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This award recognizes an IAMSE member who has a distinguished record of educational scholarship, including educational research and dissemination of scholarly approaches to teaching and education. Candidates should be Professor, Associate Professor, or equivalent rank, or have demonstrated greater than 10 years of educational scholarship. Additionally, candidates must have a significant record of engagement within IAMSE. Award recipients are selected based on the impact, ingenuity, and longevity of educational scholarship and their records of publications, presentations, and other forms of dissemination of educational scholarship. The Educational Scholarship Committee reviews all nominations and supporting documentation based on established criteria and selects finalists. Final approval of each award recipient rests with the IAMSE Board of Directors.

2018 Award Winner—Nicole Woods, PhD

University of Toronto, Associate Director of the Wilson Centre

Nicole N. Woods, PhD, is an Associate Director of the Wilson Centre, University of Toronto at the University Health Network. Dr. Woods joined the University of Toronto in 2006 and leads a successful program of research in health professions education. Dr. Woods’ laboratory-based research program uses experimental methods and principles derived from cognitive psychology to advance theory and practice in health professions education. The goal of her work is to improve the education and training of health professionals by developing and testing models of knowledge acquisition and expertise development and translating these models into tools and techniques for education. Over the course of 15 years, Dr. Woods has led numerous studies of memory and decision-making that have explored the impact of biomedical knowledge on clinical reasoning. Although much of her work focuses on the early stages of expert development and is most relevant to undergraduate medical education, her research has significant implications for education across the developmental continuum and for a variety of health disciplines. In addition to supervising graduate students and working with medical educators, Dr. Woods is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine and was recently appointed as the inaugural Scientific Director of the UHN Research Institute for Healthcare Education.