This presentation will highlight our experiences teaching scientific research skills within the elective Scholarly Concentration in Biomedical Research at the USF Morsani College of Medicine. This Scholarly Concentration is part of our overarching Scholarly Concentration Program, an elective opportunity for our students to develop an independent scholarly product. The presentation will start with a brief program description and then focuses on the goals of the Biomedical Research Concentration regarding teaching scientific research skills. We will stress the specific challenges we have encountered developing this concentration and our experiences trying to address them, describing in some detail some of the more recently implemented measures. One of the major challenges to be discussed is achieving sustained student commitment to the concentration throughout all four years of medical school. In this regard we will discuss our new senior student mentorship program. We will further discuss how this elective inquiry-based curriculum influences the required core pre-clerkship curriculum The presentation will conclude with preliminary data attempting to measure the impact of this scientific-inquiry based curriculum on continued scholarship in the practice of medicine.

Target Audience

DMU faculty and staff.

Speaker

Ingrid Bahner, PhD 
Associate Professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of South Florida, Morsani College of Medicine (MCOM).

Ingrid Bahner received her PhD in Microbiology from the University of Southern California, where she subsequently taught in the first and second year curriculum at the Keck School of Medicine and conducted translational research on gene therapy for HIV infection and melanoma.

In addition to being a Course Director in the pre-clerkship curriculum at the MCOM, Dr. Bahner is currently the Associate Director of the Scholarly Concentration Program and the Leader of the Scholarly Concentration in Biomedical Research. Dr. Bahner is also directing the effort to return to the basic sciences from a clinical perspective in the clerkship curriculum. She is furthermore the Director of the IMS Program, a Master’s Degree program designed to prepare economically and/or educationally disadvantaged students for admission to medical school with the goal to enhance medical education through a highly diverse student body.

Her educational research interest is to study what fosters scholarship in medical students including the impact of biomedical research and scientific inquiry based curricula.