Dr Susan F Smith

Dr Sue Smith is Reader in Medical Education and Deputy Head (Teaching) at the National Heart and Lung Institute.  After graduating with a BSc in pharmacology, she enjoyed a brief flirtation with toxicology, but soon decided that this was not for her. Dr Smith worked for a short time as biochemistry technician at Chelsea College, combining this with part-time study for a PhD at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School where she investigated the effects of tobacco smoke on proteolytic activity on the lung surface. This was a formative period for several reasons. First, working on two sites made her well organised. Second, demonstrating in undergraduate practical classes gave her her first taste of teaching, which she enjoyed enormously and finally, her PhD supervisor was Dr Terry Tetley who was then, and continues to be, an inspiring role model and mentor.

Having successfully completed her PhD, Dr Smith moved to Charing Cross and became a full time researcher, extending her teaching role by becoming a pharmacology tutor. She loved this because it allowed her to work with the same group of students over a whole academic year and see them grow in knowledge and confidence as the year progressed. She also had the privilege of being taught to teach by Professor Julia Buckingham, now the Pro-Rector for Education for Imperial College.

The merger with Imperial provided an exciting opportunity to get involved in curriculum development and she contributed to a number of areas of the (then) new six year MBB/BSc course, most notably Pharmacology and Therapeutics which she co-lead for the first few years of its existence and which continues essentially unchanged to the present day. Another challenge was being appointed Deputy Head (Teaching) for NHLI; seeing the growth in the number of NHLI staff teaching undergraduates is a continuing source of satisfaction. In the last few years, she has expanded her leadership role at Faculty level and started building her educational research portfolio. Not many academics get the opportunity to completely reinvent themselves during their career and those opportunities are being fewer all the time, so she counts herself a very fortunate woman.