Presenting Author
Western Atlantic University School of Medicine
Dr. Bruce Wright is Professor of Foundational Sciences at Western Atlantic University in Freeport, The Bahamas. He attended both undergraduate and graduate school in New Orleans, Louisiana, receiving a Ph.D. in Physiology from LSU Health Sciences Center in 1993. His first faculty job was at a liberal arts college teaching biology and health science majors anatomy & physiology and many other courses. After several years in undergraduate education, Dr. Wright moved to the Caribbean and taught at several small medical schools there before moving to one of the large schools there. He was also faculty at an osteopathic medical school for two years, and he remains a National Member of the National Board of Osteopathic Medical Examiners (NBOME). Along the way, Dr. Wright had not only to teach all of medical physiology alone three times per year, he also taught physiology in organ-system-based curricula integrating physiology with clinical science in cell & molecular, nervous, muscular, integumentary, digestive, endocrine, reproductive, renal, and cardiovascular physiology, serving as module director for several of these as well. He also taught at the graduate/medical level in both gross anatomy and biochemistry. Given this, it should not be surprising that Dr. Wright considers himself to be a specialist in general physiology education at both the undergraduate and medical school level.
As a researcher, Dr. Wright started his career as a lab-bench-based endocrine/reproductive researcher, but for many years his research has been wholly within the field of medical education. In addition to evaluating the effectiveness of the APS Learning Objectives, he has worked on several projects in collaboration with others on subjects such as "lab bucks", a method for flipped-classroom medical education sessions which prioritize students' choosing the best tests under time pressure to reach a diagnosis, as well as "the physician's statement", a fifth-order multiple-choice item format in which students' evaluations of a physician's analytic statements based off of a vignette test higher-order reasoning skills. Dr. Wright's most recent forays into medical education research has been in the creation and testing of new teaching methodologies and, even more importantly, creation of stand-alone teaching tools that can supplement or possibly replace those commonly used today to teach medical physiology. Of these, in addition to the reimagining of the 86-year-old Darrow-Yannet diagram which is the subject of this year's poster, Dr. Wright created a new tool, the Wright table of the cardiac cycle, that both helps many students who have difficulty with the 101-year-old Wiggers diagram to learn this important topic, and with which students have demonstrated the ability to model several cardiac pathologies. Dr. Wright continues to create new ways to teach topics and further revise the tools he has developed, so he is not wanting for things to do! In his spare time, Dr. Wright likes to scuba dive, walk along the beach, and write.