Dr Dean - Biography
Dr Laura Dean is passionate about teaching IT, and using IT in teaching.
She graduated as a doctor with an honours degree in pharmacology from Cambridge University. Her research project achieved publication for its innovative methods and social implications.
On entering undergraduate medical school, she had never used a computer before. By the time Laura had entered clinical medical school, she was already teaching colleagues. Her skills were entirely self-taught.
Since then, she has continued to push forward her IT expertise, and deploy it within healthcare. She was hired by the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC to write and design their first Clinical Coffee Break. The site, which rapidly received positive feedback from doctors around the world, aimed to clearly explain cutting-edge medical research and its implications for clinical practice. This led Oxford-based Doctors.net.uk (DNUK), to commission her to write lecture notes for their new site, devoted to medical students. DNUK is the UK's largest portal for doctors.
After graduating as a doctor, she worked at Project Palm for Cambridge University. The project's software allows medical students to share their learning using handheld computers. Dr Dean supervised 30 medical students who had the full spectrum of IT literacy. She trained them in the use of the hardware and software, and gained valuable feedback on the technology's role in education.
While working as a junior doctor, she has been lecturing and consulting on the use of handhelds in medicine. This includes designing a course to quickly get any clinician confident and proficient with their handheld computer. She is now as a Visiting Research Fellow at the National Center for Biotechnology Information in Washington, DC.
