Academics and researchers
UCL Medical School is committed to excellence in education and has a strong reputation for teaching informed by cutting-edge research.
The School has a distinguished cadre of academic staff who are at the forefront of international research in medical sciences and clinical medicine.
Faye was appointed as Director of UCL Medical School and Head of the MBBS Programme in April 2021. Her clinical role is as a Consultant in Palliative Medicine.
Faye started at UCLMS as a Clinical & Professional Practice tutor in 2007. Since then she has held several roles with us: she led the Curriculum Mapping project, introduced reflective Schwartz Rounds into healthcare education, and led the Professionalism module.
She is a Doctor of Education, having undertaken her research in undergraduate curriculum mapping. Faye is a Principal Fellow of the global Higher Education Academy. Faye has also been awarded three UCL Provost Awards across three domains, most notably the 2020 Inaugural Provost Team Award for Embedding Equality, Diversity & Inclusion. She contributes to departmental research and international consultancy activities.
Deputy Director UCL Medical School; Director Research Department of Medical Education; Postgraduate and Scholarship Academic Lead; Honorary Consultant NHS London
Ann is Professor of Medical Education Research, Adjunct Professor in Medical Education and Family Medicine at Chulabhorn Royal Academy in Thailand, and Clinical Professor in Medical Education; responsible for the leadership and strategic direction of UCLMS, leading on under-graduate and postgraduate programmes and scholarship, and the Medical School Education Consultancy (MSEC).
Ann established the Research Department of Medical Education (RDME) and was appointed as the Head of Division for Research, which has evolved into an international centre for excellence, with its outputs shaping health care policy and professional practice, doctor’s education and training, patient care and pedagogy nationally and globally.
With extensive experience in Medical Education Research, Ann led the Research Excellence Framework in 2014 & 2021. In recognition of the contribution RDME has made to educational scholarship and impact on policy and practice the department was awarded the Association for the Study of Medical Education’s inaugural award for Institutional Commitment to Scholarship in 2021.
Her research interests include professional transitions in medical education and training, impact of service reorganisation on training, quality in education and training, assessment, differential attainment and fairness in progression, professionalism, workplace learning, the employment of locums in the NHS, and medical regulation (appraisal and revalidation).
Research Themes
- Collaborative Social Science
Professor of Medical Education Research, Deputy Lead for Research at UCL Medical School and an Honorary Research Fellow in Psychology at UCL.
Kath’s research aims to understand and improve medical students’ and doctors’ performance, and thus improve patient care, with a strong belief in equality and fairness being vital for effective selection, learning, and assessment. These values underpin her major research areas of improving educational outcomes for minority ethnic medical students and doctors, and improving access to medicine by helping medical applicants from diverse backgrounds make informed choices about which medical schools they apply to.
She uses both qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches, including interviews, multivariate statistical analysis of secondary cohort data, and social network analysis and has a keen interest in involving the public in research and teaching.
Most of Kath’s teaching relates to research methods and teacher training; she is increasingly teaching people about equity and fairness in education and has supervised various undergraduate and postgraduate research projects.
Senior Research Fellow in Medical Education
Asta is a quantitative researcher in the Research Department of Medical Education at UCL Medical School with a PhD in understanding and improving the occupational health of medical doctors; and has a background in organisational psychology.
Asta’s particular interests are in conducting research on well-being (including mental health, stigma, psychosocial work/learning conditions, and career progression) of medical students and doctors, including testing the effectiveness of interventions. She is experienced in a wide range of statistical methods which includes multivariate statistics, structural equation modelling, and meta-analyses. Asta works with surveys and experimental design studies, and secondary data analyses.
Research Themes
- Mental Health and Human Wellbeing
- Psychosocial Work Conditions
- Organisational Psychology
Associate Professor in Medical Education
Antonia is a mixed-methods researcher in the Research Department of Medical Education at UCL Medical School, and a member of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee at UCL Medical School. Antonia is a Health Psychologist, with a Professional Doctorate in Health Psychology, and is an Associate of the Division of Health Psychology, British Psychological Society. She previously worked in NHS Public Health on health promotion priorities including childhood obesity, sexual health, and smoking cessation.
Antonia’s research experience includes conducting interviews and focus groups, qualitative analysis methods including interpretative phenomenological analysis and thematic analysis, designing questionnaires and quantitative analysis methods including multivariate statistics and meta-analysis. Antonia’s interests are in doctors’ and medical students’ mental health and well-being, career progression, learning and work environments, development and evaluation of interventions, differential attainment, treatment adherence and self-management in long-term conditions.
Research Themes
- Behaviour Change
- Human Wellbeing
- Population Health
Associate Professor in Medical Education
UCL Profile
Rowena is a qualitative researcher in the Research Department of Medical Education at UCL Medical School. She leads the RDME Researcher Development Group and is a reviewer for the UCL Research Ethics Committee. She is also a member of the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee at UCL Medical School. With a PhD in Social Sciences, conducting conversation analytic research on sexual identity, gaze, and touch in everyday interactions, Rowena has a background in sociolinguistics, and linguistics and language studies.
Her research experience includes conversation analysis, thematic analysis, and realist evaluation; with interests in medical communication, fairness in postgraduate medical training and assessment, medical student and practitioner well-being, and identity.
Research Themes
- Communication, Language & Hearing
- Cultural Understanding
- Language, Linguistics & Literature
Professor of Clinical Communication
Research themes
- Doctor-patient communication
- Clinical communication education
Emeritus Professor in Medical Education
PhD students
Funding for our doctoral students has come from Arthritis Research Council, ASME (Association for Medical Education), Cancer Research UK, Commonwealth Scholarships, NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research) and UCL Impact Studentships.
Magdalen Baker
- Thesis: Evaluating the outcomes and impact of less than full-time training on the medical workforce
- Supervisors: Ann Griffin, Asta Medisauskaite
Carolina Britton
- Thesis: Which mechanisms support workforce transformation for a safe, effective and resilient perioperative care workforce
- Supervisors: Della Freeth, Ann Griffin, David Walker
Kate McCarthy
- Thesis: Stakeholder perceptions of the use of contextual information in selection processes by UK medical schools.
- Supervisors: Katherine Woolf, Anouk Wouters
Catherine Nakidde
- Thesis: Accreditation of Health Professions Education in Uganda - exploring policy, processes, actors and context
- Supervisors: Ann Griffin, Catherine O’Keeffe
Eliot Rees
- Thesis: Medical School Choice in the United Kingdom
- Supervisors: Katherine Woolf
Halima Shah
- Thesis: Do ethnic differences in performance and selection across medical education persist when controlling for prior educational attainment?
- Supervisors: Katherine Woolf, Henry Potts
Former PhD students
Dr Gianpaolo Manalastas, PhD
- Thesis: Bridging the gap between patient agency and doctor authority: how structure interacts with power in the consultation
- Supervisors: Lorraine Noble, Ann Griffin, Rowena Viney
Dr Tosin Ososami, PhD
- Thesis: ‘What’s wrong with me?’ The evolution of patients’ information seeking behaviours and doctors verbal responses within the medical consultation
- Supervisors: Lorraine Noble, Rowena Viney
Ahmed Rashid, MD(Res)
- Thesis: Global approaches to medical school regulation
- Supervisors: Ann Griffin, Deborah Gill
Dr Jemima Thompson, PhD
- Thesis: The development of a conceptual framework and method to determine whether doctors’ responses to patients’ concerns are patient-centred
- Supervisors: Lorraine Noble, Rowena Viney
Judith Tweedie, MD(Res)
- Thesis: Professional identity formation in physicians in training
- Supervisors: Ann Griffin
Dr Emily Unwin, PhD
- Thesis: Gender differences in the professional performance of doctors practising in the UK
- Supervisors: Jane Dacre, Katherine Woolf and Henry Potts
