The School of Medicine’s anatomy program leader is lauded for his effective teaching style, innovative learning technologies, and work heading the first anatomy lab renovation on campus in 50 years.
Every fall, the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) commemorates our rich history and celebrates the future we’re building together during Founders Week, which this year runs Oct. 14-17. Among the highlights of Founders Week is recognizing the extraordinary work of our faculty, staff, and students with awards that signify outstanding accomplishments in education, public service, research, entrepreneurship, and academics. Leading up to Founders Week, we will highlight the award winners every Wednesday on The Elm.
What is the anatomy of an effective teacher? For Adam C. Puche, PhD, it is to be engaging, approachable, organized, respectful of the learner, and mindful of what it is like not to know something. This philosophy has led Puche, professor and vice chair, Department of Neurobiology, to become one of the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s (UMSOM) most popular teachers.
Puche is widely known across the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s (UMB) 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. And now he has been named the 2024 UMB Founders Week Educator of the Year.
“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],” said Asaf Keller, PhD, the Donald E. Wilson, MD, MACP Distinguished Professor and chair, Department of Neurobiology. “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.”
(See a video about Dr. Puche below or on UMB’s YouTube channel.)
Puche began leading the UMSOM gross anatomy program nearly 15 years ago after the death of Larry Anderson, PhD, whom Puche calls an inspiration whose style as an approachable and engaging teacher he emulates.
“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,” Puche said. “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 has transformed the way UMSOM approaches anatomy teaching, pioneering new digital technologies that have revised gross anatomy laboratory content.
“The impact of this transformation cannot be underestimated,” Keller said. “His models of small group engagement and design have influenced curriculum and teaching in all UMSOM courses, UMB schools, and other universities.”
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.
“While taking advantage of technical advances with computers and imagery, students never lose the essential patient-centric clinical care focus, which has been a driving goal for Dr. Puche’s modernization. The approach has been so successful that other institutions have starting similar programs,” Keller said.
He added that students have been enthusiastic about this approach and that the modernization is a central “show and tell” for student recruitment.
Areas of Innovation
Among other innovations Puche has led over the years was creating “smart tables” in the lab, where each dissection table is equipped with a full touch panel computer linked to an online laboratory manual he wrote and illustrated to deliver multimedia at the “patient’s side” of the lab.
In addition to these innovations, Puche played an integral part in revamping the anatomy portion of UMSOM’s Renaissance Curriculum introduced in 2020.
“The Renaissance Curriculum was a sea change in the structure of the medical educational program. Anatomy faced one of the toughest sequencing complexities in the new curriculum; for example, students cannot reach the heart to study it without having already studied the ribcage,” Puche said. “Additionally, as the anatomy facility is used year-round by three UMB schools [medicine, dentistry, and graduate studies], the needs of multiple core health professions using the same space had to be met. The logistical sequencing of the anatomic sciences drove much of the overall Renaissance Curriculum sequencing design.”
Puche determined 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.
“Rather than treating these as a simple logistical consideration, he made these an educational activity by using a patient handoff experience,” Keller said. “In this process, each class adds to a patient chart that is reviewed by their colleagues in the other class as the sequence of transitions progresses. This, educationally, mimics in the anatomy lab the way a clinical patient handoff between teams occurs using electronic patient records in the hospital.”
Olga B. Ioffe, MD, professor, Department of Pathology, and vice chair for education and faculty development, said anatomy is one of the subject areas that has undergone the most change and necessitated more innovative approaches than any other.
“Dr. Puche has embraced and spearheaded the change, again delivering a highly successful educational offering, which is now continuous throughout the preclinical years and beyond,” she said. “I cannot begin to describe the size of the logistical challenge that this presented; this challenge was overcome by Adam with incredible skill, organizational talent, and creative approach.”
Top-Tier Teacher
Since the new curriculum started, Puche has received nine faculty teaching commendations and three distinguished lecturer awards from the Office of Medical Education, given for excellence in student feedback for lectures, sessions, and courses, as well as UMSOM’s Babak J. Jamasbi MD ’89 Award for Medical Educator of the Year in 2023.
“His work has made the anatomy content thread of the curriculum a student favorite with laudatory student feedback,” Keller said.
Anatomy is Puche’s favorite course to teach because it is a hands-on discipline that teaches practical skills, reasoning, and theory.
“There is also an elegance to how we are put together internally, which is a delight to experience with new learners as they see the details few have the opportunity to see,” he said. “I often say people are more beautiful on the inside, and I’m being quite literal rather than metaphorical.”
Puche recently oversaw the first gross anatomy lab renovation at UMB in 50 years. He helped secure funding; designed the layout, lighting solutions, and information technology infrastructure; and worked with the architects, construction team, and contractors to create the state-of-the-art Maurice N. Reid, MD ’99 Anatomy Teaching Facility, which began operation in August.
“This renovation converts an old facility into a flagship educational site within UMB, impacting education for decades to come,” Keller said.
Puche also is known throughout the school and University as a mentor to other educators. He assists faculty with the design of their lectures, provides feedback and guidance, and teaches faculty how to build and deliver effective lectures. For example, he incorporated team-based learning into the Renaissance Curriculum and developed highly successful sessions, which have been used as a model. He also worked extensively with the School of Dentistry’s anatomy directors on curriculum development, providing mentorship in course leadership and curriculum design.
Puche said his role as a mentor is important to UMB’s future.
“No top-tier educational program or institution such as UMB can be top tier with just a handful of great educators,” he said. “What sets UMB apart is a broad base of qualified, trained, dedicated, and experienced educators. That requires mentoring the next generation of faculty, so that no matter how large or small a faculty member’s educational involvement is, they will be supported and capable of carrying out that function with excellence.”
Puche, who said he was flattered to receive the Founders Week award, wants his medical students to leave him taking this knowledge: “Never stop learning. There is always something new to learn and someone new to learn it from.”
For more information on UMB’s annual celebration and associated events, please check out the Founders Week website.