Project Team

Dr. Barbara Schouten (project lead) is associate professor intercultural health communication at the University of Amsterdam, department of Communication Science, member of the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) and affiliated with the Centre of Urban Mental Health as PI . She has been involved in numerous national and international research projects on intercultural health communication for over 20 years as PI and co-PI, including supervision of PhD- and postdoctorate students. She is associate editor for European Journal of Health Communication, scientific committee member for Journal of non-Professional Interpreting and Translation and has been chair of the 5th International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation.

Brittany Chan is PhD candidate and member of ASCoR. Her PhD project takes on an interdisciplinary approach (from communication science to linguistics) in mitigating language barriers between migrant patients and healthcare professionals. Specifically, the project aims to gain insights about different communication strategies (ranging from traditional ones to digital ones) from both sides via gaining the stakeholders’ perspectives to observing them. In the final subproject, a digital e-tool that will enable joint personalised and informed decision making will be developed and evaluated to aid both parties in deciding when to use what kind of combined communication strategies will be most beneficial to the consultation session. Ultimately, this project hopes to drive the Dutch healthcare system to offer more inclusive, participatory and equitable care to everyone.

Prof. dr. Julia van Weert is full professor Health Communication and member of ASCoR. She has supervised multiple research projects on doctor-patient communication and eHealth, including RCTs and implementation research. Her work received many awards, including the prestigious Lewis Donohew Outstanding Health Communication award (2018) and Jozien Bensing Award (2014). Her role as promotor in this project will guarantee this project’s success.

Dr. Liza van Lent is a postdoctoral researcher specializing in health communication at the University of Amsterdam and member of ASCoR. Her PhD research explored doctor-patient interactions and shared decision-making in the context of early phase clinical cancer trials. As a postdoc, she contributed to the development of a Dutch national guideline to mitigate language barriers in health and social care, and she leads the evaluation of the MentalHealth4All platform. Her research interests include (mental) health, intercultural communication, mixed-method research, online interventions, shared decision-making, and vulnerable populations.

Hülya Ates, MSc, is a lecturer in Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam. She teaches and leads several courses and tutorial groups in the Dutch bachelor’s track, including Corporate Communication, Research Workshop Survey, Introduction to Communication Science. With a research interest in intercultural health communication, Hülya is involved in Right2Health in numerous ways. In the third year of the project, she supported the finalisation of MediLanguage, a digital decision aid designed to support migrant patients and healthcare providers in overcoming language barriers. In the current year, she has been assisting with the final sub-project (a pilot randomised controlled trial) to evaluate the effectiveness of MediLanguage, by serving as the main coordinator for data collection and conducting the observational and quantitative analyses.

Dr. Geert Brône is professor at the Department of Linguistics at KU Leuven. His research centers around the interface between language, embodied behavior and human-human interaction. In developing tools and applications for multimodal (interaction) analysis, he has set up interdisciplinary collaborations with computer scientists, cognitive scientists, vision engineers, and interpreting researchers. For his work in interpreting studies, he has focused on the role of gesture and eye gaze in both consecutive and simultaneous interpreting in various contexts, including healthcare settings. He is co-manager of the KU Leuven Mobile Eye-Tracking Lab (METLab) and director of the Leuven Interdisciplinary Language Institute (LILI).

Dr. Inez Beukeleers is a part-time postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven’s Faculty of Arts. Her research focusses on multimodal interaction management in face-to-face interaction, thereby adopting a multifocal eye-tracking approach. In the Right2Health project, she investigates how healthcare providers, interpreters and foreign language speaking patients use speech and a variety of bodily resources to negotiate meaning and coordinate mutual understanding. Inez thereby compares consultations mediated by informal interpreters and consultations mediated by professional interpreters. Inez also regularly gives guest lectures on gesture and multimodality in face-to-face interaction, multimodal analyses of (interpreter-mediated) discourse, and sign linguistics. She studied at KU Leuven, where she obtained a PhD in Linguistics with a dissertation on the role of gaze direction in Flemish Sign Language.

Dr. Antoon Cox is a tenure-track professor at KU Leuven, where he coordinates the Master of Interpreting programme and leads the Interpreting Studies Research Group. He teaches courses related to Spanish interpreting, interpreting studies, and multilingual communication. Furthermore, Antoon is a research fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and serves as co-chair of the Special Interest Group on ‘Language and Cultural Discordance in Healthcare Communication’ at the International Association for Communication in Healthcare. He serves on the Regional Advisory Committee of GLOCAL (The Global Council for Anthropological Linguistics) at SOAS, University of London. As a trainer and examiner of community interpreters, his research focuses on linguistic ethnography and social interaction in linguistically diverse and stressful environments, such as emergency departments and asylum reception centres. His research is published in international peer-reviewed journals, such as The Translator, Patient Education and Counseling, and Advances in Health Sciences Education.

Prof. dr. Heidi Salaets is head of the Interpreting Studies Research Group at the Faculty of Arts of KU Leuven. At the Antwerp Campus she teaches interpreting studies and methodology as well as interpreting and note-taking techniques and Italian-Dutch interpreting in the Master of Interpreting. At the same campus, she is also responsible for the evaluation procedure in the GVT program. Furthermore, Heidi Salaets is a staff member and board member of CETRA and represents the Antwerp Campus in CIUTI, which supervises quality control of translation and interpreting education worldwide. She acts as a non-permanent member of the Admissions committee for the National Register of Sworn translators, interpreters and translators-interpreters of the Belgian Ministry of Justice in Belgium and as an expert in the Quality Institute of the Bureau Wbtv (Wet Beëdigd Vertalers en tolken, Sworn Translators and Interpreters Act) for the Ministry JenV (Justitie en Veiligheid, Justice and Security) in the Netherlands.

Dr. Peter Pype is associate professor in interprofessional collaboration in education and practice at the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at Ghent University and director of this research group. He is chair of www.pallialine.be, and has conducted extensive research in interprofessional collaboration through the lens of complexity theory and interpreter-mediated interactions in healthcare. Expertise in interprofessional collaboration in healthcare combined with experience in interpreter-mediated interactions is unavailable in the Netherlands. Hence, his expertise will add to this project’s success.

Prof. dr. Jeanine Suurmond is full professor at the Department of Primary Care Medicine at the Radboudumc. For more than 20 years, her research program has focused on improving care for people in vulnerable positions. She also teaches medical students about how to provide good care to a diversity of patients.

Prof. dr. Christopher Jenks has worked in six distinct geopolitical regions: the United States, England, South Korea, Hong Kong, Denmark, and now the Netherlands. He specializes in the study of language in society and is particularly interested in the political and cultural implications of the global spread of English. His research interests include online communication, intercultural encounters, political discourse, and identity construction. Christopher is particularly interested in how spoken and written discourse performs a range of communicative actions (e.g., trolling and arguing) and indexes a number of social phenomena (e.g., nationalism and race). He is the author and editor of 12 books.

Dr. Simone Goosen is epidemiologist and policy advisor. She worked for the World Health Organization in Africa and was involved in policy making for refugees and asylum seekers. She was one of the initiators of the study ‘Legal Implications of the Discontinuation of Compensation for Translation and Interpretation Services in the Dutch Health Care System’ of the Public International Law and Policy Group, and leader of the project ‘Taal mag toch geen obstakel zijn? Tolken terug in de zorg, alstublieft’ at the Johannes Wier Foundation for human rights and health care which aims to initiate the development of a national level quality standard on language barriers in health and social care.