Advance HE has announced the winners of this year’s national awards with Ulster University’s ‘Personalised Medicine: Developing People, Place, and Partnership in a New Discipline’ team receiving a Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE).
Introduced in 2016, the Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) recognises and rewards collaborative work that has had a demonstrable impact on teaching and learning, and it highlights the key role of teamwork in higher education.
The Personalised Medicine (PM) team, located at the Clinical Translational Research and Innovation Centre on the Derry~Londonderry campus, features a unique partnership between Ulster University and the Western Health and Social Care Trust, and Derry City and Strabane District Council.
The Personalised Medicine team has brought together specialists from different disciplines in collaborative partnership, prioritising student experience and employability.
The team has established innovative research programmes and developed first-in sector courses that established Personalised Medicine as a taught discipline, with the primary aim of addressing the urgent need for graduates with biological and clinical knowledge and computational literacy to handle the complex data requirements of modern medicine, that have been identified by scientific, government and NHS reports.
Personalised Medicine aspires to provide improved, customised approaches to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of disease. To realise the benefits of PM, graduate skills in both biological sciences and data analytics/computational biology, which have traditionally been disparate disciplines, are vital.
This holistic approach of integrating teaching and research has produced agile graduates, who are responsive to the needs of the sector and has benefitted the local economy through graduate training and job creation.
The PM team has engaged with stakeholders to identify skill gaps and refine research-informed programmes to provide students with hands-on, transdisciplinary skill sets.
These skill sets:
- have created high value jobs through significant external funding
- established clinical research partnerships
- engaged the local community in research, predominantly for the first time, through outreach and education
- established patient information groups
- hosted numerous school students from disadvantaged backgrounds
- trained and mentored over 200 BSc/MSc PM students and 40 PhD students.
On hearing of the team’s CATE success, Professor Odette Hutchinson, PVC - Academic Quality & Student Experience, commented:
“Winning the Advance HE Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence is a testament to the transformative power of collaborative effort shown by the Personalised Medicine team.
“By uniting diverse disciplines, the partnership prioritises community health, accessibility, collaboration, innovation, and regional development. It has also developed transdisciplinary skills sets in our graduates, helping to improve social mobility, access to education and high-value employment opportunities.”
Professor Alex Owen, Dean of Learning Enhancement, added:
The Personalised Medicine Team will collect the CATE at this year’s Advance HE’s Teaching Excellence Awards ceremony being held in Edinburgh in October."Collaborative partnership ensures learning and the student experience, leading to enhanced student outcomes. The work of the Personalised Medicine team exemplifies the significant impact of innovative, collaborative partnerships for teaching excellence.
“The Personalised Medicine team at Ulster University has not only advanced the discipline but has also enriched the educational and economic landscape of local communities, by preparing graduates who are equipped to meet complex, modern demands and are responsive to the needs of the life and health sciences sector.”