Progress and professional development marked by Harvard Macy Institute alumni

David Keegan remembers in vivid detail the moment when he had the epiphany that helped him chart a new course for his career. The setting was Harvard Medical School, where Keegan and about 60 others attended the 2005 Program for Educators in the Health Professions.

“I decided to attend the program at the Harvard Macy Institute because I wanted a rapid formal orientation to medical education. I had been a clinician for more than 10 years and had been involved in educational leadership, but had little formal training in this area,” said Keegan.

He was working on developing a new training program in child health for family medicine at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), and saw the Harvard Macy program as a good environment to gain insights from others who had rolled out similar programs. At the same time, he was attempting to understand and address a lingering frustration with the direction of his career; he didn’t seem to be getting where he wanted to be.

“The program brought me up to speed, kind of like an Advanced Life Support course, but for medical education, and I was exposed to concepts of transformational leadership that have been valuable to me ever since,” said Keegan. In terms of his career trajectory, he found that the Institute offered a “surprisingly rapid way to look at your behaviors and identify what is working against you. My philosophy, unknown to me, had been, ‘If I’m not different, then I don’t count.’ Acknowledging that I thought this way and then radically responding to it was the major breakthrough for me at the Harvard Macy Institute.”

Upon his return home, Keegan rapidly transitioned into the role he had been seeking, and is now the undergraduate academic director for family medicine at UWO.

For Darshana Shah, a pathology professor at the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine at Marshall University, the Harvard Macy Institute’s Program for Leaders in Healthcare Education helped provide her with the confidence needed to launch a major initiative.

Shah, who attended the Institute in 2004, was working on developing her institution’s new Academy of Medical Educators. The Academy was designed to serve as a centralized faculty development program that would meet faculty members’ educational needs in their quest to provide the highest quality teaching to students, develop and implement new educational theories and technologies, and promote educational skills, critical thinking, and innovative approaches to teaching among medical faculty.

At the time, Shah was a course director leading the pathology course. Since then she has been elevated to section chief in pathology as well as assistant dean for professional development in medical education. The Academy, of which she is founder and chair, is in its third year, with more than 20 members, and has become a platform through which faculty members can pursue their passion for teaching with excellence.

Shah, who returned to the Harvard Macy Institute as a faculty member in 2006, credits much of her recent professional success to her participation in the 2004 program: “My experience at the Harvard Macy Institute helped me to communicate my vision effectively, helped me to develop necessary leadership traits, and above provided me with the courage to walk beyond boundaries.”

Stephen J. Moorman, associate professor of neuroscience and cell biology at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, attended the 2004 Program for Educators in the Health Professions hoping to move forward a project focused on using internet-based videoconferencing to help students in the anatomy dissection lab.

“Within the next decade there will be a critical national shortage of PhD-level faculty trained to teach gross anatomy—the way we teach will have to change,” writes Moorman in an article published in BMC Medical Education in November 2006.

In the article Moorman describes the use of his “Prof-in-a-Box” system to enable an anatomist to use distance learning technologies to provide instruction in gross anatomy to students in a dissection laboratory at another site. The Prof-in-a-Box consists of the anatomist in his or her office with a computer and video camera, a computer and two video cameras in the laboratory where the students are, online chat software, and a secure server to host the professor-student “consultation.” Moorman’s experiments with the Prof-in-a-Box demonstrated that a geographically dispersed faculty could assist in providing instruction in the dissection labs at multiple medical schools without needing to be physically present. Moorman says that the Prof-in-a-Box concept is being considered for other courses held between remote sites and the main campus at his institution.

“The Harvard Macy Institute program allowed me to get up to speed on recent literature in a variety of educational arenas, and I was able to be competitive for grant money available for medical education projects through private foundations,” said Moorman. “I now maintain active, funded research programs in developmental biology and medical education research.”

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