With the influx of new champions and ideas in 2021 , The Lived Experience Network (LENs) pressed pause on formally constituting as a CIC. In March 2022, Giovanni Biglino, joined The LENs as an Honorary Director. Collectively, the Directors, working alongside The LENs steering group, continue to focus on their aims to put lived experience and meaningful co-production at the heart for the culture, health and wellbeing sector in a new world.
To read more of our Learning from Experience Blogs, many authored by The LENs champions, please click here.
Giovanni Biglino
Giovanni is a biomedical engineer with an interest for interdisciplinary and creative work, paying attention to how technologies can be used for patient benefit. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics at the Bristol Medical School and Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer at Imperial College London. He holds qualifications from Imperial College, the Brunel Institute for Bioengineering and Harvard Medical School. In 2020-21 he was a Future Leader in Innovation Enterprise and Research (FLIER) with the Academy of Medical Sciences. He is also an international adviser to the Youth Equity Science/YES project of the Global Health Justice Partnership of Yale Law & Public Health Schools. He has been and is involved in collaborative projects exploring facets of patient experience, working with artists, psychologists, patients, clinicians, experts in the medical humanities and curators.
"As a bioengineer carrying out research in a clinical context, lived experiences are profoundly intertwined with the concept of healing. Paraphrasing E. F. Poli (who, in turn, quotes Jung and the myth of Chiron), it is one’s own wound that symbolically represents a space through which others’ suffering can enter. Appreciating the importance of the individuality of these experiences is key and requires collaboration, attention and empathy."