Dr. Lorelei Lingard is a leading researcher in the study of communication and
collaboration on healthcare teams. She is a Professor in the Department of Medicine at
the University of Western Ontario (UWO) and the inaugural Director of the Centre for
Education Research & Innovation at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry.
Dr. Lingard obtained her Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the English Department at Simon Fraser
University, specializing in rhetorical theory, genre theory, medical discourse, and
qualitative methodology. As a rhetorician, she investigates ‘language as social action’:
that is, how social groups use language to get things done, and how that language acts on
them, their identities, their purposes, their situations, and their relationships. Her
research program has investigated the nature of communication on inter-professional
healthcare teams in a variety of clinical settings, including the operating room, the
intensive care unit, the internal medicine ward, the adult rehabilitation unit, and the
family health centre. She is particularly interested in how communication patterns
influence patient safety, and how learning to talk in sanctioned ways shapes the
professional identity of novices. In addition to her team communication research, she is
currently intrigued by methodological challenges such as accounting for silence in the
study of communication and conceptual projects such as critiquing the individualist
discourse of competence.
