Congratulations to Professor Sally Curtis

In the recent promotion round, Sally Curtis has been appointed Professorial Fellow Education.

Sally graduated from Southampton with a degree in Physiology with Pharmacology and worked in a number of teaching roles before accepting the post of lecturer and deputy programme lead on the University’s new Widening Access to Medicine programme, BM6. Alongside this, Sally studied for a PhD in Health Sciences where she investigated muscle co-activation in chronic neck pain, and in 2012 became BM6 Programme Lead. Since then she has cemented the programme’s reputation as one of the most respected of its kind in the UK.

Sally’s nationally recognised expertise in widening participation (WP) has seen her invited to act as an advisor for many institutions, organisations and advisory bodies, including the UK and Scottish Governments and several Russell group universities, providing advice on the design and development of curricula, programme design, admissions processes and student support. Sally is also an external associate member of the Centre for Healthcare Research and Innovation at the University of Aberdeen and a founder member of the WP education research special interest group for ASME.

A member of the Medical Schools Council Selection Alliance (MSCSA) and UKCAT consortium, in 2015 Sally was elected to a four-year tenure on the MSCSA executive board, which is responsible for implementing the recommendations made in the Medical Schools Council’s 2014 Selecting for Excellence final report. Sally co-wrote the current indicators of best practice in the use of contextual admissions and leads the national data monitoring group for MSCSA board which works closely with HESA, UKMED and UCAS. The group has established a reliable national data set and a robust process for collating and disseminating data whilst monitoring national WP progress at a national level and Sally recently presented this approach at the 2018 Selection in Health Professions conference in Melbourne and at the JMEF Forum for Medical Education Leaders in Tokyo.

Sally is developing and leading a programme of research in Medical Education at Southampton and has published a short series of papers on WP in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the first to publish detailed admissions and progression data in the UK. Sally has developed research partnerships with a number of Universities and external organisations and is currently co-leading two studies investigating institutional and national performance and professional outcomes of medical graduates from WP and standard entry programmes.