4 minute read
Dr. Tim Wilson
Associate Professor
More about his research https://bit.ly/TheCriptLab
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Contact Info
tim.wilson@schulich.uwo.ca (519) 661-2111 Ext. 81587 “There are two sides to my professorial life that have evolved, research and teaching. Teaching is where COVID made us change the way we do things very rapidly. For a person like me, who derives much energy from young people interacting scholastically, it was draining. There were upsides, I learned how to be a better teacher online, this exercise augmentedmy teaching toolbox. I'm happy that we're coming back together, but I will not abandon my new methodologies within the digital environment. In research, a group of us in anatomy in Early 2021 wrote a review paper in anatomical sciences education, talking about impacts of COVID on how we teach and how people learn anatomy. It changed the way I looked at teaching in COVID times. In my field, anatomy teaching labs are about touching “stuff,” creating an understanding of how this stuff fits together, and that informs us how it then works in a natural environment. However, during COVID this all screeched to a halt. There are no digital environments that can offer rich haptic feedback, heck, we are still working on the visuals. The latest research in my lab investigates how learners with varying spatial abilities get an advantage in STEM (science, technology, engineering, meds) disciplines. Essentially, we are studying how ‘Olympians’ and ‘couch potatoes’ of spatial ability interact with the environmental “stuff” mentioned earlier. In multimedia we can only take in information with our eyes and ears. Much human understanding of our environment come from what we can touch, that occurs in the anatomy lab. In our experiments, adding haptics to theperceptualmix, we startto break the spatial ability advantage. That points further to the fact that digital environments for learning still have a lot of evolving to do just like we had to do when COVID started.”
“In my other life, I'm a farmer. The seasonal changes push activities accordingly. In a way, my academia life is also seasonal. Most of my teaching is in September - February. My fall is thunderously busy teaching in two faculties, Anatomy and Cell Biology and Dentistry. After the shock of aninitial fall burp in activity, then it starts to hit a different pace.It's a complex environment for me, trying to balance things that we do in the department in addition to teaching. Many of us balance the needs of our labs with different services that we offer to the school, like sitting on committees, editing for journals, doing the unseen work. “There is no syllabus for being a professor, this is sometimes one of the challenges we love, because we're curious people who want to dive in and explore or find out what makes stuff work.”
Generally, what does your day-to-day look like?
What are some of the major barriers to your research?
“Every researcher you've interviewed thus far is maybe going to say this, but it comes down to great people and the funds to pay them. Writing grants and acquiring the money that then pays graduate students to undertake the research that you've proposed is really challenging. For me, the biggest challenges down the road will be to try to reign in my various interests. I don't think I can link sleep apnea(another research avenue)and spatial ability in a grant. Keeping them apart and figuring out which avenueto pursue is something professorsdo as part of their job. A very local barrier is the continual need for body bequeathal here in ACB. The gift of leaving your body to science helps those who are still here in many ways. For example, in another line of research I a treatment for sleep apnea and undertake surgeries on the cadavers. There are inclusion criteria for the cadavers that we are using to study sleep apnea. Many of the criteria cannot be met so for me and the graduate students working on that project it has been challenging. That's been a challenge since COVID has made it hard to not only get people to the university, but cadavers as well. ”
How do you envision the field in the next 5-10 years?
“Well, the world's getting older, we sit around with screens all day, and we're getting fatter. At a conference recently keynote speaker made the important link to the amount of sugar going in people's faces is unprecedented and it has immense impacts on our global oral and overall health. I think better public understanding of our health will control how we deal with our lives, whether that's snoring at night or understanding how that affects your quality of life. At the same time, we are still witnessing how the world adapted to a global pandemic. The way we've learned to deal with it has really polarized us. There are those that adopt a scientific approach and use peer review to understand a problem and there are those that do not: this is a new frontier. Scientists need to learn how to communicate and teach others better. Applying my modus operandi, I would love to see the bigger picture of my field lead better public knowledge. Can we help people learn more, in less time, with less effort to use knowledge effectively? In a sense, help themselves because the world pushes all sorts of opinion and different information towards us. If we can sift outmisinformation better, we raisethe quality of our own lives, whether it be physically, mentally, or spiritually, it comes at least partially through knowledge acquisition.”
