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Additionally, at the end of her PhD, she was awarded a Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada- Medical Education Research Grant (RC-MERG, 2018) for her research in developing a curriculum to teach and assess advanced laparoscopic suturing skills, taking first steps in the development of an advanced laparoscopic surgery program.

Currently, Dr. Bilgic’s program of research is in the field of performance assessment in the simulation and clinical settings, focusing on technology, innovation, and collaboration, ensuring that trainees are gaining the necessary skills to provide the best patient care possible.

In relation to her program of research, Dr. Bilgic was awarded a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant (2024) titled: “Joy and pain in observed assessments: Improving workplace- and simulation-based assessments in the age of competency-based medical education”. This project was developed in partnership with Drs Brent Thoma (University of Saskatchewan) and Teresa Chan (Toronto Metropolitan University), and overall includes team members from across 9 institutions. Our grant aims to identify joy- (experiences beneficial for trainee education) and pain-points (experiences limiting trainee education) in observed assessments within authentic learning environments, including workplace-based assessments [WBAs] and simulation-based assessments [SBAs], to improve educational practices for the Royal College trainees and faculty.

Additionally, Dr. Bilgic was awarded a SSHRC Partnership Engage Grant (2023) with co-applicants/collaborators from 4 institutions across Canada and partnership with a private business enterprise (MedVR Education), for her work titled ‘Exploring the Role of Virtual Reality to Support New Training and Assessment Mandates in Medical Education’. The goal of this under progress study is to explore the use of immersive virtual reality in an EPA training/assessment context, which could be a practical and educationally relevant alternative to clinical and in-person simulation contexts.

Finally, Dr. Bilgic was awarded a RC-MERG (2023) with co-applicants Drs Quang Ngo and Jonathan Duff, (University of Alberta) for her work titled ‘Defining the Key Abilities Required to Perform in Challenging Pediatrics Procedures’. With procedural skills being an important part of patient care in pediatrics, and with evolving changes in practice routines of pediatricians, there continue to be changes in the needs of trainees when it comes to procedural skills training. Additionally, certain procedural skills are often challenging for residents to gain competence given their relative low frequency. Therefore, this project aims at understanding what makes certain procedures or parts of procedures challenging, to then explore the types of educational interventions, including use of simulation, that could be used to train residents on the identified key skills.

Lawrence serves as Assistant Dean of McMaster’s Health Science Education Graduate Program. Lawrence leads the FSG Med Ed Lab through which he supports postdoctoral fellows, doctoral trainees, masters and undergraduate thesis students, and a compliment of research staff as they collaborate on a wide array of research concerned with education for primary care, admissions, education data capacity, and the acquisition of precision technical skills.

Among Lawrence’s most relevant scholarship is work establishing the foundation for big education data platforms for the longitudinal appraisal of medical education metrics collated across physicians’ learning trajectory; from medical school into practice. This work began with examinations of the factors that influence the policy intervention of matriculating International Medical Graduates (physicians trained abroad) into Canadian residency programs with the ultimate goal of improving physician distribution in Canada and continues with provincial collaborative work aimed at determining the admissions and training factors associated with trainee performance on the national licensure examinations. This research has continued to grow, and Lawrence has led national and international groups of training institutions, data stewards, regulatory authorities, medical education researchers, and student and resident organizations in the development of jurisdictionally-relevant consensus statements for the ethical conduct of inter-institutional data-driven medical education research. This work is supported through funding provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Digital Research Alliance of Canada, and Compute Ontario. Lawrence is currently expanding his data science research with a new international collaboration focused on understanding the potential of explainable artificial intelligence technology to the acquisition and performance of precision ultrasound skills.

Dr. Grierson is also active in research that considers the way in which medical training and credentialing influences the delivery of continuous, comprehensive, and community-adaptive family medicine across the country. This research explores the impact that the Certificates of Added Competence program has on family medicine delivery in Canada; the relationships between family physicians’ geographic disposition before medical school, during training, and when in independent practice; the processes and mechanisms that support the development of team-based primary care; and family physician experiences of moral distress. This work is supported by funding from the Academic Family Medicine Associates of Hamilton Physician Services Incorporated, and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research.

Currently, Dr. Kahlke is developing a program of research that uses a range of qualitative and mixed methods to explore how social and systemic pressures influence health professionals’ and trainees’ decisions. For instance, she recently explored how trainees navigate the uncomfortable and disruptive work of health advocacy, and she is now examining how racialized trainees’ make decisions when they encounter interpersonal or systemic racism. She is also embarking on new projects that examine the impact of intersectional discrimination within health and educational systems on the well-being and success of medical learners and doctors who identify as fat. She is also interested in moving qualitative research in health professions education forward by engaging in methodological innovation, theory development, and meta-research.

As an educator and advisor to health professionals, Sandra shares her expertise in measurement to guide data analysis and research objectives. She has mentored nearly 100 learners, including graduate students, medical students, residents and junior faculty, on the pursuit of their research goals. In 2020, Sandra received the Excellence in Graduate Student Supervision Award from the Faculty of Health Science. In 2021, she received the Meridith Marks New Educator Award.

Sandra has established a successful international collaboration investigating theoretical models of cognitive processes behind clinical reasoning with application for education and assessment. In 2023 she was awarded a KIPRIME fellowship as recognition of her   contribution to medical education. Sandra is currently expanding her research focus to translate evidence into strategies that address inequity in healthcare and medical education. Her dedication to equity is clear through her advocacy for fair and equitable evaluations of junior faculty and learners.

Geoff has held an appointment at the Wilson Centre, UofT, since 2015, and has been an associate member of McMaster’s Department of Psychology, Neurosciences and Behaviour from 1994 to 2010.

Dr. Norman has received many honours and awards over the course of his career, including an Induction into Community of Excellence (McMaster, 2017), the President’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision (McMaster, 2013), the John Ready Award for Innovation (Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada, 2012), Querido Visiting Professorship from Erasumus University, Rotterdam (2012), an honorary degree from Erasmus University (2010), the Karolinska Award for Research in Medical Education (2008), and the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Assessment of Clinical Competence (Medical Council of Canada, 2001). In addition, he held a Canada Research Chair from 2001 to 2014.

Geoff’s long-standing interest is in cognitive psychology, particularly as it applies to clinical reasoning, learning, and decision-making. Geoff has expertise in statistics and measurement and has authored several popular books in this area with David Streiner. He has taught these subjects for many years at the undergraduate and postgraduate level and has published more than 300 journal articles on these topics. Recent investigations have expanded into two areas: 1) the role of computerized decision support systems; and 2) visual diagnosis at extremely brief times in radiology and electrocardiography. Another recent area of interest is the role of simulation in learning and assessment in areas ranging from anatomy learning to critical care decision making. Since 2017, McMaster’s Faculty of Health Sciences has organized the Norman Education Research Day. This yearly event, named after Dr. Norman, is dedicated to celebrating the rich history and future of Health

Professions Education research and scholarship across the Faculty of Health Sciences and McMaster University.

Jonathan is the co-editor of the CanMEDS 2015 Framework, which governs physician training in 50+ jurisdictions around the world. He has published more than 200 papers and given more than 200 plenary and keynote addresses.

Dr. Sherbino is an award-winning teacher, including the recipient of a 2021 3M National Teaching Fellowship, the top Canadian recognition for university educators.

The collaborative research program in clinical reasoning (with Sandra Monteiro, Matt Sibbald, and Geoff Norman) continues. Experiments evaluating the influence of experience on decision time and the value of crowdsourcing a diagnosis were published this year.  The research group published a series of commentaries offering a counter theory to the dominant viewpoint on the cognitive processes of reasoning.  This theory suggests that previous experiential knowledge, rather than general cognitive skills, better explains the potential for diagnostic error.

A multi-centre study with collaborators from Queen’s University demonstrated the utility of eye-tracking technology to enhance debriefing during simulation education.

Finally, Jonathan is leading a collaboration with the Department of Medicine to develop free, open-access resources for teachers across the Faculty of Health Sciences.  The Teacher’s Toolkit aims to synthesize resources and evidence to help teachers effectively, efficiently, and creatively teach and assess learners.

Matt holds a Master’s in Health Professions Education in 2011 and a PhD in 2013 – both from Maastricht University, Netherlands. He is currently the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Medical Education, Cardiology Residency Program Director, and Chair of the AFC Committee for Intervention Cardiology at the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.

Over the past year, Dr. Sibbald has led a number of studies on professional identity formation (PIF). Work done to understand the role of the COVID-19 pandemic around undergraduate learner identity formation was presented at the annual Geoff Norman Education Research Day by undergraduate MD student, Maham Rehman. A second project understanding the role of competency based medical education on PIF of postgraduate learners was presented by cardiologist and intensive care fellow, Justin Chow. Matt continues to work to understand the role of PIF in professionalism, with ongoing scoping review works around the overlap between professionalism and transformative learning, as well as the overlap between professionalism and inclusion. Funded work by a Faculty of Health Sciences grant continues around understanding how learner professionalism concerns are addressed, using a transformative learning lens.

Dr. Sibbald continues to work with Dr. Arden Azim, funded by a Royal College grant to understand the intersection between interprofessional education and postgraduate education frameworks. This three-part project is in its final phase, with manuscripts around the relationship between the Canadian Interprofessional Competencies and CanMEDS frameworks, survey of program directors and qualitative study understanding where interprofessional education occurs within postgraduate education. A final area of research focuses on artificial intelligence in medical education.

Early work explored the performance of ChatGPT on formative and summative assessments, with recent publication.

Dr. Sibbald continues to mentor trainees and faculty members studying simulation-based education, competency based education, interprofessional education, and clinical reasoning.

She maintains a part-time faculty appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences at McMaster University and is an Adjunct Scientist with the McMaster Health Education Research, Innovation and Theory (MERIT) Centre.

In 2024, Dr. Acai continued her work advancing education science within St. Joseph’s Education Research Centre (SERC) at St. Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. SERC’s mission is to enhance hospital-based education research, positioning St. Joe’s as a leader in education and education scholarship. Among the newly launched research projects was a study evaluating a virtual reality training program to prepare healthcare providers for handling violent situations in the workplace, as well as research on educating healthcare providers to address the unique needs of women with chronic illnesses, such as chronic kidney disease. Dr. Acai’s research portfolio at St. Joe’s also included studies in surgical education, covering areas such as human-robot teaming, rater cognition in the operating room, and the use of artificial intelligence to provide feedback to surgical learners.

Additionally, this past year, Dr. Acai proudly celebrated the graduation of four Master’s students under her supervision: Sakshi Sinha, Spencer van Mil, Kathleen Howcroft, and Marina Boutros Salama—all in the MSc in Health Science Education Program. Their research ranged from the emotional and well-being impacts of competency-based medical education to health science researchers’ experiences with equity-focused research, as well as the impacts of residency and fellowship training on intimate partner relationships. Dr. Acai is thrilled to see these, and other former students launch their careers in academia, medicine, and pharmacy.

Lastly, Dr. Acai continued several fruitful collaborations in 2024, including leading a mixed-methods manuscript with Dr. Cheryl Poth, Visiting Scholar from the University of Alberta. She also collaborated on a variety of health professions education projects with fellow MERIT Scientists Dr. Elif Bilgic, Dr. Sandra Monteiro, and Dr. Renate Kahlke and continued her research on the impacts of residency and fellowship training on intimate partner relationships with Drs. Catharine Munn, Enas el Gouhary, and other colleagues.

Teresa received her Masters of Health Professions Education from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Currently, Teresa is the Associate Dean, Continuing Professional Development. She previously was the Assistant Dean, Program for Faculty Development in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster from 2019-2021.

In 2021 she completed her term as the Director of the Royal College Clinician Educator Area of Focused Competency Diploma program, and she just completed her term as the AFC Specialty Committee Chair this year in 2024. Dr. Chan serves on the editorial boards of several important health professions education journals including Academic Medicine, Journal of Graduate Medical Education, and Perspectives on Medical Education. Dr. Chan is well known for her education research and innovation. She is a principal investigator in the METRIQ Study Group. Dr. Chan has also recently helped to co-found the Games As Medical Education Research (GAMER) Collaborative, which seeks to advance the theory, innovation, and science behind using game-based learning. This year she received a PSI Foundation Grant to explore the nature of Talent in Medical Education, alongside co-investigators including Sandra Monteiro, Matthew Sibbald, Renate Kahlke, and Jonathan Sherbino.

Ranil is also a Faculty Affiliate with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a member of the Schools of Computational Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, and is an Adjunct Scientist with MERIT. Ranil also serves as the Creative Director for McMaster’s LIVELab, and is currently appointed as the President, Chief Research Officer and CEO for Compute Ontario.

One of Dr. Sonnadara’s research areas is the study of musculoskeletal medicine in undergraduate medical education. Musculoskeletal conditions are extremely common in the general population and are frequently seen by physicians in their day-to-day practice. Despite the relevance of musculoskeletal education for medical practice, ongoing research suggests that medical students are not receiving the training they need to manage musculoskeletal conditions after they graduate. To better understand the current gaps and design sustainable solutions, we assessed the musculoskeletal curriculum at the DeGroote School of Medicine. Based on the strengths and weaknesses of the curriculum identified, an online learning tool was developed for students to use during their clinical rotation in orthopedic surgery through a survey and MSK knowledge assessments. The results of the evaluation demonstrate that the learning tool holds promise in helping students to learn about musculoskeletal medicine.

Dr. Amster is the Jason A. Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine and a historian of the Islamic world, France, and medicine. She has been a Fulbright scholar, a Chateaubriand scholar of the French government (1998) and received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania (2003). She has been a simultaneous translator for an ORBIS ocular surgery mission in Morocco, a researcher at the Institut National d’Hygiène du Maroc, and created an interdisciplinary determinants of health field study program for students to travel to Morocco. At McMaster, she also developed the History of Medicine and Medical Humanities Research Portal for all students to use, with grants, libraries, archives, museums, digital exhibits, digital collections, conference information, and images collections.

Her 2013 book, Medicine and the Saints: Science, Islam, and the Colonial Encounter in Morocco, 1877-1956 is an interdisciplinary study of health, healing, and the body in Morocco, based in fifteen years of research in Arabic manuscripts, French colonial and medical archives, and field interviews with Moroccan physicians, nurses, patients, midwives, and leaders of NGOs. She has served on the United States IIE Fulbright national screening committee for Morocco, Tunisia, and the Gulf States (2010-2013), and is currently on the Board of Directors for a Cambridge University Press book series. Currently she is researching maternal and infant health in Morocco and has received a SSHRC for a new project, “The Other is Me: Transvestism, Hybridity, and Cosmopolitanism in Colonial and Postcolonial North Africa.” She is jointly appointed in Religious Studies and the Department of Family Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences and supports students in both faculties.

Dr. Ilana Bayer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology & Molecular Medicine and the Director of the Learning Technologies Lab (LTL) in the Faculty of Health Sciences at McMaster University. Her primary teaching areas include use of technology in education, human-centred design and anatomy & physiology.

She teaches in several undergraduate and graduate programs and in a variety of learning environments (face-to-face, blended, online). She is a core faculty member in the MSc Health Science Education program. In her LTL Director role, Dr. Bayer acts as the education scholarship lead for education technology-related activities and research. She has led and worked on numerous development and research projects as well as curricula that have involved the use of technology. Her research interests include education technologies, education design, program evaluation, user experience and anatomy education.

Dr. Daniel Brandt Vegas is a Clinician Educator in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University. He received his MHPE from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is currently focused on developing a novel program evaluation strategy for post- graduate medical education programs to increase the amount and quality of data gathered and enable advanced analyses to inform goal focused, achievable program specific strategic plans.

He is the deputy program director for the Clinician Educator AFC diploma program at McMaster University. His other interests are systems improvement, end of life care, and clinical reasoning. Daniel is mainly focused on the interface between clinical practice and medical education scholarship, and the tension that exists between the pressing urgency of the clinical world and the growing body of science in different areas of medical education. Daniel’s role as a Clinician Educator, and world view in general, are largely informed by his erratic background in life, making his way from his native Venezuela, eventually zig-zagging up to McMaster. Daniel strongly believes in language, in a broad sense. This is often the source of arguments, but also many interesting conversations.

Dr. Deepak Dath is a professor of surgery at McMaster University. His current educational projects include research on validating a simple tool to measure the quality of educational materials and understanding how medical students decide to choose a career in general surgery. His main focus is in leadership in education.

Dr. Dath is co-founder of the TISLEP leadership summit and the sanokondu group of educators who aim to make leadership education accessible to physician trainees and training programs worldwide. He is a faculty of the CLIME (Canadian Leadership in Medical Education) course and the co-chair of developing CLIME II. Dr. Dath is working to develop value based or character-based leadership training.

Dr. Lee de Bie is the Ethics Program Lead and a Clinical Ethicist for the St. Joseph’s Health System, an affiliate of The Research Institute of St. Joe’s Hamilton, and a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow in McMaster’s Office of the Vice-Provost (Teaching and Learning). Dr. de Bie’s health professions education research has primarily contributed to the disciplines of Mad and Critical Disability Studies, bioethics, and social work, and drawn on critical social science, qualitative, archival, arts-informed, community-based, pedagogical partnership, coproduction, and service user-led research methods.

Dr. de Bie’s work seeks to encourage approaches to teaching and learning that advance equity, accessibility, social justice, and the integration of lived experience of disability and health service use. Current projects include a SSHRC Connections Grant to develop ethics education for peer support practitioners, as well as work focused on enhancing equity in clinical ethics fellowship programs, concept analysis of “ethics debriefs” and the impact of this method on health professional wellbeing and reflection, development and diffusion of an ethics framework to support ethical decision-making in healthcare, implementation of the proposed Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) healthcare and post-secondary education standards, and supporting staff and faculty in evaluating and disseminating accessible education interventions.

Rebecca Madan is a Thesis student in the McMaster Health Science Education Program and a recent graduate of McMaster Arts and Science. She is interested in the relationship between health science education and health equity. In her final year of undergraduate studies, Rebecca completed a thesis exploring how undergraduate prospective medial students make clinical decisions about 2SLGBTQIA+ patients. As a MERIT Scholar and Health Science Education student, she aims to expand her undergraduate thesis and create educational interventions to reduce implicit bias.

Dr. Anjali Menezes is a community family physician based in Hamilton. With special interests in trauma-informed care, medical education, and racism in medical training, her career is an eclectic mix of clinical work, teaching, mentoring, scholarly work, and community activism. Born and raised in Scarborough, she studied medicine and obtained her master’s in clinical education in the UK before returning to Canada for residency. She co-founded and chaired Racialized Residents at McMaster during her residency training at McMaster. She then completed an enhanced skills PGY3 year at Western University in Academic Family Medicine, where she focussed on deepening her understanding of racial identity formation and how medical training racializes learners. In September 2024 she finished her term as Director of Racialized Medical Learner Mentorship.

In 2021, she created and led the DARe Group Collaborative: exclusively Racialized academics studying and addressing the racial attainment gap in medical training. The group rapidly expanded, reaching a peak of just under 50 within 3 years, until she put a pause on her work to escape the colonial grind and prioritize herself, her family and her community.

 Her prior scholarly focus on how race-based data is collected and used eventually led her to be appointed to the Hamilton Police Service Board where she serves as the Citizen Appointee.

Previously, Professor Molinaro was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University, where she was also an instructor in the Bachelor of Health Sciences Undergraduate program. She completed her PhD in Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Western Ontario, where she conducted a critical narrative analysis on pediatric oncology nurses’ stories of moral distress, and worked as a research associate at the Centre for Education Research and Innovation (CERI). Building upon her expertise in using narrative methodologies to examine experiences of moral distress, Professor Molinaro uses a variety of qualitative critical and interpretive methodologies to provide understandings of how moral distress, as a result of institutional and provincial policy, has bearing on health outcomes, future health care delivery, and staff well-being. Additionally, her work aims to draw attention to how the sharing of narratives may act as a form of collective support and resistance for health care workers, reduce the distance between other health care providers, their management, and policy makers, and catalyze changes in medical education about how to best prepare learners for the realities of practice and future events that strain the healthcare system.

Dr. Som Mukherjee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Oncology, Division of Medical Oncology at McMaster University. He completed a two-year oncology research fellowship combined with a Masters in Health Research Methodology at McMaster University. He recently completed a 9+ year term as program director for the McMaster medical oncology residency training program and a two-year term as national program director subcommittee chair for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Medical Oncology Specialty Committee. His research interests in education include evaluation of resident wellness programs, assessment of teaching using electronic modules for resident education, integration of entrustable professional activity (EPA) assessments within objective structure clinical skills examinations (OSCE) and evaluating various aspects of new competency based medical education (CBME) programs within existing residency training programs. His clinical areas of interest include the management of patients with breast and genitourinary malignancies.

Dr. Quang Ngo is an Associate Professor and clinician educator in the Department of Pediatrics at McMaster University and a practicing pediatric emergency medicine physician at McMaster Children’s Hospital. He is the founding program director for the Pediatric Emergency Medicine subspecialty residency program at McMaster University and chair of assessment with the DeGroote School of Medicine. He has previously served as the associate and interim program director for the core Pediatrics program at McMaster University and is core faculty in the Clinician Educator Area of Focussed Competence at McMaster University. He is currently completing his Masters of Health Professions Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His educational and scholarly interests are in simulation-based assessment, teaching and feedback, and he has given talks and workshops nationally and internationally on these topics

Desigen Reddy is a pediatric anesthesiologist based at McMaster University Medical Centre, and an associate clinical professor in the Department of Anesthesiology. He has also the current Program Director for the department and has been in this role for the past 7 years.  He did his medical training at the Nelson Mandela Medical School in South Africa, a fellowship in pediatric anesthesia at Erasmus University in the Netherlands and has been attached to Hamilton and McMaster University now for the past 23 years. Whilst at McMaster Desi completed his Master’s degrees in Health Research Methodology and Health Science Education. He has a strong interest in Global Health, and is the current Canadian representative for pediatric anesthesia at the World Federation of Societies of Anesthesiology, as well as the past examiner in anesthesia for the University of Guyana.

Alison is a research assistant in McMaster’s Department of Family Medicine, where she is currently investigating the indirect patient care activities of Canadian primary care physicians. With a Master of Science from McMaster University and a Bachelor of Science from Queen’s University, Alison’s interests include ethical decision-making, medical education, and providing humanized end-of-life care. Alison was the recipient of the MERIT-HSED fellowship award in 2022-2024 to support her thesis work investigating how trainees can be better prepared for the ethical dilemmas they will face in clinical practice through an analysis of resource allocation decisions within Intensive Care Units during the pandemic.

“Over the past two years, the MERIT HSED Fellowship has provided me with continuous support and numerous opportunities to learn and engage with the MERIT community. From receiving mentorship from multiple MERIT scientists and scholars to forming friendships with other fellows, my role as MERIT HSED Fellow has enriched my experience at McMaster in countless ways.”

Allison is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Faculty of Health Sciences.  Her full-time teaching role is within the Child Life and Pediatric Psychosocial Care (CLPCC) graduate program.  Within the program, Allison has held the position of Clinical Education Coordinator for the past 12 years.  This role helps facilitate the child life clinical internship matching program, maintains relationships with child life internship programs and preceptors across Canada, teachers’ clinical education related courses and most importantly, provides support and mentorship to child life interns.  In addition to her clinical education role, Allison teaches a number of courses within the CLPPC program and was one of three faculty who developed this unique graduate program.  Allison’s current research interests involve understanding the impact of ePortfolios in child life internship applications and exploring decision-making processes within the child life clinical internship matching process.

Greg is a full-time Associate Professor in the School of Rehabilitation Science (SRS), Physiotherapy, McMaster University, engaged in a teaching role. He is currently the Chair of the physiotherapy program’s Admissions Committee. In 2023 he was awarded the MERIT Faculty Fellowship at McMaster to support his education scholarship. Greg is a physiotherapist with expertise in musculoskeletal health and has attained the designation of Clinical Specialist Musculoskeletal from the Canadian Physiotherapy Association (CPA). This designation certifies physiotherapists who have focused their careers and demonstrated advanced clinical competence, leadership, continuing professional development and research in a specific area of practice. In 2021, his collective career accomplishments were acknowledged and highlighted as a recipient of the CPA’s Medal of Distinction, and in 2023 he was presented with the Lifetime Membership Award from the Canadian Academy of Manipulative Therapy.

Dr. Tong is a family physician with a practice in emergency medicine and prison health in Kitchener-Waterloo and Associate Professor at the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University. She is the Program Director of the Royal College Clinician Educator Area of Focused Competence Diploma program at McMaster University, the first of its kind in Canada. She also serves as the Faculty Development Director at the Dept of Family Medicine. As a graduate of the MERIT Fellowship (2022-2023) and supported by the Gender and Health Grant, she continues to lead the interprofessional health educators’ team, Creating Brave Spaces, in designing and delivering simulation-based faculty development workshops addressing objectives in equity, diversity, inclusivity and indigenous reconciliation.

Dr. Mary Zachos is an Associate Professor and clinician educator in the Department of Pediatrics at McMaster University and a practicing pediatric gastroenterology physician at McMaster Children’s Hospital. Her clinical and research interests include pediatric IBD, point of care intestinal ultrasound and endoscopic procedural training. Dr. Zachos is the training program director for the Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition Program and is completing a Royal College Clinician Educator Area of Focused Competence Diploma program at McMaster University. Currently she serves as the CBME representative on the Pediatric Education Advisory Committee and is a member of the Department of Pediatrics mentorship committee. She has served on the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada Examination Committee and is on the Specialty Committee in Gastroenterology. Medical educational interests include the role of simulation and education technology in procedural training, as well as coaching and mentorship.

Dr. Zubairi is a Developmental Pediatrician at Ron Joyce Children’s Health Centre & Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at McMaster University. He is currently program director for the McMaster Core Pediatrics Residency Program and has led the roll out of the Royal College’s Competence-By-Design for Core Pediatrics at McMaster since December 2021. He is also Medical Director with the McMaster Children’s Hospital Autism Program, leading training workshops on culturally responsive diagnostic approaches. He has previously co-led the Equity Advocate and Allyship Program through Faculty Affairs. As a MERIT Scholar, Dr. Zubairi is involved with several studies in health professions education including an understanding of the knowledge-to-practice continuum in the emergency room care of children and youth with autism spectrum disorder, and how to enhance reflection on culture among undergraduate and graduate health professions students.