CHES is proud to host a monthly session of the Cutting Edge Speaker Series on the second Tuesday of each month from 12:00-1:30pm, with virtual connections available to all distributed sites. Presenters will be drawn from our internal UBC community, as well as external institutions. Depending on the month, the Cutting Edge Speaker Series will vary in a rotation of three different speaking genres:
- The What I’m Thinking About sessions are designed to promote questions and discussion around an emerging topic relevant to health professions education. Each session is facilitated by a moderator, and will usually include two to three short presentations of theoretical, research-based, or implementation findings before moving into group questions and discussion.
- The Invited Speaker Rounds are focused to present a critical examination of current topics of interest in health professions education research. Each session will feature an invited local or international speaker, who will present their program of scholarship, with audience questions and discussion to follow.
- The Joanna Bates Lectureship will feature a presentation from a CHES trainee, fellow, student, or alumni in recognition of the legacy of CHES’ founding director, Dr. Joanna Bates.
Learning Objectives – by the end of each session, participants will be able to:
- Identify and challenge current thinking in a particular area of health education scholarship.
- Relate concepts explored to their local educational context for the purpose of improving education practices and informing educational innovations.
- Relate concepts or insights explored to their own scholarship.
If you have a suggestion for a topic or presenter, please contact rola.ajjawi@ubc.ca.
January 2026 Invited Speaker Rounds
Interprofessional and interdisciplinary research teams in Health Professions Education
Meredith Young, PhD
Professor, Institute of Health Sciences Education
McGill University
Date: Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Time: 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Hybrid: IRC Room 414 & Zoom*
Zoom Details: For connection details, please email ches.communications@ubc.ca.
Abstract
As discipline-specific knowledge expands, there is a need to link, or transcend, disciplinary boundaries to solve increasingly complex societal problems, to more comprehensively answer critical questions, and to more effectively mobilize knowledge into application. The drive for cross-disciplinary research rests on the assumption that key societal problems are best solved by researchers working collaboratively across disciplines. In other words, this lauded cross-disciplinary research is executed by research teams. A well-functioning research team can engage in scholarship that breaches boundaries, trains learners in a rich interdisciplinary context, and generates high quality impact. Poorly functioning teams may generate low-quality or low-impact research, and waste precious research resources. This talk accepts the truism that much of the research in Health Professions Education (HPE) is generated by interdisciplinary and interprofessional research teams, and focuses on research teams in HPE. Despite the prominence of research teams in HPE and in the broader scientific field, little guidance is available for how to build, support, and nurture research teams. In this talk, Prof. Young will discuss initial findings from a program of work exploring research teams in HPE. Through this talk, she will present findings suggesting the importance of considering research teams as instances of teams and share practices that may support the transformative potential of research conducted in effective teams.
Biography
MEREDITH YOUNG, PhD, is a Professor in the Institute of Health Sciences Education at McGill University. She earned her PhD in cognitive psychology from McMaster University studying how individuals (both individuals with and without medical expertise) think through a variety of complex problems in medicine. More specifically, she studied the intersection of more intuitive decision-making and more structured, rule-based reasoning. Her current work examines reasoning in Health Professions Education, and the assumptions that underpin what we think makes for a good decision. She explores this topic in three main areas: 1) issues related to clinical reasoning, 2) issues of validity and assessment in Health Professions Education (HPE), 3) issues related to the ways we conduct research in Health Professions Education. Her work aims to make our understandings of key concepts in HPE more explicit in order to support productive dialogue to better support teaching, assessment, and scholarly practices.
The Division of Continuing Professional Development, University of British Columbia Faculty of Medicine (UBC CPD) is fully accredited by the Continuing Medical Education Accreditation Committee (CACME) to provide CPD credits for physicians. This activity meets the certification criteria of the College of Family Physicians of Canada and has been certified by UBC CPD for up to 15.0 Mainpro+® Certified Activity credits. Each physician should claim only those credits accrued through participation in the activity. CFPC Session ID: 301903-001 to 301903-010. RCPSC ACCREDITATION: The CHES Cutting Edge Speaker Series is a self-approved group learning activity (Section 1) as defined by the Maintenance of Certification Program of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.