معرفی
Antoon Cox is an Assistant Professor (tenure-track) at KU Leuven's Faculty of Arts, where he coordinates the Master of Interpreting programme across Antwerp, Brussels, and Leuven campuses and leads the Interpreting Studies Research Group. He holds multiple significant affiliations including research fellow at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Assistant Professor in Intercultural Communication at Utrecht University, and visiting scholar at King's College London's School of Medical Education. Cox actively contributes to the academic community as co-chair of the Special Interest Group on 'Language and Cultural Discordance in Healthcare Communication' at the International Association for Communication in Healthcare since 2023 and serves on GLOCAL's Regional Advisory Committee at SOAS, University of London.
Dr. Cox's research centers on linguistic ethnography and social interaction in linguistically diverse and stressful environments, particularly emergency departments and asylum reception centers. His work examines interpersonal communication challenges, interpreter-mediated consultations, and strategies for improving healthcare access for migrants and refugees. He investigates how language barriers impact patient-centered care, lifeworld integration, and medical outcomes in multilingual settings, with particular attention to the dynamics of miscommunication and the role of patient companions as interpreters.
His recent publications demonstrate a strong trend toward interdisciplinary healthcare communication research, with increasing focus on mental health access for migrants, AI applications in language-discordant healthcare, and innovative digital interventions for managing language barriers in emergency care. The research spans medical humanities, linguistics, and public health, consistently emphasizing practical applications to improve healthcare communication for linguistically diverse populations through projects like MentalHealth4All and MaLBUC.
Dr. Cox has secured significant research funding including the Managing Language Barriers in Unplanned Care (MaLBUC) project (2022-2026) as co-promotor, the Training offer and language tools as support for communication (VTOC) project (2019) as promotor, and the Fedasil Language Tools project (2019) as co-promotor. These projects reflect his commitment to developing practical solutions for language barriers in healthcare settings through collaborative research and community engagement.
As head of the Interpreting Studies Research Group and member of both the Leuven Centre for Health Humanities (LCH²) and the LILI – KU Leuven Interdisciplinary Language Institute, Dr. Cox fosters cross-disciplinary collaboration that bridges language studies, healthcare communication, and social interaction analysis. His work creates a robust platform for addressing complex communication challenges in multilingual healthcare environments while maintaining active involvement as a trainer and examiner of community interpreters, connecting academic research with practical application.
