People

Position: SMERC Project Board Interim Director and Depute Postgraduate Dean (Scotland Deanery, North Region)

Email: peter.johnston@abdn.ac.uk

He is the Director of Medical Education Research in the Scotland Deanery and is a member of the UKMED Research Group.  He is a Director on the Board of the Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME). He has roles in the Centre for Healthcare Education Research and Innovation (CHERI).  Peter is a member of the GMC Curriculum Advisory Group and Quality Scrutiny Group.  He is also involved in curriculum redesign at the Royal College of Pathologists.

An Aberdeen graduate and trainee, he has a long commitment to undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. He has coordinated and innovated in undergraduate teaching, including the final year elective, over many years. As an associate dean, he currently oversees diagnostics specialties, obstetrics and gynaecology and trauma and orthopaedics. He chairs the Scottish Diagnostics Specialty Training Board and is the associate dean coordinating research in the NES Medical Directorate and had leadership roles in the Scottish Medical Education Research Consortium between NES and the five Scottish Medical Schools. Dr Johnston has led quality management and performance reviews for NES, the Royal College of Pathologists and the GMC and has participated in undergraduate and postgraduate curricular review and development. He has been a member of the GMC Curriculum Advisory Group since 2012 and represents that Group on the GMC Quality Scrutiny Group.

In recent years, he has extended his educational interest to pedagogic research, particularly in the area of medical careers decision making. Current additional projects explore issues related to educational culture and human factors in diagnostics.

Position: SMERC Member

Email: David.Hope@ed.ac.uk

Dr David Hope is a psychometrician and medical educationalist specialising in assessment. He is the director of the PhD in Clinical Education programme and the co-chair of Research Ethics in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. A Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he has a particular interest in standard setting, quality assurance, and fairness in assessment.

Position: SMERC Member

Email: l.y.gordon@dundee.ac.uk

Dr Lisi Gordon is an independent health professions education (HPE) researcher based in the UK. Until March 2024, she was Head of Medical Education Research and Head of Doctoral Studies in the School of Medicine at the University of Dundee. 

Her personal scholarly programme focusses on professional career trajectories, specifically transitions, identities and wellbeing. Lisi has developed internationally recognised expertise in longitudinal qualitative research and using innovative methodologies such as longitudinal audio-diaries and video-reflexivity. She has recently been appointed to the Board of the Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME) as Director of Publications.

Position: SMERC Member

Email: ahl1@st-andrews.ac.uk

Anita Laidlaw has been a member of the Medical Education Research Executive component of SMERC since it formed in Sep 2011. She is a Reader in the School of Medicine, Medical Sciences and Nutrition (SMMSN), University of Aberdeen where she is Director of the Centre for Healthcare Education Research and Innovation and leads the SMMSN Higher Education Research group.

Anita is also the current Chair of Education Research Committee of ASME, and a Programme Board member of the National Centre for Remote and Rural Health and Care.

Research interests:

• Wellbeing at work (physical and psychological)
• Development of interventions
• Attitudes towards psychological wellbeing and psychological wellbeing difficulties
• Recruitment of workforce and students
• Retention of workforce and students
• Discrimination and embeddedness
• Remote and rural
• Healthcare communication
• Clinical communication training
• Inter-professional collaboration

Position: SMERC Member

Email: lindsey.pope@glasgow.ac.uk

Professor Lindsey Pope is a GP, Professor of Medical Education and Dean of Internationalisation (MVLS) at the University of Glasgow.

She is the Director of Community Based Medical Education at the Undergraduate Medical School.  

Lindsey is Associate Postgraduate Dean for Academic Medicine at NHS Education for Scotland and Chairs the Specialty Training Board for General Practice, Public Health and Broad Based Training.

She is Director of the Scottish School of Primary Care and the Specialty Adviser for General Practice to the CMO for Scotland. She is an elected member of the Medical Schools Council ED&I Alliance Board .   

She is a GMC Education Associate with involvement in regional and school reviews, new school approvals and most recently as a Team Leader for the CPSA component of the new national MLA (Medical Licensing Assessment).

She is an Examiner for the Royal College of GPs as well as an approved GP trainer and has been involved in teaching and training across the continuum of medical education.

She has a Doctorate in Health Professions Education and is a member of the Scottish Medical Education Research Consortium (SMERC) Project Board. She is a member of the Scottish Doctors' Wellbeing Study group and sits on the Editorial Board of Virtual Primary Care. She supervises Masters and Doctoral students in Medical Education.  

Position: SMERC Member

Email: vicky.tallentire@ed.ac.uk

Dr Vicky Tallentire is a Consultant Physician and Associate Director of Medical Education in NHS Lothian.  She is also an Associate Postgraduate Dean for NHS Education for Scotland and an Education Co-ordinator and Research Lead for the Scottish Centre for Simulation and Clinical Human Factors.  Vicky is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Vicky has research interests spanning transitions, professional identity, clinical error, clinical event debriefing and all aspects of simulation-based education.  

Position: SMERC Member

Email: joanne.kerins@nhs.scot

Joanne is an acute medicine registrar in the West of Scotland and medical education researcher striving to improve medical training at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Her research has emphasised the development of non-technical skills, using simulation-based strategies to explore behaviour and team performance and professional identity development.

In 2023, she won the NHS Education for Scotland Medical Directorate Award for Scholarship and Research in Medical Education. In 2024, she completed a PhD in medical education at the University of Dundee in professional identity development during transitions in medical training. She is an honorary clinical lecturer at the University of Glasgow and continues to research key aspects of professional identity including clinical reasoning and decision making.

Position: SMERC Member

Email: ah200@st-andrews.ac.uk

Dr Alun Hughes is the Head of the Education Division in the School of Medicine at the University of St Andrews. A pharmacologist/physiologist by training, he transitioned into medical education in 2011 and has since lead on the development of medical curricula (including Scotland’s first graduate entry medical programme), as well as the development of education-focussed staff and education research within his institute.

His current research interests are around the use of technology to adapt teaching both reactively (e.g. in response to the COVID pandemic) and pro-actively (e.g. the use of technology-enhanced learning to augment student learning, especially around extended reality and artificial intelligence). He has also interested in the management of risk in educational environments associated with technology use (e.g. incidental findings during practical sessions using ultrasound).

Position: Medical Education Lecturer

Email: kalexander001@dundee.ac.uk

Kirsty Alexander is a Medical Education Lecturer at the University of Dundee. Her research interests focus on selection, curricula and support through medical school, and the implications this has for workforce distribution especially to rural and underserved areas.

Kirsty's role is focussed on the ScotGEM programme and research into related areas - generalism, rural medicine and innovative curricula. Her work is largely qualitative and aims to drive alternative ways of thinking for academics, policy makers and practitioners. The goal is to help address inequalities in healthcare and education.