The Department is also engaged in research in Translational Biomedicine, specifically in relation to the integration of the natural sciences and the humanities as well as the study of ‘Communication Sciences and Disorders’. Below are some indicative examples of work by Faculty members in this area:
Integration of the Natural Sciences and the Humanities
- Li Ou’s project on ‘Keats and scepticism’ involves discussion of Keats’s medical background and the humanitarian concerns of Romantic medicine. It also explores the root of scepticism in Keats’s contemporary medical community. It shares the goal of this strategic theme: ‘to integrate natural sciences and the humanities’ so as to ‘bring human knowledge to a new horizon’.
- Evelyn Chan’s ongoing project entitled “Doctor’s Narratives: The Construction of Meanings and Values Supporting Doctors’ Work in the Public Hospital Sector in Hong Kong” uses interviews with public hospital doctors in Hong Kong to explore how they understand their work and careers, and to examine the meanings and values they construct and ascribe to these. The outputs will comprise both a research article or report, and a collection of fictionalized doctors’ stories that can shed light on the human dimensions of doctors’ public hospital work.
Communication Sciences and Disorders (Brain and Mind):
- One line of Jette G. Hansen Edwards’ research focuses on ‘Communication Sciences’, and specifically, speech processing and production. Her research seeks to understand how social and linguistic factors interact to constrain and foster the acquisition of a second language phonology. She has published widely in this area including a recent chapter on “Pronunciation and individual differences” in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary English Pronunciation. Her current research in this area focuses on speech intelligibility. She is currently engaged in an international research collaboration on the intelligibility of Asian Englishes both locally and internationally, which explores the impact of various factors including proficiency, international experience, and familiarity on speech intelligibility. Her most recent work in this area includes “The accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility of different varieties of Asian Englishes” in World Englishes and an article in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development on “Listener judgments of speaker and speech traits of varieties of English.”
- Prem Phyak has explored how citizens have communicated the COVID-19 pandemic-related information in the public sphere. His research has focused now the analysis of communication strategies and their ideologies in linguistic landscapes.
