Tag: Anatomy

  • Anatomy of the Research Statement (opinion)

    Anatomy of the Research Statement (opinion)

    The research statement that you include in your promotion and tenure dossier is one of the most important documents of your scholarly career—and one you’ll have little experience writing or even reading, unless you have a generous network of senior colleagues. As an academic editor, I support a half dozen or so academics each year as they revise (and re-revise, and throw out, and retrieve from the bin, and re-revise again) and submit their research statements and P&T dossiers. My experience is with—and so these recommendations are directed at—tenure-track researchers at American R-1s and R-2s and equivalent Canadian and Australian institutions.

    In my experience, most academics are good at describing what their research is and how and why they do it, but few feel confident in crafting a research statement that attests to the impact of their accomplishments. And “impact” is a dreaded word across the disciplines—one that implies reducing years of labor to mere numbers that fail to account for the depth, quality or importance of your work.

    When I think about “impact,” I think of course of the conventional metrics, but I think as well of your work’s influence among your peers in academia, and also of its resonance in nonacademic communities, be they communities of clinicians, patients, people with lived experiences of illness or oppression, people from a specific equity-deserving group, or literal neighborhoods that can be outlined on a map. When I edit research statements, I support faculty to shift their language from “I study X” to “My study of X has achieved Y” or “My work on X has accomplished Z.” This shift depends on providing evidence to show how your work has changed other people’s lives, work or thinking.

    For researchers who seek to make substantial contributions outside of academia—to cure a major disease, to change national policy or legislation—such a focus on impact, influence and resonance can be frustratingly short-termist. Yet if it is your goal to improve the world beyond the boundaries of your classroom and campus, then it seems worthwhile to find ways to show whether and how you are making progress toward that goal.

    If you’re preparing to go up for tenure or promotion, here’s a basic framework for a research statement, which you can adopt and adapt as you prepare your own impact-, influence- or resonance-focused research statement:

    Paragraph 1—Introduction

    Start with a high-level description of your overarching program of research. What big question unites the disparate parts of your work? What problem are you working toward solving? If your individual publications, presentations and grants were puzzle pieces, what big picture would they form?

    Paragraph 2—Background (Optional)

    Briefly sketch the background that informed your current preoccupations. Draw, if relevant, on your personal or professional background before your graduate studies. This paragraph should be short and should emphasize how your pre-academic life laid the foundation that has prepared you, uniquely, to address the key concerns that now occupy your intellectual life. For folks in some disciplines or institutions, this paragraph will be irrelevant and shouldn’t be included: trust your gut, or, if in doubt, ask a trusted senior colleague.

    Middle Paragraphs—Research Themes, Topics or Areas

    Cluster thematically—usually into two, three or four themes—the topics or areas into which your disparate projects and publications can be categorized. Within each theme, identify what you’re interested in and, if your methods are innovative, how you work to advance scholarly understandings of your subject. Depending on the expected length of your research statement, you might write three or four paragraphs for each theme. Each paragraph should identify external funding that you secured to advance your work and point to any outputs—publications, conference presentations, journal special issues, monographs, edited books, keynotes, invited talks, events, policy papers, white papers, end-user training guides, patents, op-eds and so on—that you produced.

    If the output is more than a few years old, you’ll also want to identify what impact (yes) that output had on other people. Doing so might involve pointing at your numbers of citations, but you might also:

    • Describe the diversity of your citations (e.g., you studied frogs but your research is cited in studies of salmon, belugas and bears, suggesting the broad importance of your work across related subfields);
    • Search the Open Syllabus database to identify the number of institutions that include your important publication in their teaching, or WorldCat, to identify the number of countries in which your book is held;
    • Link your ORCID account to Sage’s Policy Profiles to discover the government ministries and international bodies that have been citing your work;
    • Summarize media mentions of your work or big, important stories in news media, e.g. magazine covers or features in national newspapers (e.g. “In August 2025, this work was featured in The New York Times (URL)”);
    • Name awards you’ve won for your outputs or those won by trainees you supervised on the project, including a description of why the award-giving organization selected your or your trainee’s work;
    • Identify lists of top papers in which your article appears (e.g., most cited or most viewed in that journal in the year it was published); or,
    • Explain the scholarly responses to your work, e.g., conference panels discussing one of your papers or quotations from reviews of your book in important journals.

    Closing Paragraphs—Summary

    If you’re in a traditional research institution—one that would rarely be described by other academics as progressive or politically radical—then it may be advantageous for you to conclude your research statement with three summary paragraphs.

    The first would summarize your total career publications and your publications since appointment, highlighting any that received awards or nominations or that are notable for the number of citations or the critical response they have elicited. This paragraph should also describe, if your numbers are impressive, your total number of career conference presentations and invited talks or keynotes as well as the number since either your appointment or your last promotion, and the total number of publications and conference presentations you’ve co-authored with your students or trainees or partners from community or patient groups.

    A second closing paragraph can summarize your total career research funding and funding received since appointment, highlighting the money you have secured as principal investigator, the money that comes from external (regional, national and international) funders, and, if relevant, the new donor funding you’ve brought in.

    A final closing paragraph can summarize your public scholarship, including numbers of media mentions, hours of interviews provided to journalists, podcast episodes featured on or produced, public lectures delivered, community-led projects facilitated, or numbers of op-eds published (and, if available, the web analytics associated with these op-eds; was your piece in The Conversation one of the top 10 most cited in that year from your institution?).

    Final Paragraph—Plans and Commitments

    Look forward with excitement. Outline the upcoming projects, described in your middle paragraphs, to which you are already committed, including funding applications that are still under review. Paint for your reader a picture of the next three to five years of your research and then the rest of your career as you progress toward achieving the overarching goal that you identified in your opening paragraph.

    While some departments and schools are advising their pretenure faculty that references to metrics aren’t necessary in research statements, I—perhaps cynically—worry that the senior administrators who review tenure dossiers after your department head will still expect to see your h-index, total number of publications, number of high-impact-factor journals published in and those almighty external dollars awarded.

    Unless you are confident that your senior administrators have abandoned conventional impact metrics, I’d encourage you to provide these numbers and your disciplinary context. I’ve seen faculty members identify, for example, the average word count of a journal article in their niche, to show that their number of publications is not low but rather is appropriate given the length of a single article. I’ve seen faculty members use data from journals like Scientometrics to show that their single-digit h-index compares to the average h-index for associate professors in their field, even though they are not yet tenured. Such context will help your reader to understand that your h-index of eight is, in fact, a high number, and should be understood as such.

    You’ll additionally receive any number of recommendations from colleagues and mentors; for those of you who don’t have trusted colleagues or mentors at your institution, I’ve collected the advice of recently tenured and promoted associate professors and full professors from a range of disciplines and institutional contexts in this free 30-page PDF.

    I imagine that most of the peers and mentors whom you consult will remind you to align with any guidelines that your institution provides. Definitely, you should do this—and you should return to those guidelines and evaluation criteria, if they exist, as you iteratively revise your draft statement based on the feedback you receive from peers. You’ll also need to know what pieces of your P&T dossier will be read by what audience—external readers, a departmental or faculty committee, senior administrators. Anyone can tell you this; every piece of writing will need to consider both audience and context.

    But my biggest takeaway is something no client of mine has ever been told by a peer, colleague or mentor: Don’t just describe what you’ve done. Instead, point to the evidence that shows that you’ve done your work well.

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  • A Deep Dive into MindTap for Anatomy and Physiology: Now With Visible Body

    A Deep Dive into MindTap for Anatomy and Physiology: Now With Visible Body

    Reading Time: 3 minutes

    Students taking Anatomy and Physiology have many challenging and complex topics to navigate through. Some of the common areas where they may struggle include concept visualization, term memorization and learning how to apply their critical thinking skills within a real-world clinical setting.

    Let’s explore MindTap for Elizabeth Co’s “A&P” and examine its suite of interactive features that improve engagement and comprehension, including Visible Body activities, author concept videos, clinical activities and personalized features.

    Visible Body activities help students exercise factual and spatial knowledge

    With Visible Body embedded into the MindTap Learning Path, students can access accurate visual representations, anatomically correct 3D models and immersive activities. Students can manipulate these 3D models and exercise their factual and spatial knowledge while reinforcing the concepts they’ve learned in Co’s “A&P.” Students can also check their understanding of these concepts by taking quizzes. With multiple Visible Body activities available in every chapter of the title, students can take advantage of a whole semester’s worth of 3D learning.

    Visible Body activity in MindTap Learning Path

    Author-driven content at students’ fingertips

     “A&P” author Liz Co has always been passionate about supporting student learning and study skills. She currently serves on the HAPS (Human Anatomy & Physiology Society) learning objectives panel, is Committee Chair on Inclusive Pedagogy and Principal Investigator of Assessing Student Engagement and Efficacy of Remote Learning. Her wide-reaching experience has influenced new concept videos in each chapter, found under Learn Its in the MindTap Learning Path. Liz walks through what students have deemed to be the toughest topics in A&P, and breaks down those concepts using her pedagogical knowledge.

    Author Elizabeth Co stands next to an A&P graphic image.
    New concept videos with Dr. Elizabeth Co, author of “A&P.”

    Clinical activities get students career-ready

    Many students taking an A&P course are on the nursing/medical profession career track. With various opportunities to practice their critical thinking skills in MindTap for Co’s “A&P,” students can prepare for their future careers working in a clinical setting. Students can enhance those skills through Case Studies, activities which engage them with clinical scenarios and challenge them to achieve a higher-level of understanding with auto-graded assessments.

    Study features reinforce key concepts/terms and personalize the learning experience

    With over 8,000 anatomical terms to cover in the span of two semesters, A&P students need personalized solutions to help hone memorization skills and develop a better understanding of key concepts and terms. Students can improve these valuable skills with:

    • The Student Assistant, leveraging GenAI and exclusive Cengage content, delivers a personalized learning experience to students, available 24/7.

     

    • Mastery Training (powered by Cerego) uses cognitive science principles to help students learn key terms faster and more effectively. These activities help students make connections between terms and concepts, providing guidance until students have a full grasp of what they’ve learned.

     

    • Adaptive Test Prep helps students review and understand concepts and skills in the course. Students take a quiz and receive a customized set of study materials.

    Interested in exploring MindTap with Visible Body for your Anatomy and Physiology course?

    The post A Deep Dive into MindTap for Anatomy and Physiology: Now With Visible Body appeared first on The Cengage Blog.

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  • Anatomy of a higher education merger – City St George’s, University of London

    Anatomy of a higher education merger – City St George’s, University of London

    Depending on how you look at it, mergers are either very common or very unusual in UK higher education.

    Dig deep enough into the annals of any institutional history and you will most likely find at some point that the institution as we know it today emerged from the combination or absorption of various nineteenth or twentieth-century mechanics institutes, colleges of teaching or technical colleges.

    But recent history of the sector has seen only a handful of mergers, most notably the merger of what was then Victoria University of Manchester and the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 2004, and the merger of the University of Glamorgan and University of Wales, Newport, to become the University of South Wales in 2013. More recently we’ve seen the merger of the Institute of Education into University College London, the merger of Writtle College with Anglia Ruskin University, recounted in detail on Wonkhe here, and the merger in 2024 of City, University of London and the medical school St George’s, University of London to create City St George’s, University of London.

    The mergers paradox

    Seen from the birds-eye view of Whitehall the relative recent paucity of higher education mergers can be puzzling to some. In the private sector mergers and acquisitions are a well-trodden path to gaining market share, reducing overheads, and generally creating the kind of organisational powerhouse before which others cower and cringe. Arguably, larger institutions can support a wider breadth of education and research activity, can have a greater impact on their external landscape, and are more protected from external change and financial twists of fortune.

    But for higher education institutions there is much more to take into consideration than the goal of organisational heft and security – there is a public service mission, and the institution’s values and culture, which may be best served by remaining the same size or pursuing only modest growth. And there is the administrative complexity and effort of undertaking major organisational change, when in some cases, institutional leaders argue, the benefits of scale can be realised through strategic collaboration rather than full merger.

    While it may look from the outside like the UK has a puzzlingly large number of universities and other providers of HE compared to our geographical footprint and population, we’re not a global outlier in that regard. Prospective students enjoy a broad choice of large multi-faculty institutions with a wide range of extra-curricular services and opportunities, and smaller, cosier, and more specialist offerings – indeed, higher education policy in recent decades has trended towards increasing the numbers of higher education providers.

    Yet at times of financial challenge, such as those the sector is currently experiencing, talk inevitably turns to mergers and whether the sector as a whole would be more resilient if merger or acquisition was a more readily available tool in the financial sustainability arsenal. And here lies what might be termed the merger paradox – financially healthy institutions tend not to see a need for mergers or be motivated to pursue one even where a strategic business case might be made; whereas financially distressed ones are less likely to be an appealing prospect for a merger partner.

    In the case of both Writtle and St George’s, their governing bodies were astute enough to realise that their institutions would not thrive in the long term, and to start considering merger well before reaching a point of crisis.

    Being financially challenged is not the primary driver to merge with another institution,” says Richard Mills, Director, Head of Finance Consulting and lead for public sector M&A for KPMG in the UK. “Returns on investment take a long time to realise, and sometimes things get worse before they get better. The driver has to be strategic fit – for higher education a merger needs to be about strengthening the academic portfolio, and you need to be really clear on the vision and strategy for the merged organisation.”

    Having the strategy in place, and a plan for the legal and financial aspects of managing a merger is only the beginning. “You need to consider the implications of integrating systems, processes, and culture,” says Margaret Daher, Director and major higher education change specialist at KPMG. “The worst case scenario is a Frankenstein model of bolt-ons rather than one organisation emerging. The work of a merger is much greater than the initial negotiations and the creation of a new legal entity – but that initial work can be so consuming that you end up risking letting the dual running of two distinct entities under one institution become an unintentional status quo.”

    City St George’s story

    Elisabeth Hill, Deputy President and Provost at City St George’s, joined what was then City, University of London in September 2022, and was given responsibility for delivery – and realising benefits from – the planned merger with St George’s, University of London which was under discussion at that point.

    The merger was very much about strategy, not finances,” says Elisabeth. “City has always been a University focused on business and professional practice. When Anthony [Finkelstein] took up his post as President he saw the potential to expand the range of professions that we serve to include broader aspects of health as well as medicine. Being a larger institution gives us greater capacity, greater resilience, and a greater opportunity across a breadth of disciplines to leverage interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work internally and have a greater impact externally. All six of our academic schools already had some kind of interesting relationship with health and medicine so you could see how strengthening the breadth of health and medicine could align with City.”

    At the very early stages of discussion, the governing bodies of both institutions had agreed some “red lines” – primarily to give security to the Council of St George’s that the institution’s long history would not simply be assimilated into City and disappear. The incorporation of St George’s into the new institution’s name was seen as essential, as was the idea that the merger was a combination of two universities rather than the incorporation of one by another, although it was agreed that in practice City’s structure and policies would become the reference point for subsequent work to establish the new institution.

    Once it was clear that there was a strategic rationale and appetite to pursue merger for both Councils, a lot of “due diligence” work was required to make sure that the new institution would have the finances, and the expertise, to function and would be compliant in legal and regulatory terms. While neither institution felt itself to be in immediate financial peril, neither had the luxury of a financial cushion to support major investment, and it had to be clear that the combined finances of the two institutions would be sufficient both to fund the merger itself and to realise its planned benefits. Taking on space in the midst of a hospital site meant that City’s Council and executive team had to do a lot of work to establish risks and compliance expectations around estates maintenance and health and safety to ensure that they would not be putting City at risk as a result of the envisaged merger.

    At this stage both institutions had to carefully manage their very distinctive relationship, i.e. having agreed to merge in principle, but not yet having merged. A tightly negotiated “transfer agreement” set out the conditions under which the merger would operate including the conditions whereby either party could legitimately back out and what information each was obliged to share, in some cases with reference to competition law. Also at this stage, work began with the Department for Education, Office for Students, Privy Council, and General Medical Council among others to work through the academic and legal governance issues of transferring powers and duties from one higher education institution to another. Further work was undertaken to understand the implications for students and prospective students and their likely response to the merger and any related impact.

    A key thing was that there was little in terms of pre-defined process for dealing with a university merger of this type,” reflects Elisabeth. “At times it felt like we were making it up – albeit in a very thoughtful and evidence-informed way – as we went along. It was especially helpful to have people with insights from other sectors on our Council that we could draw on where useful or relevant in our sector and context. External bodies were very supportive, and we drew on significant external support, which is an absolute necessity in this kind of work. I don’t know how you could effect something like this without broader insight, guidance and expertise.”

    Integration – two becoming one

    The new City St George’s, University of London formally came into being on 1 August 2024, but the work of integration is ongoing. “We decided to leave most of the integration work until after the formal point of merger,” says Elisabeth. “By that time, we had been talking about merging for two years and there was a sense that some people were tired of the discussion and needed to see that it was really happening. And on a pragmatic level it is much easier to work through the integration challenges when everyone is under one metaphorical roof, there’s one vice chancellor, one senior team – so we judged that this approach would provide certainty and signal an ability to move forward, replacing uncertainty with certainty. Once we had access to all the detail of the information about St George’s programmes it also became clear that we weren’t going to have to deal with a lot of overlap, which was helpful because it meant we could deliver on a cultural expectation that we would respect the St George’s heritage, which by implication is fundamentally about the academic programmes and research.”

    Key priorities for integration were about bringing together St George’s and City’s School of Health & Psychological Sciences into one academic unit, whose executive dean was appointed through an external recruitment process. There was also a mapping process to establish the university professional functions and roles, and assign some functions to the new school, and some to the university. An early priority was confirming directors of professional services for the merged institution, who were then tasked with managing the integration of their teams. This work is now underway.

    While that integration work continues, Elisabeth points out that City St George’s like most universities, has a whole range of other strategic change agendas on the go, including portfolio review, curriculum management, creation of a student services hub, and replacement of some university professional services systems. There is also a root and branch review of professional services under way, looking at the location and effectiveness of roles and functions. That means it’s harder to attribute impact specifically to the merger process, but it’s also harder for people to blame the merger as the sole cause of unpalatable disruption.

    There is active discussion at City St George’s Council about what above-baseline success measures for the merger should be. Some members of St George’s Council have joined an enlarged City St George’s Council and work is underway to establish the culture of the new institution and supporting processes, and the information needed by Council members to ensure their understanding of the combined institution and support informed decision making around strategic developments and operational priorities.

    Institutionally, leadership continues to think on a day-to-day basis about the kind of integrated community it wants to have at the level of both school and university and what sorts of interventions will help people forge that community. Leaders are taking care to have visibility across all university campuses, putting effort into building relationships, undertaking more formal “road shows” to share strategy, hosting talks, and holding informal sessions with different staff groups. The two students’ unions have also merged – a separate merger in its own right – and continue to maintain an active presence on both sites, strengthening student representation and opportunities from the outset.

    So what would Elisabeth say to another senior leader preparing for a merger? “It’s extremely intense, and for most people it starts outside your normal realm of expertise. You have to be prepared to run business as usual alongside all the additional work on merging, and you have to support staff and students to stay focused on the things they should be focusing on and not getting distracted either by opportunities for future alignment or deferring things to post-merger.”

    Perhaps the most important lesson for any leader considering merger is having to be prepared to navigate the challenge of sticking to institutional and professional values while actually achieving what can be an intensely challenging process on a human level:

    We always wanted to be respectful of context and history, to collaborate, be true to our values, and true to the commitments we made and the ethos of how the merger would be discussed and planned,” says Elisabeth. “But you can’t always be as collaborative as you might want to be – otherwise the risk is you fail to get to the point of merger agreement. At least one of the parties has to be pushing for progress and ensuring that decisions are made at any one time.”

    Seven merger fundamentals

    Having worked on the City St George’s merger, Margaret Daher and Richard Mills would strongly advise boards and executive teams to recognise that a merger is a serious strategic endeavour – it needs to be owned and delivered by resolute staff and managers. Their experience and studies of successful mergers highlights seven fundamentals which need to be got right, although they add that often these are still ignored.

    1. Create and communicate a strong, clear vision. From the start, all staff should be informed of the compelling strategic rationale behind the merger, the transition process and the expected changes, and encouraged to engage in two-way feedback to increase the sense of involvement.
    2. Select new leaders early and let them lead. By identifying and publicising the new leadership team, the merged entity can effectively cut links with past loyalties, provide clarity on leadership and lines of reporting, building cultural alignment and engagement.
    3. Place an emphasis on integration planning. Having a robust and long-term post-merger integration plan is essential to overcoming fragmented ways of working, legacy structures and cultural issues, thereby reducing the risk of indefinitely dual running.
    4. Do the due diligence. Giving proper consideration to short- versus long-term benefits, and carrying out robust due diligence to understand risks fully and test the plans will help the organisations set their sights on opportunities at an early stage, and incorporate anticipated issues into post-merger integration plans so they are monitored and addressed.
    5. Win over stakeholders and develop cultural alignment. Staff are the people that make services happen, so it is vital to overcome any resistance to change. A comprehensive change management approach needs to be adopted, “change champions” should be chosen at an early stage, and given the responsibility and authority to influence and motivate their colleagues. Understanding cultural differences and how to achieve alignment is critical.
    6. Develop both the structure and people. Make sure that the new merged organisation has the resources and the skills to manage the transition process by investing in suitable capability, as well as instituting structural and procedural changes such as mixed work schedules and cross-site working that can encourage collaboration and generate a new culture.
    7. Have patience to achieve long term objectives. Mergers are highly challenging and integration is unlikely to happen quickly. To succeed every level of the organisation requires dedicated resources, experienced people, and strong pre- and post-merger planning, all of which take time to develop and deploy.

    While there are obvious practical and cultural hurdles to overcome, what recent examples demonstrate is that with the right vision, case for change and supporting business rationale, a merger can be the strategic solution for long term sustainability.

    This article is published in association with KPMG as part of our Radical Efficiency series. You can view other articles in the series here.

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