Dr. Dawn Cooper
Instructor I,
Department of Cellular and Physiological Sciences;
UBC Faculty of Medicine
Dates: August 17 – 21, 2015
Purpose of Visit
As an educator, I am interested in how medical students use foundational knowledge to solve clinical problems. I have been developing teaching strategies to more effectively promote integration and application of foundational sciences knowledge. In 2014, I developed two integrated learning experiences for the medical students: (1) integrated histo-pathology laboratory sessions and (2) a series of flipped classrooms that utilized team-taught (scientist and clinician) problem solving sessions in pulmonary physiology. As I move forward, I am interested in evaluating the effectiveness of integration strategies, including the value of team-taught sessions in promoting integration. As a co-director for the new FLEX course, I am interested in defining outcome measures that could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of scholarly concentration programs in medical education.
Biography
Dr. Dawn Cooper is an instructor in the MD Undergraduate program where she is the Associate Director for Histology and the Course Co-director for the new scholarship course, FLEX (Flexible and Enhanced Learning). She is a PhD-trained research scientist who specializes in cell death and disease. Her diverse research background includes understanding how parasites manipulate cell death to maximize infection and how dysregulated cell death causes disease. She currently teaches histology and physiology to UBC medical students and is interested in developing new approaches to help students’ link foundational scientific knowledge to clinical problem-solving. As part of developing the new FLEX integrated scholarship course, she hopes to evaluate the impact of scholarly concentration programs in medical education.