Failure in health professions education & scholarship and finding your voice as a medical education researcher – an interview with Dr Lara Varpio

Dr. Lara Varpio completed her PhD in 2007 at the University of Waterloo, Canada in collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Research in Education at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her award-winning PhD research investigated the impact of Electronic Health Records on medical trainee socialization. She spent the first 6 years of her career with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa, Canada, and the Academy for Innovation in Medical Education. Then in 2013, Dr. Varpio moved to Washington DC, USA to work with the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences where she was a founding member of the university's Center for Health Professions Education.  Today, Dr. Varpio is internationally recognized for her expertise in qualitative research methods and methodologies, and in Social Science and Humanities theories which she uses to investigate questions relating to how clinicians, patients, and researchers influence the performance of teams and organizations, and how those teams and organizations impact on the individual.   Her research has won national and international awards.  In this episode of the KIPRIME podcast, Dr. Varpio talks to Alina Jenkins about failure in health professions education & scholarship, how to find your voice as a medical researcher, and her new job at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania.