Email: UnderwoodLG@hiram.edu
Office: Gerstecker 213

For more information about Lynn visit:

http://researchintegration.org

B.S. University of Iowa; M.D. program: University of Iowa School of Medicine; Ph.D. Queen’s University Belfast , N. Ireland Academic interests: literature, visual arts and medicine, human meaning and values, spirituality, methodology, social and cognitive science.

Center for Literature, Medicine, and Biomedical Humanities Home

Lynn Underwood joined Hiram in 2006 as Professor of Biomedical Humanities.

Education:

     Originally trained in medicine at the University of Iowa, Dr. Underwood then moved to research in Epidemiology, receiving her Ph.D. in Cancer Epidemiology from Queen’s University in the United Kingdom. Her dissertation research involved identifying a pattern of late diagnosis of melanoma, linking it to the histopathology of the disease, and designing and implementing a public health intervention that significantly improved survival. She spent ten years doing cancer and public health research in the U.K., while teaching at the medical school.

Teaching:            

     Taught oncology, epidemiology and molecular biology for 10 years at the Queen’s University Medical School, epidemiology and study design at Case Western Reserve Medical School, and interdisciplinary studies in the Honors College at Western Michigan University

Professional Career:

     For thirteen years she directed and conducted research programs at a privately endowed foundation, where she worked with the World Health Organization and conducted and facilitated research.  Dr. Underwood is on review and advisory boards for the National Institutes of Health and for private foundations, and various journals and professional organizations. She developed a scale of Daily Spiritual Experiences (the DSES) that is being widely used in health studies worldwide, she recently helped with a Chinese translation of it that is currently being used in a large study of burnout in health-care professionals in Hong Kong, and is now working on one in Korean. It was recently used in a study of Afghan refugees.  It has been cited in over 50 publications. 

The Arts :

          Always having a keen interest in the arts, over the years she has studied drawing at the University of Iowa, Belfast Institute of Technology, and at the Art Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  She particularly enjoys pen and wash life drawing of faces and studies of amphibians, plants and natural objects. She designed and painted a nine foot long mural for a public space in Ireland.  While in medical school she studied creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers workshop, and still enjoys playing the piano and sometimes the pipe organ.

Current work :

        Published widely, editing and writing a series of books with Oxford University Press, writing chapters, including one on Compassionate Love for the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, she has written journal articles in biomedical humanities, methodology, melanoma epidemiology, spirituality, and psychosocial factors and health.  She is currently part of the European Research Network on the Human Person, presenting in Athens Greece in September of 2007 a paper entitled: “The Human Person:  Possibilities for Flourishing in Dire Circumstances.”  She has just finished an edited volume with Blackwell Press: The Science of Compassionate love: Theory, Research, and Applications.