Dr. Bernadette Chevalier received her Ph.D. from the School of Pharmacy at The University of Queensland where she also holds an Honorary Fellow position. Her Ph.D. research investigated the effectiveness of hospital pharmacist communication with patients during medication counselling.
Currently, Bernadette is a Lecturer/Course Coordinator in the Certificate to Canadian Pharmacy Practice (CCPP) program in the Faculty of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Alberta, Canada. CCPP is a 10 month bridging program for internationally trained pharmacists and a requirement for the Canadian and Alberta licensing process. Her courses fall within the Behaviour- Administrative – Social – Evidence Based (BASE) stream, and include a range of topics from pharmacist-patient communication, interprofessional collaboration and communication to leadership and professionalism.
Her other research interests include healthcare communication with patients as well as between other health professionals, pharmacy and interprofessional practice research, pharmacy education, and medication adherence.
Dr Jessica Gasiorek (PhD, University of California – Santa Barbara) is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communicology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. Her research addresses the communication processes, and the social and cognitive consequences that follow from these processes.
In particular, she focuses on how people accommodate (adjust) their communication for each other, how people process messages, and how people create understanding.
She is also interested in the role of communication in people’s collective ideas about age and aging, and the implications this has for social dynamics, social evaluations, and people’s subjective well-being. Her published work includes both book chapters and empirical articles on perceptions of communication accommodation and non-accommodation in a range of contexts, understanding, communication about age and aging.
Dr Christine Ji specialises in empirical translation studies, especially data-driven multilingual corpus analyses. She has published on environmental translation, healthcare translation, statistical translation stylistics/authorship attribution, and international multilingual education (statistical translation quality evaluation). She is the author/editor of research books with Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Palgrave, Springer, John Benjamins, Waseda University Press Tokyo, University of Montréal Press.
She is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Translation and Social Practices, New York: Oxford University Press (with Sara Laviosa) (2020); editor of Advances in Empirical Translation Studies, Cambridge University Press (with Michael Oakes) (2019). She is the founding series editor of the Cambridge Studies in Language Practices and Social Development (co-edited with Georges Bastin), Cambridge University Press, and Routledge Studies of Empirical Translation and Multilingual Communication, New York/Oxon: Routledge. She is on the founding editorial board member of the series of Cambridge Elements of Translation and Interpreting, Cambridge University Press. Her research has been supported by British Academy, Japanese Society for the Promotion of Sciences, Australian Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, Toshiba International Foundation, Worldwide University Networks Research Development Fund, and global university partnership awards from leading universities in the UK, the EU, Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and Brazil. She is a qualified professional translator between English, Spanish and Chinese having previously worked for international organisations before teaching at universities.
Dr Andrian Liem is a research fellow at Monash University Malaysia and currently coordinating a mixed- methods study to improve migrant domestic workers’ mental health, particularly who are taking care for the older adults with dementia in Asian countries. His research interests include clinical, health, and cultural psychology; integrative medicine; migrants and refugees; gender and sexuality; and mixed-methods designs.
Dr Cindy SB Ngai is an Associate Professor cum Programme Leader of MA in Bilingual Corporate Communication in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. By adopting an interdisciplinary research approach, she integrates her knowledge of language, media and communication into the business, health and science disciplines. Her work appeared in SSCI and SCIE journals including Discourse and Communication, English for Specific Purpose, Lingua, International Journal of Business Communication, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Medial Internet Research, Management Communication Quarterly, PLOS One, Public Relations Review and Studies in Higher Education.
Dr Rachyl Pines is Research Scientist at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital where she leads population and behavioral health research with over 6 years of healthcare research experience. Rachyl completed a short postdoctoral research fellow position with the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation for the Transplant Education and Resource Center where she led patient education and patient experience lines of research about how organ transplantation education for both patients and providers can be improved to help end the organ shortage. She received her PhD in Communication focusing on healthcare in April 2020 from University of California, Santa Barbara.
Rachyl has served as the lead on several multi-national research projects, helped hospital and health care systems to improve their provider-patient communication, implemented organizational change and trainings on communication best practices and published more than 13 articles in peer-reviewed journals. Her dissertation focused on training healthcare staff to better communicate with aggressive patients to prevent violence and improve patient care. Rachyl also serves as an executive officer for the International Association of Language and Social Psychology and the International Communication Association.
Dr. Billy So is the Assistant Professor (Physiotherapy) in the Department of Rehabilitation (RS) at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is an active educator at different health-related areas and he has extensive teaching experience at the community and tertiary levels. He is the recipient of the RS Outstanding Teaching Award 2016/17 and FHSS Teaching Prize 2016/17 of PolyU.
Billy is serving in different professional organizations. He is the Chairperson of Membership Subcommittee of the Hong Kong Physiotherapy Association, Associate Editor of Hong Kong Physiotherapy Journal, the Vice President of Hong Kong Ergonomics Society, a Specialist of Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications.
Research Interests:
- Occupational Health and Ergonomics
- Work Disability Prevention
- Aquatic Physiotherapy
- Sports Physiotherapy
- Exoskeleton for preventing Musculoskeletal Disorders
- Acupuncture for Rehabilitation
Ms. Ivy Wong is the Clinical Associate of the School of Nursing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). As a registered nurse, she is particularly interested in interprofessional education and simulation. Ivy had received the Teaching & Learning Grant (2016-19) from PolyU to develop an innovative learning module for interprofessional simulated clinical learning, which is comprised of online teaching and simulated clinical workshop. She was further awarded the Overseas Scholarship from PolyU to develop interprofessional education particularly in the real clinical setting.
Ivy participated on a 1-week interprofessional simulated clinical workshop and community placement which commenced in August 2021. This program is designed for the students from School of Nursing, Rehabilitation Sciences and Applied Social Sciences of PolyU, and will prepare them for subsequent community clinical placement by theoretical input and simulated clinical workshop.
Dr Alice Yau is a lecturer at the Centre for the Applied English Studies (CAES) at The University of Hong Kong. She is particularly interested in research that explores visual computational methods for Cantonese data analysis and lay understanding of medical knowledge in healthcare settings.
Dr Sarah White is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Social Impact at the UNSW Business School. Sarah is a conversation analyst and qualitative health researcher and has worked in clinical communication and safety and quality research, teaching, and policy for over 15 years. Sarah leads an innovative program of research with an aim to improve communication between clinicians and patients. Sarah is on the editorial boards Qualitative Health Communication and BJGPOpen.
Sarah has experience in teaching across the breadth of higher and continuing education, particularly with healthcare students and providers. Sarah’s accomplishments and reflective approach to learning and teaching were recognised through being awarded Senior Fellow of Advance HE (SFHEA) in 2019 and an Australian Award for University Teaching Citation in 2022. Sarah is also the Deputy National Representative of the International Association for Communication in Healthcare, having previously served as National representative and Deputy National Representative across previous terms as well as Social Media Officer and member of the Policy and Practice subcommittee.
Dr Anne Schluter is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Communication at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research focuses on sociolinguistic aspects of communication across various settings. One of these settings includes the acupuncture clinic, where her work investigates the multimodal communicative resources used to forge and maintain patient-practitioner alignment. In addition to linguistic aspects, her research showcases the integral roles of affect and the body.
Dr Xixi Wang received her Ph.D. from the Department of English and Communication at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include health communication, patient-clinician communication, and minority and immigrant health.
Dr Aditi Bhatia is a (critical) discourse analyst whose work focuses on the discursive construction of social and political phenomenon from a qualitative perspective. Her goal is to better understand how people in society use language in identity-construction and argumentation with regards to pressing social issues. Aditi is currently engaged in an interdisciplinary collaboration that analyses the metaphorical conceptualisations of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) by patients, healthcare professionals, and laypeople in both media and professional practice.
Professor
Department of English and Communication
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hong Kong
Professor Ahrens’ research focuses on corpus-based research of conceptual metaphor use by political and business leaders. In addition to these corpora-based analyses, Professor Ahrens also runs experiments using web-based systems to ascertain participants’ judgments about carefully constructed texts in order to better model how the conceptual metaphors used in those texts may influence reasoning. She is currently working with Dr. Bhatia and Professor Watson on metaphorical conceptualizations of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
Dr. Jeffry Oktavianus
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Communication
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hong Kong
Jeffry’s research centers on how digital media can be leveraged to create changes in individuals and communities, particularly to address emerging and pervasive issues, including health disparities and online mis/disinformation, and to facilitate public campaigns or social activism. In addition, his research frequently listens to the experience of underrepresented groups, such as migrant workers.
Research Interests: New Media and Social Change, Health Disparities, Online Mis/Disinformation, Public Campaigns, Migration
Dr. Max Shaw Dunn is a postdoctoral fellow at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His current research interests are on how people perceive and converse with AI and robots in healthcare.
Dr. Amy Han Qiu is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Gothenburg. Her research interests lie in Cognitive linguistics, and the language of psychotherapy.
Dr. Susan Baker is an honorary senior research fellow with the University of Queensland. She applies theory and research derived from her work in second language learning to investigating the interpersonal and intergroup dynamics of healthcare. She is interested in language use and communication between doctors and patients, and how it affects patient health outcomes.
Specifically, she examines how patient willingness to communicate, communication anxiety and participation in health consultations influence their perceptions of health provider communication strategies. She also explores how patient health status (e.g. chronic, acute conditions), age, and use of technology determine patient communication behaviors as well as their understanding of and ability to follow treatment recommendations. Her other related areas of research interest focus on the social developmental aspects of language and communication in various contexts. She explores second language (L2) learning motivation, willingness to communicate (WTC), and language anxiety in immersion and non-immersion classrooms in Canada. She also collaborates with musicians in the Gaelic community in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in their efforts to identify the motivation to learn and preserve the Gaelic language.
