Meet Our Talent
Meet Odilia Wijburg
When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in Melbourne and the University moved to a virtual campus in April 2020, Department of Microbiology and Immunology A/Prof Wijburg and her colleagues Dr Adam Jenney and Helen Cain were quick to respond.
Instead of scheduling six repeat workshops for each topic they taught, they scheduled a single webinar for the entire class, supported by online practical material.
Enter: the Cook and the Chef sessions.
The sessions, as part of the curriculum for MD1, invite students to discuss clinical case studies with a scientist (A/Prof Wijburg) and a specialist clinician (Dr Jenney).
“We now have an amazing opportunity to discuss the foundation of biomedical sciences as delivered in lecture content and illustrate how this foundational knowledge is used in clinical settings,” explains A/Prof Wijburg.
In 2021, the team hope to run face-to-face workshop sessions for students to view and discuss the case studies, followed by the Cook and the Chef sessions online for the entire class to explore each clinical case.
These sessions show that biomedical sciences, and translation and application of that knowledge to the clinic, is not always black and white. Development of clinical and scientific reasoning skills is one of the most important outcomes of these sessions.