Katherine Train & Lidewij Niezink (Empathic Intervision)

Lidewij Niezink is an independent scholar and practitioner, focused on the development of empathy theory and practice. She dedicates her professional life to the integration of fundamental and applied research from science in psychology, philosophy, social neuroscience, the arts and anthropology, with practice based experiential methods. After completing her PhD in 2008, Dr. Niezink chose to combine academia with practice and works internationally to develop evidence based interventions and education for diverse groups and organisations, ranging from universities to firefighters, from actors to entrepreneurs and from (mental) healthcare professionals to engineers. Katherine Train is an independent practitioner and researcher. Since 2005 she has been researching, developing learning material and presenting training on professional development, wellbeing, presence, empathy and prevention of compassion fatigue and burnout in the corporate, NGO and public sector. These skills are applied to leadership, teamwork, diversity, tolerance and ethical decision making. Her special research interest has been in the application of empathy in organizations in South Africa during a time when South Africa is emerging as a new democracy with its cultural and resource diversity and history of social upheaval. She particularly likes to work with organizations addressing social change.