Dr Margo Louise Turnbull

Biography

Dr Margo Turnbull is a health communication researcher whose work explores how communication shapes the experiences of people navigating cancer, migration, and chronic illness across cultural and linguistic boundaries. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Communication at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), where she has been based since 2017. She is affiliated with PolyU's International Research Centre for the Advancement of Healthcare Communication (IRCAHC) and the Mental Health Research Centre (MHRC).

Her research sits at the intersection of three fields that rarely speak to each other: applied linguistics, public health, and migration studies. Using qualitative and discourse-focused methods — critical discourse analysis, Foucauldian frameworks, narrative analysis, and interpretive phenomenological analysis — she examines how health systems communicate with, and about, people whose lives do not fit the normative assumptions embedded in policy and clinical practice.

Her most distinctive and sustained body of work focuses on migrant women with cancer in Hong Kong. Over five years, she has collaborated with Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers navigating breast cancer and other diagnoses in a city where their healthcare rights are limited, their languages are largely absent from clinical settings, and their experiences are shaped as much by kinship and collective memory as by biomedical frameworks. This work — published in Qualitative Health Research, Social Science & Medicine, Journal of Migration and Health, and the International Journal for Equity in Health — forms the basis of her forthcoming book with Cambridge University Press, Intercultural Communication and Cancer (2026).

Before entering academic research, Margo spent twelve years as a speech and language pathologist and allied health service manager in the London NHS, ultimately leading paediatric community services. This clinical and managerial background is unusual among applied linguistics academics and gives her work a grounded understanding of how health systems actually function — and fail — at the level of practice. This background also informs her strong interest in clinical communication education: she currently leads an RGC-funded project on multilingual simulation-based communication training for final-year nursing and medical students at PolyU.

Her PhD (University of Technology Sydney, 2012–2017) was embedded in an Australian Research Council Linkage Project on practice change in primary health care, in partnership with Western Sydney Local Health District. The ethnographic fieldwork included First Nations participants navigating chronic conditions in community settings — a thread she has continued to develop, most recently through a visiting fellowship at the University of Queensland's Sociohealth Lab (January–March 2026).

Margo has been recognised for the real-world impact of her research through consecutive Knowledge Transfer awards at PolyU: Individual Award for Knowledge Transfer: Society (2024) and Individual Award for Knowledge Transfer: Industry (2025). Multilingual cancer awareness resources she co-developed with community partners in 2024–25 have been endorsed and promoted by the International Organization for Migration (UN), the European Union Delegation in Hong Kong, and workers' groups across the region. She holds an Associate Editor role at Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, a Nature portfolio journal.

Career history

Period	Role
Jan–Mar 2026	Visiting Academic, School of Social Sciences, University of Queensland (Sociohealth Lab)
Nov 2022 – present	Assistant Professor, Dept. of English & Communication, PolyU
Jul 2020 – Nov 2022	Research Assistant Professor, PolyU
Aug 2018 – Jul 2020	Postdoctoral Fellow, PolyU
Aug 2017 – Aug 2018	Research Associate / Project Associate, PolyU
2000–2012	Speech and language pathologist; Allied health service manager (NHS London, paediatric community services)
1998–1999	Speech and language pathologist, Queensland and Tasmania

Education

Year	Qualification
2012–2017	PhD (Primary Health Care), University of Technology Sydney Embedded in ARC Linkage Project, Remaking Practices: Learning to Meet the Challenge of Practice Change in Primary Health Care, led by Emeritus Professor Nicky Solomon, in partnership with Western Sydney Local Health District.
2003	MBA, University of New England
1997	Bachelor of Speech Pathology & Bachelor of Arts, University of Queensland

Awards & recognition

• 2025

  Winner, Individual Award for Knowledge Transfer: Industry

  Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

• 2024

  Winner, Individual Award for Knowledge Transfer: Society

  Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

• 2022

  Nominee, PolyU President's Award

  The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

• 2021

  Winner, Award for Outstanding Achievement in Teaching (Individual)

  Faculty of Humanities, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

• 2019

  Genealogy Journal Postdoctoral Travel Award

Citation trajectory

128 of 138 total citations have come since 2021 — 93% of career citations in five years. 2025 was the highest year on record.

Editorial & peer review service

Associate Editor: Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature portfolio journal)

Reviewer for: Community Mental Health; Discourse & Society; Emotion Space and Society; Global Mental Health; Nurse Education Today; Patient Education and Counseling; PLOS ONE; Social Science and Medicine; Societies