Elena Semino

Professor Elena Semino is a Distinguished Professor at Lancaster University, affiliated with the School of Social Sciences and the Department of Linguistics and English Language. She serves as Director of the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) and holds Visiting Professorships at Fuzhou University (China) and La Sapienza University (Italy). Her roles include being an Associate Editor of Metaphor and Symbol and leading the International Consortium for Communication in Health Care.

Her research spans health communication, medical humanities, stylistics, and metaphor theory, employing corpus linguistic methods. Recent projects include Questioning Vaccination Discourse (Quo VaDis), 4D Picture (EU-funded cancer care), and collaborations with Hearing the Voice at Durham University. She supervises PhD students in metaphor analysis, cognitive stylistics, and corpus-based discourse studies.

Her scientific awards include Fellowships from the Royal Society of Arts and Academy of Social Sciences, and the Distinguished Professor title. She has contributed to 15 recent publications on topics like vaccine hesitancy, pain discourse, and metaphor in end-of-life care, with a focus on cross-genre metaphor adaptation and cognitive simulation in language.