→Full Interview in Japanese
An interview with meteorologist Naoko Sakaeda, who teaches at the University of Oklahoma while modestly saying she is “not good at English.” She reflects on her experiences learning English after transferring from a Japanese school in Thailand to an international school, and on what she realized during graduate school in the United States—that her challenges were “not really about English.”
栄枝 直子 Naoko Sakaeda
Assistant Professor in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Thailand and Indonesia, she attended a Japanese school abroad until partway through middle school before transferring to an international school. After graduating from high school, she moved to the United States on her own, earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington, Seattle, and a Ph.D. in meteorology from the State University of New York at Albany. She then spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at NOAA’s research institute in Boulder, Colorado, before taking on her current role.
Her research centers on tropical weather and climate and their global impacts. Though she hasn’t yet found a chance to return to Japan, she gets by day to day with a “somehow it works out” spirit, even as her sense of English being a weakness never quite goes away.
Profile on the University of Oklahoma, School of Meteorology website
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