Educator and anatomist Charys M. Martin is looking to make an impact on her students, her fellow educators as well as her association.

“I’m looking forward to getting more involved in AAA,” said Martin, a recent recipient of AAA’s Basmajian Award. “I’m looking to make a bigger impact beyond the walls of my institution.”

Martin joined AAA in 2008 and is currently a member of AAA’s Committee for Early-Career Anatomists (CECA). Her membership and attendance at AAA’s Annual Meeting led to her first job at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University (now Augusta University). “I was talking to people at the posters [at the Annual Meeting] and that’s how I got the interview,” Martin said. “I think the networking that you get at the conferences is unbelievable, it’s such a community, everyone is friendly, you meet collaborators.”

Today, Martin is an assistant professor on the teaching scholar track at the Department of Anatomy & Cell Biology at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University in Ontario, Canada, and serves as the director of all anatomical education within the undergraduate medical education program at Schulich.

Creating the Best Anatomy Curriculum for Clinicians

Her extensive experience in authentically integrating anatomy into a systems-based medical curriculum led to her being tapped to help lead Schulich’s 2019 curricular renewal process that involved a shift to a competency-based curriculum. “When I got hired in 2015, that is when they started talking about it and we finally rolled it out in 2019,” Martin said. “It was a fascinating process. We got to start with pie-in-the-sky going from ground zero. We got to go into the literature and really find what pedagogy we wanted and settled on a master adaptive learner approach.”

The idea is that the curriculum teaches skills for fundamental knowledge, with students then asking the right questions and seeking out more information on their own. Meanwhile, educators are guiding the student’s progression through the curriculum and hold synchronous sessions to make sure students are applying the knowledge and providing a framework to think through clinical problems.

The new curriculum also focuses on integrative/collaborative teaching and bringing in a panel of experts to discuss medical cases. For example, a class examining an OB/GYN case might include an embryologist/anatomist, a radiologist, a pathologist, and an OB/GYN physician – all talking about different aspects of the same case. “It’s a really hands-on, interactive session where the students see how the fundamental anatomy plays a role in the individual cases. We’re trying to make sure we don’t silo anatomy away from the clinical teaching.”

Martin was also recently elected as a Teaching Fellow with Western’s Center for Teaching and Learning, where she is currently developing a library of anatomical learning resources that educate and role-model gender-inclusive and culturally appropriate terminology. “The anatomy community spurred the idea in me,” Martin said. “The anatomy community is very vocal on Twitter. It’s a lively community and they were having the conversation about gender-inclusive terminology and it gave me the idea that we need to do this at Western.”

In recognition of her curriculum efforts, Martin’s colleagues nominated her for—and she won--AAA’s Basmajian Award, which honors health science faculty members for their contributions to the teaching of gross anatomy, and outstanding accomplishments in biomedical research or scholarship in education. “I think it was celebrating all the things that I’ve done around the curriculum renewal and my new fellowship with the Western Center for Teaching and Learning. It was really an honor.”

While Martin has already made her mark on her university’s anatomy curriculum, she hopes it’s the mark she makes on individual students that will have a lasting effect on the fields of both medicine and anatomy. “I like teaching adults and giving students the tools they need to succeed. I like that I can build relationships with them and see those ‘a-ha’ moments in the lab.”