COMET2026

Kazue Nakajima, MSc, PhD, MD is the Co-founder, Director, and Professor of the Department of Clinical Quality Management at the University of Osaka Hospital, Japan. She also served as Assistant Director for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the hospital and as Executive Assistant to the President of Osaka University. With over 25 years of dedication to patient safety and quality improvement, she established Japan’s first hospital-wide patient safety management system in 2001. She served as the conference president of the 14th Annual Congress of the Japanese Society for Quality and Safety in Health Care (JSQSH) and hosted the 8th Resilient Health Care Meeting in 2019. Currently, she holds the positions of President of JSQSH, Chairperson of the Resilient Health Care Society, and Member of ISQua’s Academy of Quality and Safety in Health Care.

Nelya Koteyko is Professor of Language and Communication in the School of Arts at Queen Mary University of London. She has published widely on health, disability, and the politics of communication. Her recent research uses ethnographic and corpus linguistic methods to examine how digital infrastructures organise inclusion, linking health and disability contexts with wider questions of communicative equity. She has co-authored Exploring Health Communication: Language in Action (Routledge, 2012) and is lead editor of the forthcoming second edition of the Handbook of Language and Health Communication (Routledge).

Srikant Sarangi is the founder of the COMET Society, an international research group focused on communication, medicine, and ethics. He has been Professor in Humanities and Medicine and Director of the Danish Institute of Humanities and Medicine (DIHM) between 2013 and 2021 at Aalborg University, Denmark, where he continues as Adjunct Professor. Between 1993 and 2013, he was Professor in Language and Communication and Director of the Health Communication Research Centre at Cardiff University (UK), where he continues as Emeritus Professor. Since 1998, he is the editor of TEXT & TALK: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language, Discourse and Communication Studies (formerly TEXT) as well as the founding editor, since 2004, of both Communication & Medicine and Journal of Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice.