It’s with great excitement that we announce the 2026 Dr. Chan Yeh Practitioners, powered by SILICON @ Stanford University.
The 2026 Yeh Practitioners hail from around the world, and are working on the front lines of 21st-century digital language inclusion and capacity-building.
The Yeh Practitioner program is named in honor of the late Dr. Chan Yeh, and is made possible thanks to generous support of the Yeh Family. Learn more here.
The MEDIZULU Project
Practitioner Team: Roshni Gokool & Njabulo Hadebe (South Africa)
Project: The MEDIZULU project
MEDIZULU is a digital platform and chatbot that equips medical students with the language tools needed to serve isiZulu-speaking patients more effectively. With 28,000,000 speakers, isiZulu is one of South Africa’s most widely spoken yet digitally disadvantaged languages. The chatbot addresses the lack of online medical and educational resources by offering essential clinical phrases in isiZulu and English, supported by audio and visual aids. Prioritizing accuracy, accessibility, and cultural relevance over advanced AI, MEDIZULU collaborates with isiZulu speakers and healthcare professionals to ensure high-quality, inclusive content. Through practical language training, the project promotes patient-centred care, enhances clinical communication, and supports the growth of isiZulu in digital health education.
Roshni Gokool is a lecturer in the African Languages Discipline at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, where she teaches isiZulu as an additional language to non-native speakers. Her research focuses on task-based (TBLT) and computer-assisted language learning (CALL), with a special interest in isiZulu for specific purposes in health sciences education. As the project leader of the MEDIZULU website, she leads efforts to support isiZulu in clinical training through accessible, culturally relevant digital content. Roshni’s doctoral work explored cognitive and linguistic complexity in syllabus design for health sciences students, and she continues to collaborate on research promoting isiZulu in the health sciences context. She has co-authored several academic publications and AsifundeisiZulu, a widely used manual for isiZulu learners. Her work advocates for inclusive education, digital equity, and the empowerment of African languages in higher education.
Njabulo Hadebe is a distinguished Computational Linguist, Data Scientist, and Machine Learning Engineer with deep experience in NLP and application development for African languages. At the University of KwaZulu-Natal, he has architected and deployed end-to-end language service platforms, built a 40-million-token corpus, and developed open-source tools including Termbank, Zululex mobile apps, Medizulu web application, isiZulu Spell Checker, and an internal Machine Translation system. His work has been showcased at national conferences and honored with the Rising Star Award from the University’s Deputy Vice Chancellor. Passionate about low-resource languages, Njabulo leverages technology to empower African language communities and ensure their digital future.
Mixe (Ayuujk) and Epi-Olmec Typefaces
Practitioner: Manuel López Rocha (México)
Project: Typefaces and Digital Tools for Mixe (Ayuujk) and Epi-Olmec
This project develops digital typefaces and writing tools for the Mixe (Ayuujk) language in close collaboration with the Mixe community in Oaxaca, Mexico (population: 90,000). It addresses the urgent need for high-quality, accessible typographic resources to support education, publishing, and digital communication. The work will deliver three professional typefaces, including one that incorporates a reinterpretation of symbols from the ancient Epi-Olmec script. A previously proposed keyboard layout will also be reviewed and refined for practical use. SILICON funding will enable dedicated time for design, professional font mastering, user testing, and field research. Community members will directly benefit from open-source fonts, training in digital writing tools, and reliable resources for local publishing initiatives. By combining typographic design with linguistic and cultural research, the project strengthens digital inclusion and supports language sovereignty.
Manuel López Rocha is a graphic and typeface designer from Xalapa, Mexico. For several years, he has researched and developed projects focused on typography for indigenous languages of Mexico and the Americas. He has conducted workshops and lectures on the subject in Mexico, Argentina, Canada, Colombia, and the United States, and has collaborated with speakers and linguists to create typographic solutions tailored to the needs of these languages. His work in typography has been recognized in several editions of the Latin American Typography Biennial “Tipos Latinos” (2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018). He has taught at various universities at both undergraduate and graduate levels, covering typography, calligraphy, type design, and editorial design. He is the founder of the Fontstage collective and a collaborator with the PampaType foundry, where he published Gorgias, his most recent work. Currently, he is a partner and designer at the Cuatro Ojos studio, a professor at Universidad Anáhuac Veracruz, and a member of the Letrástica collective.
Mother Tongue STEM Education in Africa
Practitioner Team: Neil Patel & Mark Jamra (U.S.)
Project: Mother Tongue STEM Education for 20,000,000 Students in Africa
In parts of Africa, maternal language education using indigenous writing systems has gained momentum. However, extending it to advanced STEM education remains a challenge. This is especially true for right-to-left writing systems like Adlam and N’ko (student population: 20,000,000), which lack software support for typesetting complex equations. By developing a solution for open-source page layout programs, educators will be able to create and broadly distribute textbooks and curricula for the Fulah and Manding communities, while also paving the way for other under-supported right-to-left writing systems.
Neil Patel is a co-founder of JamraPatel, a studio focused on developing fonts and utilities for underrepresented writing systems, primarily from sub-Saharan Africa. He studies the entrenched factors that hinder language communities from leveraging the full benefits of computing and seeks out solutions to technical issues that prevent newly encoded writing systems from functioning well on devices. He provides communities with the necessary fonts, input methods, and transliteration tools to accelerate digital adoption and facilitate the exchange of ideas in their own languages. He holds a B.S. in Microelectronic Engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology.
Mark Jamra has designed typefaces for over 40 years. He is a founding partner of JamraPatel. Mark has taught type design at colleges and in workshops in the U.S. and Germany. He is also the proprietor of TypeCulture, an online type foundry and academic resource.
Indigenous Languages of Latin America Technology Platform
Practitioner Team: Dafne Martínez & Sandra García (México)
Project: The Technology Platform for Indigenous Languages of Latin America
Inspired by Multilingüe 2025, the Technology Platform for Indigenous Languages of Latin America seeks to improve access to typographic resources. It will serve as a centralized website to map and distribute fonts and keyboards, publish culturally contextualized typefaces, and provide a digital catalog of free and linked resources for speakers, educators, and designers.
Dafne Martínez is a Graphic and Typeface Designer based in Mexico City. With over 15 years of experience, she is co-founder of Tipastype. Her typefaces are distributed through Sandoll Cloud, Cocijotype, Sudtipos, and I Love Typography.
Sandra García is a Graphic and Typeface Designer based in Medellín/Mexico City. Co-founder of Tipastype, she teaches at UNAM and has published work with Latinotype and I Love Typography.
Tipastype is an independent studio focused on typeface and typographic design based in Mexico. It has promoted women’s work in the field and contributes to the dissemination of typographic knowledge. Over the past decade, Tipastype has developed projects on legibility, typefaces for early readers, and typography for Indigenous languages. Its educational initiatives include social media content, workshops, talks, and the book Elementype: A Practical Guide to Typographic Use (Spanish). The founders have spoken at conferences such as ATypI Tokyo 2019, Typographics 2020, Design Matters 2023, and What Design Can Do 2023. The studio received the FONCA Grant in 2018 for Elementype, and in 2022, at the Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography, the studio created Achtli during the “Hispanic Women and Typography” fellowship. In 2025, Tipastype helped organize Multilingual: Writing Systems and Typography for Indigenous Languages of Latin America.
The Puno Quechua Project
Practitioner: Elwin Huaman (Peru & Austria)
Project: The Puno Quechua Project
Puno Quechua is spoken by around 500,000 people in Peru. This project will give Puno Quechua speakers and learners a powerful new digital resource by expanding the presence of their language in Qichwabase, an open knowledge graph for under-represented languages. Instead of being limited to word lists, Puno Quechua entries will be enriched with real sentences drawn from everyday use, each paired with its authentic audio pronunciation. For speakers, this ensures their language is represented with accuracy and dignity, not as an abstract relic but as a living system of expression. For learners, it offers practical examples and pronunciations that make study more intuitive and engaging. For researchers and technologists, it creates structured data that can fuel language learning apps, dictionaries, and NLP tools tailored to Quechua. With SILICON’s support for technical guidance and community workshops, the result will be a culturally grounded, accessible, and sustainable resource that empowers Puno Quechua speakers and helps future generations keep their language strong.
Elwin Huaman is a Quechuan researcher from Peru, who studies the impact of human language technology on under-resourced language communities. He specializes in constructing knowledge graphs for under-resourced languages, a process that begins at the most vital stage: acquiring high-quality, ethical data. He holds an M.Sc. in Web Engineering from the University of Oviedo, Spain, and an M.Sc. in Digital Information Systems from the University of Salamanca, Spain. In 2019, he moved to Austria to work and research on Knowledge Graphs. Currently, he is documenting the Puno Quechua language, collecting text and speech data, and developing a linguistic knowledge graph that supports Quechua languages and their communities.