About

Who the heck is Lisa Cobb, and what is this weird mashup of a blog?

For most of my career – 25 years of it, to be exact – I worked for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Communication Programs (CCP). Say that one fast.  When I left CCP in early 2025 I was the Director of the Strategic Communication Programs Unit, overseeing health programs all around the world. It was a wonderful career – challenging, interesting, and meaningful. But all good things end, and around my 50th birthday I found myself burnt out and exhausted and in need of a career change. It took a little time, but I made a radical pivot. I re-trained as an Academic Language Therapist so I could teach dyslexic people (like me) to read.

I started this blog as a way to mentor staff at work. Some of the blog posts are very specific to that time and place, but I also wrote about growth mindset and understanding what level of effort constitutes enough. When I launched the blog I wrote:

“The longer I am in the work world, and the more I see good people come in and out of projects, the more I realize that lots of important things are left unsaid, unexplained, implicit. I simply assume people know what I know, or share my value for the things I believe to be true. But why? Organizations never write these things down, or provide a training, and in some ways it would be absurd to provide a training on something like “email tone.” But email tone matters, and it can be the difference between having a productive working relationship with the project you backstop overseas or deeply offending the people you want to support. This blog is an attempt to make explicit some of those things we never seem to say.”

What strikes me about that now is the phrase “make explicit some of those things we never seem to say.” Because that is what I am doing in my new career, too – making something that comes naturally to other people explicit for those of us who need it. Dyslexic people need reading broken down and taught in a level of detail that most people don’t need or want, and schools don’t provide. We need it made explicit.

Which is a long way of saying I have found a thread between my old life and my new, and I am going to keep the old content of my blog and layer my new experiences on top of it. If you knew me as the public health professional, you are welcome to come along on this new ride. If you know me as your kid’s Academic Language Therapist, you are welcome to poke around in the archives and know that I see as much potential and worth in your child as I saw in the colleagues I mentored.

Welcome, or welcome back.