Prof. John McLachlan
John McLachlan is a graduate of Glasgow University, and gained his PhD at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School. He is an embryologist by background, and has published extensively in development, with papers in Nature, Proceedings of the Royal Society and Development. His last paper in this area, on human sex determination, was featured in Nature Update and in the international news media. He also produced an award-winning undergraduate textbook on medical embryology, and still writes regularly for the popular magazine Pregnancy and Birth.
From 1995 onwards, he began to focus on educational roles, especially in assessment and in e-learning. In 1999, he was invited to join the Scottish Medical Dean's Curriculum Group and the Scottish Qualification Authority. In 2001, he was appointed Director of Phase 1 at the new Peninsula Medical School, where he developed and introduced the first two years of the course, admitting the first students in September 2002. In 2003, he was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship, and a Personal Chair in Medical Education. In this year, he was also Raine Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Western Australia.
In 2005, he moved to Durham University, where he is Professor of Medical Education and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Medicine. Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief of Medical Education, the leading international journal in this field. He also advises the General Medical Council on revalidation and on the assessment of overseas doctors.
John is an External Examiner for the Undergraduate Medical courses at Southampton and Edinburgh.
In 2000, he was awarded a grant by the Wellcome Consortium to work with the artist Helen Storey. This project resulted in an award winning art exhibition ("Mental"), which premiered in Copenhagen, and then moved to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The Observer described it as "a wonderful liberating truth in these deterministic days of genetic cloning" while Time Out called it "utterly mesmerising". Unusually, this work also resulted in a scientific publication in the Journal of Theoretical Biology, with artist and scientist as co-authors. In 2007 he was awarded a second Wellcome Grant to explore arts and humanities related aspects of anatomy with Tricia Belford of Ulster University.
