Q:<\/strong> You received your B.A. from Cornell in 2001 and your M.D. from SUNY-Buffalo School of Medicine in 2005. Check and double-check.<\/strong> But how is it that you decided to earn a M.Ed. in Measurement and Statistics in 2016, well into your career? <\/strong><\/p>\n I completed my Family Medicine Residency here in 2008, then I practiced in the community for two years (2008-2010) at the Seattle Indian Health Board, and then I came back to start in the Medical Student Education Program<\/a>. At that time, I was trying to figure what direction to take in terms of the academic part of my career \u2013 scholarly pursuits, scholarship, that sort of thing. There was one option that appealed most to me: the Teaching Scholars Program<\/a> (TSP). The TSP is designed to take health professionals and make them into excellent teachers, people who can develop and administer curricula and do a little bit of educational scholarship on the side.<\/p>\n When I met with my department chair, Dr. Tom Norris at the time, it became clear that I was really interested in outcomes-based research. I was part of the Underserved Pathway<\/a> when I began [with DFM], and that program had been around long enough at that point that we could start to study the outcomes and see what had happened to the students who had gone through it. I didn\u2019t have any skills in this area, but I was interested in it. Dr. Norris suggested I go to the UW College of Education to see what they had to offer. They offered a degree in Measurement & Statistics<\/a>, which really interested me. Dr. Norris supported my decision to enroll, acknowledging in part my interest in it, but also recognizing how few members of DFM did educational research.<\/p>\n It took me four years, 2012-2016, to complete the degree, one course at a time! Of course, all the while I was doing clinic, I was involved with Underserved Pathway & the Family Medicine Interest Group, I was advising, I was doing all my medical student education stuff, all of that on top pursuing this degree. It was definitely a lot, but it worked out.<\/p>\n\t I used to joke that my daughter and my master\u2019s degree were the same age, because I started right after she was born. When she turned four, I graduated. We actually walked across the stage together when I received the degree.<\/p>\n I got involved from there with the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine<\/a> (STFM) and the educational researchers there. I was really interested in Family Medicine interest groups, for example, to see if they were influencing career outcomes at all. Are we successful in helping to guide medical students into primary care or family medicine careers? How good are we at getting them into rural and underserved settings? Are we meeting the workforce needs of the most vulnerable populations?<\/em><\/p>\n Yes, I am an associate editor for PRiMER<\/em><\/strong> <\/a>(Peer-Reviewed Reports in Medical Education Research<\/strong>), an open-access scholarly journal of the Society of Teachers of Family Medicine (STFM). I also work on Teaching Physician<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, which is an STFM website for teaching. I\u2019m currently working to set up an editorial board for Teaching Physician<\/em><\/strong> and have associate editors update the content. This is an especially good way for people who are more interested in teaching and curriculum to get into editorial roles, because right now it\u2019s largely researchers in those roles.<\/p>\n Okay, I go to these family medicine meetings \u2013 and it\u2019s probably the same in the PA world too \u2013where the people who do research are largely folks who have been trained to do research. It\u2019s hard for other people who are interested in it but who aren\u2019t trained researchers to break in and make the time and figure it out. And so, my goal has always been to help faculty find opportunities if they\u2019re interested in scholarship, or interested in editorial stuff, that sort thing. Because I think that those silos of researcher vs. teacher vs. clinician are\u2026 well, if we give people a way in, I think they\u2019ll want to do this. But a lot of times people can\u2019t even see the path forward, because they are just crushed by their clinical work or teaching load.<\/p>\n Yes, I think it benefits the state of health professions education as a whole. I think you want someone who is embedded in the experience to be doing the research and doing the scholarship, and to be thinking about how we could do all this better. Of course, formally-trained researchers bring a lot, no doubt. But it\u2019s different if it\u2019s the person within the system or within in the structure leading the area of inquiry, thinking about how you make things better. A lot of people are interested in doing this. They just don\u2019t know how to do it. It was super confusing to me when I started. It\u2019s not something that\u2019s easy to navigate.<\/p>\n You know, part of doing a master\u2019s degree that was beneficial was that I had to take all these distribution requirements, too. So for instance, I took a course on motivation and what motivates people to learn, and a course on how people learn, and a course that asked Why do we have education<\/em>? and What do we think about curriculum? <\/em>and that sort of thing.<\/p>\n As a result, I received a lot of formal education that I think is really useful for faculty development. Of course, not everyone is interested or has the energy to spend four years of their life doing this. But I think one of the key things that I learned in that experience, and have learned leading the Teaching Scholars Program and working with other people, is that people are really interested in learning these things. They\u2019re really interested in becoming better teachers.<\/p>\n I think health professionals are some of the worst people when it comes to this. Because we\u2019ve had hard jobs, we tend to think Oh, how hard could teaching be? It can\u2019t be that hard, I learned all this complicated biochemistry!<\/em> But once they get started, they realize that there\u2019s a whole skill set, a whole knowledge set, that you need. And so, it\u2019s hard to figure out how to go about getting that, and it\u2019s even harder to know how to apply that.<\/p>\n I think this is what I bring to the table. I can take these pretty formal, theoretical, maybe esoteric things and I can translate or interpret them into something that is going to be useful to a teacher, something that can be applicable that day<\/em> to improve their teaching and the learning of their students. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/familymedicine.uw.edu\/medex\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2022\/05\/IMG_5425-1-scaled.jpg\")
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\tBeyond your own writing and academic publishing, you also maintain an editorial relationship with academic journals, is that correct? <\/strong><\/h4>\n
Tell us more about that. It sounds like you are saying that there are researchers on the one hand, and\u2014who exactly on the other?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
So the advantages go beyond assisting the individual person interested in research to supporting the practice or the community at large? <\/strong><\/h4>\n
Is this commitment part of what you bring to MEDEX Northwest and to the PA profession?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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