Dr. Jacquelyn Cragg was only eight years old when she lost her father in a violent home invasion in Alberta.
“One thing that I really found healing was actually exploring scientific areas and mathematics and calculus and statistics,” she told Global News.
“And I had some really amazing mentors who really fostered a passion for those areas. And that was really healing for me.”
Cragg, now a professor of health outcomes at the University of British Columbia, is hoping her experience can help other youth affected by violent crime.
She is launching a program, backed by a $150,000 NSERC PromoScience grant, to provide trauma-informed mentorship to young people by pairing them with UBC graduate students to explore scientific inquiry through science fair projects.
“The programme pairs, it’s a one-on-one mentorship program, so it pairs these youth who have been victimized by violent crime, it pairs them with undergraduate students and graduate students at B.C. and all across the province, and over the course of their school semester they work, they meet one-one-one regularly to develop a research project in different, it could be in any scientific area, and the goal is that they eventually can present at a science fair,” Cragg said.
“So, my goal is that these students develop an interest in science, but also hopefully that it can be a part of their healing journey as well.”
On Sept. 16, 1992, a burglar climbed through the window of Dr. Geoffrey Cragg’s home.
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“I woke up to my mother screaming….she was yelling at me to call 911,” Cragg’s daughter and Jacquelyn’s sister, recalled in an interview with Global News in 2017.
She said she can still remember the terror of that night. She was just 11 years old at the time.
Now, 32 years later, Dr. Jacquelyn Cragg said she wants to pay the kindness and the mentorship that she and her family received forward.
“It was really the community, the community of Calgary and when we moved back to British Columbia, which is where my family was from originally, they gave so much to me and my mentors in high school at Sentinel Secondary and here at UBC, those amazing mentors gave me such a huge gift and I hoped that I can sort of, as you say, pay it forward,” she said.
Cragg said students in grades 8 to 12 would be ideally suited for the program.
“We’re hoping they come out with many, many things,” she added.
“One is an interest in science and an understanding of the scientific method, but we’re also hoping much more broadly that they develop a passion for something that they can be proud of and potentially explore careers in or schooling in scientific subjects.
“And then lastly, really that it’s part of their healing journey, that it helps them, by finding a passion, it helps them in their recovery.”
Anyone interested in the program can email Cragg for more details.
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