https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.130.44

In April we launched the Training Hub, which provides the support essential to your career. As a member benefit, the Training Hub is your home for resources and workshops to unlock your potential and advance your career.

Changing how members access career support

In recent years The Society has invested more resources into offering professional development support designed to address career challenges or to upskill members. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for online content covering a wide range of topics. This taught us a lot about the broad range of skills a physiologist requires and The Society’s role in offering support beyond what’s available at a member’s institution.

How the Training Hub can support you

The Training Hub can help you to

• Plan your career next steps
• Improve your teaching
• Develop your research skills

The Training Hub homepage will keep you updated with what’s new or topical. The resource library hosts resources for members from on-demand webinars, cheat sheets and templates on topics such as publishing, funding and career planning. The development of content and opportunities showcased on the Training Hub is tailored by members for members to support best the communities we serve.

New video series for lecturers

Are you looking for tips to apply to your teaching methods? Professor Matthew Mason from the University of Cambridge tells us more about the new go-to video resources to support new lecturers teaching basic systems physiology.

Professor Matthew Mason, University of Cambridge

It is clear to see that there is an increasing disconnect between what we research, and what we need to teach to undergraduate students. Students, especially in medicine and allied disciplines, need a strong grounding in basic systems physiology, but this is less and less likely to have been a central focus in the PhD and postdoctoral training of newly appointed lecturers. Physiology is a conceptually complicated science and being asked to design and present a course on, say, electrochemical gradients can be daunting for a young academic with little or no background in the field, especially if their university lacks more senior lecturers who can act as mentors.

For this reason, I have been working with The Physiological Society to create video-based resources aimed at newly appointed lecturers, to help get them started. These are not about how to present a lecture in general terms as there are plenty of excellent pedagogical resources available to help with that sort of thing. They are instead about what aspects of physiology to focus on.

Each series will focus on a key area and be presented by an experienced lecturer outlining, in less than half an hour, what some of the core concepts would be. These will tackle where students often get confused and offer analogies and demonstrations that might be helpful in getting the more complicated ideas across.

Our first video series is in three parts and covers cardiovascular physiology. We will be following this with similar videos on other physiological topics selected by a focus group of young academics. These will be presented by other experienced lecturers from around the country.

Watch the video series at physoc.org/resource-library/teaching-the-core-concepts-of-cardiovascular-physiology-part-1/