Research theme: Empathy and compassion

Are you our new professor? 

Thanks to a generous donation from the Birgit Rausing Foundation for Medical Humanities, we are we are announcing a position as full professor, to focus primarily on research, but also on education in the field of medical humanities. Deadline for applications, in English, is 31 October 2025.

The professor will be employed by the Faculty of Medicine, Lund University and is linked to our centre. We welcome applicants from a wide range of academic backgrounds. Given the interdisciplinary profile of the position, applicants will be assessed by representatives from a number of academic disciplines. The position includes a start-up package of SEK 1 million per year for the first three years.

Read more about this announcement on our blog: 
Are you our new full professor? – Birgit Rausing Centre for Medical Humanities

or go directly to the announcement on Lund University's recruitment system Varbi: 
Birgit Rausing Professor of Medical Humanities, with focus on empathy and compassion in a clinical context

Research initiatives

During 2021 and 2022, we’ve pursued the research theme within a so called Advanced Study Group at the Pufendorf Institute at Lund University: "Enhancing empathy and compassion in healthcare students and professionals".

Empathy and compassion – so important yet so complex, Advanced Study Group (Lund University research portal)

The ability to express compassion increases the well-being of healthcare professionals and reduces the risk of burnout. Compassion in healthcare improves clinical outcomes for individual patients. Empathy for "the other" is also an important prerequisite for equal care. Our goal is to explore challenges associated with developing tools to increase empathy and compassion in health care and in professional education.

The research project Epione started in 2023. The project strives to reach deeper understanding of the working conditions within Swedish healthcare and how job satisfaction correlate with self-care, empathy fatigue and secondary trauma.

Elinor Schad's blogpost about the Epione-project in our blog

We have arranged two interdisciplinary workshops: “How the other person's ethnicity affects your expression of empathy and compassion in healthcare and professional education”, and “Practices influencing empathy and compassion – contemplation, art, music, dance”.

The conference The Neuroscience of Empathy and Compassion in 2022 was an eye-opener for many of the participants, regardless of which faculty they came from.

Programme sheet for the conference The Neuroscience of Empathy and Compassion, pdf 1MB (Opens in new window)

In 2023, we followed up with a related event, where neuroscientist and professor Anil Seth discussed the mysteries of human consciousness.

 Information about our events in our calendar