Having patients and clinicians share their stories in the classroom has been a powerful teaching tool for Martin.

Transcript

Interviewer: And do you talk to your students in class about this? 

I do, I do. I’m actually very proud to say that I do what I preach, and so I try to bring different views, points of view, to the classroom. I try to bring patients themselves. I try to bring the clinical perspective as well, and I try to also bring perhaps the policy and regulatory framework into that. And so I think especially in health research, if you’re trying to train the next generation of students, we have to give them opportunity to see all angles of that. And so the [school that did…      ] the science is one part of that. It’s very powerful. So I teach a third-year course, Diseases of Childhood, and I bring a friend of mine, who is – she has thalassemia – beta thalassemia. So we talk about the disease from the molecular perspective, we talk about other aspects of that, and then I bring her to speak to the class. It’s very different when you hear from a person who actually has that, so it’s a lived experience. One interesting thing is that lots of students can relate – thalassemia is one of those diseases where it’s much more prevalent in Mediterranean or African populations. We have a large international cohort of students. Many of them would come and engage in a class because of this, because they’ll say, oh, now I understand, or I have a cousin, or I have somebody. And so they make that connection and all of a sudden they can engage in the class, so it is very powerful as a teaching tool as well.

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