Jen Badie
About Adam C. Puche, PhD
Puche, professor and vice chair, Department of Neurobiology, University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), is widely known across the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s schools for teaching the foundational medical disciplines of gross anatomy, histology, and embryology. He has received awards from every graduating medical class he has taught. Puche played an integral part in revamping the anatomy portion of UMSOM’s Renaissance Curriculum introduced in 2020, determining that the same anatomic donor would be used for both first- and second-year medical students, interweaving lab use in a sequence that allows for superficial structures to be exposed by first-year students, then the organ system that was exposed studied by the second-years, followed by the return of the first-years for the next region of study. In this process, each class adds to a patient chart that is reviewed by their colleagues in the other class. This, educationally, mimics in the anatomy lab the way a clinical patient handoff between teams occurs using electronic patient records in the hospital.
Impact
Puche has transformed the way UMSOM approaches anatomy teaching, pioneering new digital technologies that have revised gross anatomy laboratory content. Unique to UMB, medical students gain clinical exposure by performing more than 20 scenario-based clinical procedures with their anatomic donor, a concept pioneered by Puche and published as a peer-reviewed article last year in Academic Medicine. The modernization is a central “show and tell” for student recruitment.
Quotes
“Students need educators who are safe to approach and who they know will be nonjudgmental of questions they may feel are silly or mistakes they may make. Educational spaces should be places where it is a safe learning environment. To flip around the term ‘fail-safe,’ UMB education should be ‘safe-fail,’ where students can have a safe space to be wrong and learn from error without judgment.” — Puche
“Dr. Puche is one of the greatest assets to teaching on this campus, invigorating health education across three UMB schools [medicine, dentistry, and graduate studies]. His commitment to continually improving teaching, addition of innovative learning technologies, spearheading the first anatomy lab renovation on campus in 50 years, and his record-setting rankings as a teacher and course leader are legendary.” — Asaf Keller, PhD, the Donald E. Wilson, MD, MACP Distinguished Professor and chair, Department of Neurobiology, UMSOM
