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Institute of Health Sciences Education - Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry
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Dr Paula Vickerton

Paula

Director of Anatomy, Deputy head of Year 1 MBBS

Email: p.vickerton@qmul.ac.uk

Profile

Paula Vickerton is the director of anatomy and deputy head of Year 1, MBBS programme. Within her role as director of anatomy Paula has responsibility over all anatomy teaching across the MBBS, Physican’s Associate, Biomedical Sciences and Prehospital Care programmes.

Paula started her career at the University of Liverpool, where she graduated from the BSc in Human Anatomy with first class honours, before undertaking a PhD in Musculoskeletal biology. Following her PhD Paula taught anatomy at Keele medical school, and here attained fellowship of the higher education academy.

In 2016 Paula joined Queen Mary University of London, and has since won many awards for teaching both student nominated awards, such as Winner of the medical school’s Teacher of the year 2020/21 based on JISC feedback, and staff nominated awards such as Team winner of Teaching innovation 2022 in the faculty of medicine and dentistry awards.

Whilst at QMUL Paula has attained senior fellowship of the higher education academy and regularly reviews fellowship applications from across QMUL as part of the teaching recognition programme.

Teaching

Anatomy is a fundamental building block of medicine and so Paula contributes to almost all modules across phase one teaching. In addition, she is a module lead for the locomotor 1 and movement and posture GEP modules on the MBBS programme.

She is currently the module lead for the Biomedical sciences module “human anatomy” BMD113.

In addition to teaching Paula is a senior tutor for year 3 students and the senior internal examiner for paper C, the data interpretation paper across years 2 and year 1 of the Graduate Entry programme.

In addition to these roles Paula holds external examiner appointments at St George’s medical school and University of Liverpool.

Research

Research Interests:

Paula has research interests in clinically applied anatomy and in anatomical education. 

Publications

Book Chapter

  • Vickerton, P., 2023. From Lecture Halls to Zoom Links: How Can Educational Theory Help Us to Deliver Effective and Engaging Teaching in an Online Environment? In Biomedical Visualisation(pp. 79-94). Springer, Cham.

 Papers

  • Kuo, L., Salloum, N.L., Kennard, B., Robb, J. and Vickerton, P., 2022. Impact of an in-person small group surgical skills course for pre-clinical medical students in an era of increased e-learning. Surgery Open Science.

  • Flynn, W., Kumar, N., Donovan, R., Jones, M. and Vickerton, P., 2021. Delivering online alternatives to the anatomy laboratory: Early experience during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Clinical Anatomy, 34(5), pp.757-765.
  • Vickerton, P., Jarvis, J.C., Gallagher, J.A., Akhtar, R., Sutherland, H. and Jeffery, N., 2014. Morphological and histological adaptation of muscle and bone to loading induced by repetitive activation of muscle. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1788), p.20140786.
  • Vickerton, P., Jarvis, J. and Jeffery, N., 2013. Concentration‐dependent specimen shrinkage in iodine‐enhanced micro CT. Journal of anatomy, 223(2), pp.185-193.

Abstracts

  • Vickerton, P., Moriarty, S., Meredith-Hardy, A. and Jones, M., 2022. Anatomy teaching in the times of COVID: Do students perceive online teaching as experiential learning?. Journal of Anatomy, pp.777-777.
  • Green, J., Vickerton, P. and Molyneux, C., 2020, January. Iliac artery morphology; an anatomical study of iliac tortuosity in human cadavers. Journal of anatomy (Vol. 236, No. 1, pp. 196-196).

  • Vickerton, P., Gallagher J.A., Jarvis J.C., Jeffery N., 2014, Defining adaptation in the rat musculoskeletal system in response to changing biomechanical demands: b12. Journal of Anatomy, 224(2), 242-243.

  • Vickerton, P., Jarvis J.C., Jeffery N., 2013, Iodine-based micro ct contrast stain causes concentration dependent specimen shrinkage: a19. Journal of Anatomy, 223(1), 101.
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