Associate professor in physiotherapy. Research focus on how stigma-related emotions affect self-management in people with COPD, and support for self-management for different groups.
I work as an associate professor in physiotherapy at the Department of Community Medicine and Rehabilitation at Umeå University. I am running a project that aims to investigate, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, how stigma-related emotions such as shame and guilt affect self-management in persons with COPD.
My research focuses on support for self-management in different groups, mainly for people with COPD. I work a lot with qualitative methods in the form of individual interviews and workshops to capture experiences of the patients themselves, but also healthcare professionals who work with the patient group. I also use surveys to collect data on this. When developing interventions, it is important to take part of the wishes and opinions of future users, therefore I work with co-creation processes with patients with COPD, relatives and healthcare professionals.
I am a registered physiotherapist since 2006 and received a master's degree in physiotherapy in 2012. In November 2018, I defended my dissertation COPD in primary care. Exploring conditions for implementation of evidence-based interventions and eHealth. During 2019-2020, I was the senior research assistant at the Department of Community Medicine and Rehabilitation at Umeå University, evaluating the use of the COPD web and with the development of the eHealth tool Me & COPD. During 2021-2023 I was a postdoctoral fellow in medical sociology at the Department of Sociology at Umeå University.
At the moment, I teach at the Physiotherapy program within my position as an associate professor. I teach in several semesters about functional examination, communication/motivational interviewing, research methods and with supervision and review of bachelor and master theses. I also have experience teaching on several different educational programs, at all educational levels at both the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Social Sciences.