Sarah AtkinsView profile
Lecturer
Dr. Sarah Atkins is a Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Culture at Aston University and a Research Fellow at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics. She holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Nottingham and a PGCHE from Aston University. Her affiliations include membership in the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), and International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics (IAFLL). Atkins' research explores: Forensic and legal linguistics, focusing on emergency calls, police interviews, and anonymization ethics Healthcare communication in clinical settings and Schwartz Rounds Applied linguistic ethics and professional practice Multimodal analysis of institutional interactions Her publications demonstrate strong methodological diversity, spanning conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, and multimodal approaches. Dominant themes include ethical frameworks in linguistic research, crisis communication dynamics, and healthcare team interactions. Recent work increasingly addresses technological applications like AI system co-design and forensic databank development. Scientific Awards: Poster Prize, Royal College of General Practitioners (2018) Knowledge Exchange and Impact Award (2016) Atkins mentors PhD students researching police-suspect interactions and supervises collaborative projects including the ID2 data anonymization initiative and Crimes in Action 999 call analysis. She secured £120k in research funding for projects with Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. She directs fieldwork at the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics and collaborates on the Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD) and EXCROW extortion corpus projects. Her lab develops training interventions for healthcare professionals and police services.










