Arunthathi Mahendran is passionate about creating authentic learning experiences for her students that challenge historic and societal assumptions about who can access medical knowledge and healthcare training. Over a 20-year career as a consultant transplant surgeon and clinical educator, she has pioneered innovations in teaching and learning that have opened up careers in healthcare to a wider community of learners: students with disabilities, neurodiversity, from lower socioeconomic backgrounds or minority ethnic groups.
For this reason, she was drawn to Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) where 92% of students are from state schools, 75% Black or Minority Ethnic groups and 49% first in their families to enter higher education. Within Surgery, she has cultivated a learning environment that encourages adventure, inquisitiveness and novel thinking so that trainees are motivated to exceed the limits of their knowledge and imagine new ways to operate and provide surgical care. At QMUL, she pioneered the highly successful physician associate (PA) programme in East London with 200 PAs working across the spectrum of UK healthcare, transforming patient services and challenging the dominant model of doctor-nurse led care.
Arunthathi is an award-winning expert teacher: QMUL honoured her with the President and Principal’s Prize for excellence in education. In her teaching practice, she distils complex medical knowledge into core concepts that are further broken down to create accessible ‘building blocks’. Learners make sense of these ‘blocks’ in ways that require them to draw on the knowledge and skills they already possess when they enter educational institutions. She has researched this area to develop her pedagogic theory of 'affective learning' to explain how learners engage with educational events and materials to create meaningful and transformative learning.
For this, the British Educational Research Association awarded her the 2018 doctoral thesis award stating that her work had significant broader impact on higher education policy, practice and research. Arunthathi is the director of the School of Medicine at QMUL, and is leading the UK’s first blended learning medicine programme, funded by Health Education England, to widen participation and provide a blueprint for a future doctor apprenticeship in medicine.