Directory of Medical Humanities researchers in Southeast Asia

​Cecilia Cheong

Cecilia Cheong Yin Mei (PhD) is a Senior Lecturer in the English Language Department, Fac​ulty of Languages and Linguistics, University of Malaya. Cecilia has taught ESL for more than twenty-five years at various levels from secondary school to university and adult learners, and conducted workshops on genre and discourse analysis, applied linguistics, LSP and the use of ICT for teaching and learning purposes. She is a reviewer for ISI-indexed, Scopus-indexed and peer-reviewed journals. Currently, she serves as an Associate ​Fellow of UM's Quality Management & Enhancement Centre; and the Assistant Secretary of the Malaysian Association of Applied Linguistics (MAAL).

Cecilia’s research interests include Critical Genre Analysis, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, ESP, and Communication and Professional Discourses. She is a Principal Investigator of various research projects particularly involving the study of various professional genres, multimodal texts and discourses. She researches in the field of genre and multimodal analysis involving the study of the interaction of language with other resources in various texts, interactions and events. She also supervises undergraduate and postgraduate students in these areas. Other research projects involved include research on Health Tourism in Malaysia; the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education’s Strategic Plan for the Development of English Language at Public Higher Education Institutions; a collaborative project with West Chester University, USA’s on the meaning of ‘quality’ in online courses at Malaysian universities; and the cyber-genre of various organizations.

Elaine L. Monserate
Ms. Elaine L. Monserate is an Instructor at the University of the Philippines (UP) Visayas. Prior to working with the said university, she worked with Central Philippine University for eight years. She earned her degrees in Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Business and Bachelor of Arts in English from the same university. She also had a short stint in the corporate world working as company trainer and eventually as training director.​

Her work has mainly focused on studies that are pedagogical in nature (e.g. Reading Attitudes and Preferences of Students in Relation to their Comprehension Skills). Her experience is mostly related to developing modules and materials that will help enhance the linguistic skills of students in the primary level. Her deep interest in indigenous literature somehow, can be a tool also to correlate medical humanities with the literature that we know about. She is very interested in creating narratives about the indigenous medical practices that are still used up to this day and discover how these can be of use to people in the modern age.
​​Ferdinand Pisigan

Ferdinand Pisigan Jarin is the author of Anim na Sabado ng Beyblade at iba pang Sanaysay, which won a National Book Award for Nonfiction in Filipino in 2014 from the Manila Critics Circle and National Book Development Board and was a finalist for Madrigal-Gonzales First Best Book Award administered by the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing ( UP ICW ). 

He has published several children’s books; won three Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature ; and was a Writing Fellow for Creative Non Fiction  in the 53rd University of the Philippines National Writers Workshop.

Recently, he translated the novel of the French writer Jules Verne, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” in Filipino commissioned by the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino ( KWF) and the National Commission for Culture and the Arts ( NCCA ) and co-edited “HAYSKUL”, an anthology of High School memoirs. He became a Writing Fellow for 2016 Kritika, workshop on Art and Cutural Criticism by the Dela Salle University- Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center. 

At present, Jari​n is a Professor at the Division of Humanities in the University of the Philippines-Visayas.

He is interested in documenting frontliners and patients’ experiences, insights and discourses through memoir writing.​

Isabella
​Ms. Isabella Marie Zerrudo is an Instructor at the University of the Philippines (UP) Visayas, where she received her bachelor’s degree in Communication and Media Studies. She worked as a journalist and is a fellow of the UP College of Mass Communication Lopez Jaena Community Journalism and the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

Her work has mainly focused on journalism and media theories. Her experience lies mostly in investigative journalism, data journalism, and disinformation. Her interest in medical humanities stems from the COVID-19 response in the Philippines, from policymaki​ng to cultural distinctions that affect how people perceive and understand medical information. With her knowledge of the dynamic between people and the press, she is ke​en on deepening her understanding of the role of information and culture in times of crises.​
Jude Vincent

Prof. Jude Vincent E. Parcon completed his bachelor’s degree in Broadcast Communication from UP Visayas last 2006 and his Master of Development Communication from UP Open University in 2014.

Before becoming a member of the academe, Prof. Parcon has worked in the HR of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines – Iloilo Airport from 2007 – 2009 and as a Senior Training Administrator at the Euromatech Group of Companies in Dubai, U.A.E. from 2009 – 2015.

In 2015, he became a member of the Division of Humanities’ faculty roster where he taught courses such as Development Media, Media Research and Design and Undergraduate Thesis. As a Development Media teacher, he continued to implement Ang Pagpahayag, a public service initiative of the BA in Communication and Media Studies students enrolled in the Development Media class which explores the role of traditional or folk media in development.

He is also one ​of the module writers of COMM 10 – Critical Perspectives in Communication, a General Education course in the University of the Philippines. He currently serves as DYUP Station Programmer, UP Visayas’ radio station based in Miagao, Iloilo. 

Apart from several public service initiatives, he is also active in several research projects on Cultural Communication, Public Spaces, and Development Communication.

Marie Rose Arong
Marie Rose Arong is an Associate Professor at the University of the Philippines Cebu, where she teaches communication and literature courses. Her research interests include narratology, Philippine literature, graphic narratives, Cebuano history and culture. She also provides research support at the Cebu Institute of Medicine. She has received training in Narrative Medicine techniques at Columbia University. Her current research is focused on the literary representations of disease, illness, and/or sickness in Philippine literary narratives. Her articles have appeared in the Postcolonial Studies, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Kritika Kultura, ARIEL, and Text Matters.
Rosario
Rosario M. Baria teaches at the University of the Philippines Los Banos. She is an Associate Professor handling courses in Language, Philippine Literature, Communication Arts, Speech, Rhetoric and Research, among others. She holds a PhD in Filipino, major in Technical Translation from the University of the Philippines Diliman. She received trainings in General Education from the University of the Philippines System and Digital Humanities from the University of Oxford. She also does research and community engagements. She has done studies in public speaking, speech disfluencies, hesitation phenomena, psycholinguistics, translation studies in biotechnology, religious rituals and communication technology. She is currently doing a Digital Humanities research on cultural preservation called SaliKultura, a component study of the DigitaLaguna Program: A Heritage CulturePlasm, a nationally-funded research under the Salikha grant of the Commission on Higher Education and National Committee for Culture and the Arts. Her community engagements with local colleges and museum curators in the province of Laguna include conducting trainings on research methods and sharing awareness on the values and necessity of cultural preservation through digital technology. Her new research interests are in the fields of Medical Humanities, particularly on traditional Asian medicines and stories of healing through folk therapies.
Susan Mila

Prof. Susan Mila P. Alvarez-Tosalem is Assistant Professor 6 of English Language and Literature in the Division of Humanities. Her academic degrees include: BA English Language Studies (major in Creative Writing), UP Diliman ( Cum Laude ), M.Ed. English as a Second Language (CAR), UP Visayas and MA English Language and Literature Teaching, Ateneo de Manila University. She teaches Communication, Literature, Academic/Technical Writing, ESP and Applied Linguistics courses to undergraduate and graduate students in UPV.

Her research interests include English Language Teaching, Second Language Writing, Teacher Cognition and Professional Communication in Multilingual Contexts. Her other interests include Philippine and Asian Literature. Between 2009-2012, she was involved as Policy Leader in a 3-year English Language Training Project, a collaboration initiated by the Centre for English Language Communication, NUS, Singapore that also involved academics from Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia. In 2017, she served as Project Leader of a CHED Institutional Development and Innovation Grant-funded capacity-building project that has produced 13 researches, creative work and public service activities. Her interest in Medical Humanities lies mainly in health communication, in particular, how health policies are cascaded to local communities and the gaps in health communication practices. In terms of narrative medicine, she would like to examine indigenous health practices in island communities such as Guimaras, and unravel the discourses and sociocultural factors that come into play in narratives of medical practitioners as well as the locals.