Anatomy's Mark Nielsen Retires

What 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.

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 Mark 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 loyalty to him…as much as any apprentice’s affinity for their master teacher.

To watch Nielsen in the classroom setting with about a hundred students in the Talmage Building is to experience poetry in motion. His tone is conversational, his method Socratic and he uses mnemonic devices and developmental patterns to aid in memorization, referring to repeating anatomical components as “Tom, Dick and Harry” while generously adding from time to time during the lecture, “That would be good advice for a test.”

Additionally, Nielsen uses dozens of digital illustrations which speak to another aspect of his career: his textbooks (one of which is currently in its 15th edition), CD-ROMs, and most recently, Real Anatomy, an interactive software program (which debuted in 2009 and is now in a 2.0 version), with colleague Shawn Miller. Rather than using modeled images, the software features thousands of detailed photographs of actual dissections in an interactive and searchable platform.

All of this, including one-on-one consultations and study groups, converges to elevate the experience students have during their unique semester of learning anatomy.

Whether he’s talking about muscle innervation or the popliteal artery that pushes blood through the leg to the foot, or the fact that the sciatic nerve is actually two, the students are rapt, and it’s hard not to think of them in the lab shortly afterwards actually probing that artery and that nerve in three-dimensional space. What’s also striking is that this is not just taxonomy. Nielsen regularly talks and even illustrates the kinesthetic nature as if he’s choreographing and then performing a multi-dimensional dance. The dance of the human body writ large.

“A teacher is not simply a knowledge source,” Nielsen writes when asked “Why teach?” “One might profess knowledge, wisdom, and expertise, yet never truly be a teacher. Anyone can share knowledge. A teacher is someone who uses their knowledge, wisdom, and expertise to show others how to learn, how to think, and how to use knowledge as a problem-solving tool.”

Professionally, Mark has been a member of the Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS) for many years and was elected its president in 2018. When HAPS arrived in Salt Lake City for their annual conference, it became clear to Carrier and others that the SBS Anatomy Program with its full cadaver lab, highly trained TAs and uniquely prepared director is the gold standard for programs in the United States. “It’s not that we have a good program here,” says Carrier, “it’s that we have the worlds’ best.”

Needless to say, whoever steps in to replace Mark Nielsen will have some big loafers to fill. He is one of those legendary professors that college graduates remember wistfully. It’s as if he’s been their one-time spirit guide through a brave new world that is utterly relevant, deeply rooted in their experience, and overlayed with nothing less than awe. For some it sort of feels like the zeal expressed by some religionists . . . evolutionarily speaking, of course.

Editor's Note: Are you an alum of Mark Nielsen’s anatomy program? Visit our anatomy web pages at biology.utah.edu/ anatomy to share your memories and update us on your career. You can also join us in funding the newlycreated Mark T. Nielsen Endowed Scholarship Fund at https://giving.utah.edu/ mark-nielsen/