RETIREMENT
W
hat constitutes a legacy? Is it having taught as many as 32,000 students? Publishing forty-eight teaching publications and twenty videos along with software and abstracts? Is it having scores of presentations and lectures under one’s belt? Six professional affiliations? No less than thirty-five teaching awards?
What about securing $1.5 million for your department (now a School) from outside certificate-granting schools of massage? For the John Legler Endowed Anatomy Lecturer Mark Nielsen, the true measure of his legacy is in the loyalty of his students who on the first day of their lecture/lab were greeted by a tall, smiling, one-time basketball player who announced dogmatically, “Anatomy is your new religion!” The statement was both serious and tongue-in-cheek, but it got the attention of pre-nursing, pre-pharma, pre-dental, pre-medical students and others from not just biology but from across the university. It also registered famously with the teaching assistants and mentors that Nielsen enlisted early in his career to help run such a vast program in anatomy–more than 1,600 over the years. Students teaching students was Nielsen’s calling card, with as many as five TAs per section of lecture/cadaver lab work.
Anatomy Professor
Mark Nielsen
Giving Students a “Eureka!” Moment
Nielsen was a student in the late John Legler’s anatomy lab in the early 80s (the Salt Lake City native graduated with a BA in 1983 and an MA in ’87, both in biology from the U), and quickly became his heir apparent. Legler and other faculty members like Dennis Bramble (now emeritus) were anatomists with a comparative and evolutionary perspective. It was the combination of that with Nielsen’s tenacity, strategy and uniquely developed pedagogical platform that converged into the program SBS and the University of Utah see today. Dave Carrier, a faculty colleague who at the 2022 Awards Ceremony in April extolled Nielsen’s signature approach to teaching, explained: “His teaching changes the way people’s brains work. His teaching gives people a new understanding of who they are and who humans are as a species. He gives students a ‘Eureka!’ moment.” The religion-of-anatomy boot camp went like this: four lectures each week with an accompanying lab, each lab section with five teaching assistants, each stationed with an intricately prepared cadaver dissection. As the class rotated through the stations, it was the TA who taught the small groups on the cadaver dissection what they had learned from Nielsen the previous week in lecture. Students were encouraged to ask questions, explore the specimen and experience first-hand what constitutes the human body. This learn-in-lecture/see-in-lab approach taught by a fleet of well-trained TAs was reinforced weekly when Nielsen met each Friday with his team of TAs and mentors, all of whom were undergraduates. The first rule of teaching is that if you can teach the subject yourself, or even some part of it, then you can be sure that you know the material. Empowering TAs not only allowed Nielsen to teach so many students, but it instilled in the TAs a real
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