Diann Eley, Ph.D., from the School of Medicine at The University of Queensland in Australia will present “Resilience and Personality: Current Research & Potential Application to Rural Medical Education” at the 9th annual William H. Coleman M.D. Distinguished Lecture at the UAB School of Medicine Huntsville Regional Medical Campus on July 19. Eley will speak on her work using the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) to assess the career choices of physicians and medical students. Eley has administered thousands of these assessments, developed by Robert Cloninger, M.D., a psychiatrist at Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., in Queensland and has developed a TCI profile of physicians who choose the field of rural primary care.
Eley is the director of M.D. Research, chair of the Internal Ethics Committee and M.D. post-graduate coordinator in the School of Medicine at The University of Queensland. Her research career began with an MSc in reproductive physiology at the University of Florida in 1978. She subsequently worked for nearly 20 years as a bench scientist in bio-medical laboratories in Kenya and the UK. In 2000 she began her academic career after receiving a PhD in health and exercise psychology at the University of Bristol. She moved to the School of Medicine at UQ in late 2003.
The primary focus of Eley’s research is medical education, rural health workforce and research training. Her specific area of research interest deals with personality and behaviour around student well-being and career choice. She leads the medical student research program and is responsible for the development and implementation of the Clinician Scientist Track in the School of Medicine, which encourages student interest and experience in research alongside their medical degree.
The William H. Coleman M.D. Distinguished Lecture honors William H. “Bill” Coleman, the director of the Office for Family Health Education & Research at the UASOM Huntsville campus. Coleman, a retired family medicine physician from Scottsboro, is a past president of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the original director of UASOM’s Rural Medicine Program at the Huntsville campus. On behalf of Dr. Coleman’s leadership, the AAFP made the initial contribution to support this lecture series. The speakers are prominent in their field and present topics that are appealing and encouraging to medical students seeking a career in Family Medicine.
Past presentations in the series have included “The Family Physician’s Role as Leader in the Managed Care Environment” by Douglas E. Henley, M.D., then-president of AAFP; and “Delivering Value: Primary Care’s Opportunity for Greatness-But Only If …” by Clinton MacKinney, M.D., MS, deputy director of the Center for Health Policy Analysis at the College of Public Health, University of Iowa.
The lecture will be from 12:30 – 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 19 at the UAB School of Medicine Huntsville Regional Medical Campus, 301 Governors Drive SW, Huntsville. Please RSVP to Paula Clawson at pclawson@uab.edu or 256-551-4609. Lunch will be available for those who RSVP.