Professor Colin Macdougall is Associate Dean for the four-year graduate entry MBChB programme at Warwick Medical School. As deputy head until 2016, he was previously responsibility for learning and teaching (including the developing the current curriculum), international aspects of the course and students with disabilities. He joined the school in 2002 initially working within phase 1 of the course.

Nationally, he is deputy chair of the UKMED research group https://www.ukmed.ac.uk/ and is an elected member of the BMA’s Medical Academic Staff Committee (MASC) and MASC executive. In 2019 he was awarded an Advance HE National Teaching Fellowship https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/ntfs/professor-colin-macdougall in recognition of his leadership in medical education.

He is a graduate of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and until 2025 worked clinically in Paediatric allergy.

Doctor Robbie Bain is an NIHR-funded Academic Clinical Fellow in Medical Oncology at Newcastle University and Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. His research interests include medical workforce research, with a particular focus on the development and evaluation of clinical academic training pathways using evidence-based approaches. He also has interests in cancer genomics and the application of novel sequencing methodologies to enable cancer research and evaluate biomarkers of disease.

Doctor Mary Fortune is a statistician, specialising in teaching statistics, designing and analyzing assessments and developing novel methodologies for analysing datasets. She has an undergraduate (BA) and masters (MMath) degree from the University of Cambridge. She then obtained her PhD, also from the University of Cambridge, working on colocalisation analysis in dependent datasets and methods for fitting models of genetic causality for autoimmune diseases. She has worked on designing clinical trials for dementia embedded within cohorts, and is currently Associate Teaching Professor in Medical Statistics and Assessment, Public Health Education Group.

Doctor Paul Garrud’s degrees were taken at Oxford. He then worked in Oxford and Sussex before moving to St. Andrews where he first taught medical students. He spent ten years there before moving to Nottingham Medical School, based in Behavioural Sciences for fourteen years, and then moving to the new GEM (graduate entry) school in Derby.

He has worked in selection and widening participation since 2009, contributing to the Selecting for Excellence project, chairing the Medical Schools Council Selection Alliance and the UK GAMSAT Users group for ten years, and co-authoring the Fostering Potential report.

He has also worked in quality assurance for a lengthy period with the Welsh HE Funding Council, the Quality Assurance Agency, the Academy for Healthcare Science, and the General Medical Council.

Educational research has included award-winning multimedia, a major widening participation project that prepared for the establishment of the Lincoln medical school, and several UKMED projects.

His recreations include life with two Labradors, singing with a choir and quartet, and gigging with a ukulele band.

Professor Ellie Hothersall-Davies is the Head of Undergraduate Medicine at the University of Dundee Medical School. She is extensively involved in curriculum design, teaching, assessment and student well-being, and has national roles in assessment, including as Chair of the UK General Medical Council’s Applied Knowledge Test (formerly called PLAB1). Her background is in Public Health, and she is also an Honorary Consultant in NHS Tayside, with a lead role in Older People's Services and Digital Health. She is Co-Chair of the Public Health Educators in Medical Schools Special Interest Group of the Faculty of Public Health. Her interests are in assessment, particularly looking at topics and skills which do not fit into traditional assessment methods; developing professionalism and professional identity, healthcare sustainability, and the issues and additional challenges faced by students and doctors from a non-traditional medical background.

Doctor Ben Kumwenda is a member of the UKMED Research Subgroup Committee and a Lecturer at the Centre for Medical Education, University of Dundee. His research primarily focuses on understanding structural inequalities within medical education and the medical workforce, with a particular emphasis on widening participation and the career trajectories of doctors from under-represented backgrounds. His doctoral work examined progression pathways for widening-access medical students, establishing a foundation for his ongoing research into differential attainment, social mobility, and career access.

Using large-scale datasets like UKMED, he has contributed to national cohort studies investigating specialty choice, selection into training programs, and the geographical mobility of trainee doctors. This expertise extends to workforce planning, including active projects examining the origins and distribution of the Scottish general practice workforce, particularly in under-served areas.

Ben also maintains a strong research portfolio in assessment and selection methodologies. His work evaluates the predictive validity of selection tools, such as multiple mini-interviews, and examines the psychometric properties of assessment formats like multiple-choice questions. This reflects his commitment to ensuring fairness, validity, and reliability in high-stakes medical assessments.

Professor Kevin Murphy is a Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism at Imperial College London where my research group studies the regulation of energy and glucose homeostasis. He has a long-standing interest and a number of roles in undergraduate and postgraduate education, including Course Director for the intercalated BSc in Endocrinology, Admissions Tutor for Widening Participation in Undergraduate Medicine, and Director of Postgraduate Studies for four Departments.

Doctor Luigi Sedda has over ten years of extensive experience in academic education, having worked across a range of departments and institutions, including the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford, the School of Geography and Environmental Science at the University of Southampton, and currently Lancaster Medical School at Lancaster University. In addition, he has more than 20 years of experience in health research.

His academic work focuses on geographical health inequalities and infectious diseases, with a particular emphasis on developing geospatial methods to investigate disease transmission and progression.

From an educational perspective, he is interested in innovative teaching and assessment approaches, particularly in analysing student pathways by linking attendance, admissions, and assessment data. This work aims to explore how demographic and socio-economic factors influence progression through medical training.