PEOPLE
Meet our faculty members
PROF. OLGA ZAYTS (DIRECTOR)
Associate Professor, School of English, The University of Hong Kong
Board Member, Mind HK
Advisory Group Member, City Mental Health Alliance Hong Kong (CMHA HK)
Olga Zayts-Spence is an Associate Professor at The University of Hong Kong. She directs the Research and Impact Initiative on Communication in Healthcare (HKU RIICH). She is an interdisciplinary researcher who draws on her dual training in (socio)linguistics and public health. She has conducted extensive research in several medical and healthcare settings: genetic counselling, cancer clinics, end-of-life care. Her most recent projects explore the impact of COVID-19 on mental health of two vulnerable demographic groups in the workforce, such as working mothers and young adults (university graduates transitioning to the workforce). She collaborates closely with government and private healthcare institutions, NGOs, and business organizations in Hong Kong and internationally.
PROF. BRIAN KING (DEPUTY DIRECTOR)
Assistant Professor, School of English,
The University of Hong Kong
Trustee, Intersex Trust of Aotearoa New Zealand (ITANZ)
Brian King has been teaching and researching in Hong Kong since 2012, and the city and society that have been deeply formative of his perspectives on healthcare communication. He is a critical sociolinguist working at the intersection of language, sex, gender, sexuality, health, and technology. His professional life is shaped by several responsibilities; He is an Assistant Professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong, a founding member of the Research and Impact Initiative on Communication in Healthcare (HKU RIICH), and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine. Dr. King’s research examines how language shapes identities, relationships, and forms of knowledge in settings such as healthcare communication, sexuality education, online interaction, and the social life of space and place across different geopolitical contexts. Dr. King works with interactional sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, linguistic anthropology, linguistic ethnography, and critical discourse studies to understand how talk and text negotiate embodiment, power, intimacy, and epistemic authority. Dr. King is especially interested in decolonial and Southern perspectives, and in collaborative projects that take seriously the ethics of knowledge production in transcultural and workplace environments. His publications span critical discourse studies, applied linguistics, and professional and healthcare communication, and he is involved in international networks concerned with epistemic justice and linguistic diversity. Lately, his work is turning towards artificial intelligence, with a developing focus on the language-related impacts of AI in medicine, education, and public life through my role in the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine. This continues a longstanding interest in how human language and emerging technologies shape one another over time.