New Health Sciences Scholarship Program | Emory University

Applications are now being accepted for one of the 25 positions within a further 18 months scholarship program designed to help health science educators study their teaching, mentoring, leadership or program development efforts and disseminate their findings to other educators.

“The education research grant is not about how to teach per se, but how to analyze what works best in teaching and how to present and publish the results of this research.” says pediatrician Linda Orkin Lewin, who runs the fellowship with the education researcher. Oulému Luhanga.

The scholarship begins with a launch event on September 12. This event, organized in conjunction with a symposium focused on interprofessional education, will be open to all health science educators, not just those in the scholarship program, says Lewin. This will be followed by six monthly workshops on Wednesday afternoons led by national experts, from October 2018 to March 2019. Each participant will then conduct a research project framed within its educational framework, meeting monthly in project groups over 12 months. , with graduation and poster presentations scheduled for March 2020. Upon completion of the scholarship, participants will receive a Medical Education Research Certification from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

The deadline to apply for this scholarship is April 1, Lewin says, and applicants will be notified of acceptance by April 15. more about the program, ”says Lewin, whose scholarship and publications have focused on teaching.

The scholarship scholarship is the flagship program of the Woodruff Health Educators Academy (WHEA), created over the past year to bring together educators from the health sciences center to promote and support the practice and scholarship of teaching and learning. The WHEA is governed by an Interprofessional Steering Committee made up of teachers in Nursing, Public Health, Medicine (including the Physician Assistant, Physiotherapy, and Anesthesiologist Assistant programs) and the Center for Training and Excellence of the university faculty. They come from a variety of backgrounds, but they all share the same goal of preparing the next generation of healthcare professionals.

For example, Elizabeth Downes, a nursing faculty member, is passionate about this mission. When she worked for the World Health Organization before coming to Emory, she developed an NP training program for small island nations that is still going strong after 18 years, educating many providers for many countries. This program had a far greater impact, she says, “than I would have simply had to provide patient care.

Downes says the WHEA gives health science education a long-standing structure and foundation. “We need to strengthen and promote the great work being done here in education,” she said. “We do a lot of things that go unseen because we don’t measure and present what we do. Education needs the same kind of status, evidence base, and avenue of promotion as our other missions.”

Member of the WHEA Steering Committee, Jodie Guest, Professor of both Public Health and Medicine (PA Program) and a Rollins MPH and Doctorate former student in epidemiology, has similar hopes for the new scholarship and the WHEA in general. Like Downes, she has considerable experience in training healthcare professionals, having taught to some extent since graduating and having received numerous teaching awards at Emory. She left her position as director of HIV research at Atlanta VA Medical Center three years ago to join faculty here full time because she wanted to spend more time with students.

“Currently, the faculty to receive more recognition for their work in research and clinical care than teaching, but Emory is a training center, ”she says. “Emory is a premier training site, but we need a more substantial pathway for teaching to be rewarded, recognized, and sustained. She believes the WHEA provides a missing link, a way to give professors the tools they need to do educational research, such as determining how students learn best, if or when a “inverted class” works better than traditional learning, or how to compare the results of face-to-face learning versus online learning.

Katie Monroe, a member of the WHEA steering committee, which runs the anesthesiologist assistant program, says she would have loved such a program early in her career before returning to school to get a Doctorate in the pedagogical direction. “Many clinical educators have an exceptional body of knowledge and a strong clinical skill set, but may have had little or no formal teaching training. This new scholarship offers a wonderful opportunity not only to collaborate with other educators in the field of health sciences, but also to share their work in a scholarly way.

In addition to the new scholarship, the WHEA offers quarterly lunches “Educational tips”, involving educators from each of the three schools and providing advice on best teaching practices. Additional programs for educators will be available as the WHEA continues to grow, Luhanga said.