17 December 2021

Linköping University (LiU) will receive SEK 30 million from the Swedish Research Council, for the funding call Research environment grant interdisciplinary research. The grant makes possible an initiative where researchers from very different backgrounds contribute to a better understanding of post-covid-19 syndrome as an urgent health challenge.

Woman in dark room, trying to look outside Photo credit chameleonseye

Previous research into post-covid-19 syndrome has primarily had a clinical and biomedical focus, and has described presence and variation of symptoms. The project at LiU that has been granted funding will also study post-covid from philosophical, socio-political and patient perspectives. Further, the project contributes an epistemological framework for the production of interdisciplinary knowledge about people’s health and disease.

“This is a very large research project involving a collaboration between researchers at Linköping University, the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine and the Department of Radiology at the Linköping University Hospital, as well as post-covid clinics at Region Östergötland. These collaborations are necessary to meet the challenges created in the tracks of the pandemic”, says Professor Kristin Zeiler, who will coordinate the project.Professor Kristin ZeilerProfessor Kristin Zeiler Photo credit David Einar

The work will be based at the Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics at Linköping University, where Kristin Zeiler is director.

“At the Centre for Medical Humanities and Bioethics we already have interdisciplinary work on which we can build. The Swedish Research Council wanted to see a focus on interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers and research groups with truly different backgrounds. We certainly meet that wish, and the project is making completely new collaborations possible. This is going to be extremely exciting”, says Kristin Zeiler.

A total of 15 researchers from Linköping University and Region Östergötland will take part in the project. These researchers come from subjects such as philosophy and ethics of medicine, sociology, rehabilitation medicine and neuroscience. The project will include collaboration with colleagues at Sorbonne University in France, Durham University in the UK, and UC San Francisco and Vanderbilt University in the United States.

The grant from the Swedish Research Council will be paid out over a six-year period.

Project name:
Biomedicine, Clinical Knowledge, and the Humanities in Collaboration: A Novel Epistemology for Radically Interdisciplinary Health Research and Policy-Work on Post-Covid-19 Syndrome


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