Elaine Hsieh

Elaine Hsieh is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication Studies. As Departmental Executive Officer, she oversees the department’s academic programs, research initiatives, and community engagement efforts. Her responsibilities include supporting undergraduate and graduate education, stewarding faculty development, mentoring junior faculty members and graduate students, and guiding the department’s strategic direction.

Communication Studies is one of the top academic units in the College of Liberal Arts, offering a full range of undergraduate majors and minors, along with a robust doctoral program. The department also offers a strong media production curriculum. It is home to one of the nation’s top-ranked debate and speech teams, which regularly hosts public policy debates and regional/national tournaments that promote civic engagement among high school and college students. In the 2024 Shanghai Ranking, Communication at the University of Minnesota was ranked 11th globally in the Academic Subjects Ranking.

As chair, Dr. Hsieh led a comprehensive strategic planning process to clarify and integrate the department’s diverse strengths and shared values. This work strengthened the unit’s mission-driven goals and amplified its commitments to social justice and public relevance. She also restructured summer course offerings to align with pedagogical priorities and financial realities, ensuring long-term sustainability. During a period of leadership transition at the college and university levels, she chaired the College of Liberal Arts’ Council of Chairs and was named a 2024 Fellow of the Big Ten Academic Alliance’s Department Executive Officers Program.

As a researcher, Dr. Hsieh conducts community-based, field-driven, and observational studies that center the experiences of marginalized and underserved populations, including language-discordant patients, migrant workers, and unhoused individuals. Her work frequently examines how institutional norms and professional practices may conflict with the values, identities, and expectations of individuals and organizations, resulting in suboptimal outcomes and gaps in healthcare delivery. She works with interdisciplinary teams across Asia, Europe, and the United States to examine how misalignments between beliefs and practices emerge in both local and global contexts, and to develop actionable, evidence-based solutions.

Her current project, funded by a Masonic Cross-Departmental Research Grant, examines the use of various types of interpreters and interpreting technologies by Somali families in neonatal intensive care settings. The study explores how cultural norms, institutional structures, and language technologies interact in high-stakes, emotionally complex clinical environments, informing broader conversations about equity, trust, and care in multilingual health systems.

Shaping a Career at the Crossroad of Culture, Care, and Communication

Dr. Elaine Hsieh came to the University of Minnesota after 18 years at the University of Oklahoma, where she was named the Edith Kinney Gaylord Presidential Professor for her outstanding work in research, teaching, and service, as well as her strong commitment to mentoring students. Her work is deeply rooted in humanistic inquiry and a commitment to compassion. She approaches health communication not only as a field of study but as a means of advocating for dignity, equity, and understanding across cultural and institutional boundaries. She brings a deeply interdisciplinary perspective shaped by a Ph.D. in health communication, a J.D. in health law and bioethics, and a background in the humanities, including an M.A. in translation and interpretation (Chinese-English) and dual B.A.s in Chinese and English literature.

Growing up in Taiwan, Dr. Hsieh aspired to be a translator and interpreter, serving as a bridge between people, ideas, and worlds. She pursued double majors in Chinese and English Literature as an undergrad at the National Central University in Taiwan, believing that mastery of both languages and cultures was essential for excellence as a translator and an interpreter. She completed her M.A. in translation and interpretation (Chinese-English) at the Monterey Institute of International Studies (now part of Middlebury College), one of the top graduate programs for professional interpreters. During a summer internship as a healthcare interpreter at UCSF Stanford Health Care, she became acutely aware of the complex roles interpreters play, not only facilitating communication but also shaping relationships and influencing outcomes and equity of care. That experience transformed her understanding of interpreter-mediated communication and inspired her to pursue a research career exploring the ethical, relational, and systemic dimensions of interpreter-mediated interactions.

Dr. Hsieh was among the first scholars to bring communication theory into the field of translation and interpreting studies. Her early research highlighted the complexity of interpreter-mediated medical encounters as coordinated communicative activities between multiple parties—ones in which providers, patients (and their family members), and interpreters must collaborate on tasks, identities, and relationships to achieve optimal care. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she conducted fieldwork involving observations and interviews with healthcare interpreters, laying the foundation for her long-term research trajectory.

After earning her doctorate, Dr. Hsieh joined the University of Oklahoma in 2004. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, she conducted interdisciplinary studies with clinicians across specialties to examine how the demands of interpreter-mediated communication vary across clinical contexts. Her work bridges theory and practice, offering culturally informed and actionable insights into clinical care, healthcare policy, and institutional practices. Over the years, her research has informed practices in cross-cultural care and language-discordant interactions, interpreter training, and language access policy. Her scholarship has been widely cited and applied in contexts ranging from medical education and clinical care to social justice research and bioethics.

After being promoted to Full Professor, Dr. Hsieh pursued a J.D. to deepen her engagement with bioethics, healthcare law, and systems-level change. While interpersonal communication and public health campaigns remain vital, she recognized the decisive role that structural policies and institutional frameworks play in shaping health outcomes and community well-being. For example, her Fulbright research in Taiwan highlighted how universal healthcare systems can incentivize healthcare facilities to reduce access barriers and build infrastructures that support migrant and language-discordant populations more effectively.

Dr. Hsieh has led interdisciplinary projects on language equity, cultural complexity, and structural barriers in healthcare. She collaborates regularly with clinicians, legal scholars, and public health experts to develop culturally grounded strategies for patient-centered care and health policy. She is the author of over 80 peer-reviewed publications and two major books. Her first book, Bilingual Health Communication: Working with Interpreters in Cross-Cultural Care (Routledge, 2016), received the Distinguished Book Award from the National Communication Association Health Communication Division. Her second book, Rethinking Culture in Health Communication: Social Interactions as Intercultural Encounters (Wiley, 2021), proposes an innovative and original framework grounded in culture. Reviewers have described it as a “generative research paradigm” that “will excite, compel, and inspire innovation and attention to the dynamics of health through intercultural engagement and interaction” (Jensen & Almuaili, 2024, pp.1670-1671).  Her forthcoming book, Cultural Lens and Shared Horizons (C.L.A.S.H.): A Framework for Intercultural Health Communication (Cambridge University Press, anticipated 2027), introduces a new theoretical model that explores cultural consciousness and frameworks shaping individuals’ understandings of reality and health practices.

Dr. Hsieh is frequently invited to deliver lectures, lead research workshops, and provide training at international conferences, universities, medical schools, and bioethics centers across North America, Europe, and Asia. Her expertise in health communication, language access, and intercultural ethics has led to speaking engagements worldwide. She also regularly serves as a grant and research reviewer for U.S. federal agencies (e.g., NIH, NSF, and Fulbright) and international funding bodies (e.g., European Science Foundation and World Health Organization), and as a committee member for doctoral candidates at top-ranking academic and research institutions globally. Her international collaborations reflect a sustained commitment to advancing interdisciplinary and cross-cultural dialogue in health and communication research.