Sarah Atkins is an applied linguist who conducts research in a range of professional settings, including healthcare, business and forensic contexts. She completed her PhD at the University of Nottingham and has subsequently held posts at King’s College London (Knowledge Transfer Partnership) and the University of Nottingham (Economic and Social Research Council ‘Future Research Leaders’), where she worked on projects researching the assessment of spoken communication for postgraduate doctors. She was then a member of Linguistic Profiling for Professionals, University of Nottingham, conducting linguistic consultancy projects with a range of external organisations. She has also worked for and remains a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Sustainable Working Life, Birkbeck, University of London, researching spoken interaction in Schwartz Center Rounds®, which are supportive forums for healthcare staff to dicuss the emotional and ethical complexties of their jobs.

Her work has a strong emphasis on applying findings in practical ways and she has developed a number of successful training interventions, including award-winning workshops and e-learning materials for healthcare professionals. She is interested in the intersection of research methods and approaches through which linguistics is applied to real-world problems across various settings and brings these experiences to bear at the Institute.