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My guest on the Faculty Factory podcast this week is Darshana Shah, PhD. Dr. Shah is Professor of Pathology, and Associate Dean, Office for Faculty Advancement at the Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine in Huntington, W.Va.
Dr. Shah describes her institution as a community-based medical school located in the heart of rural Appalachia.
She is also the founding editor-in-chief of the Marshall Journal of Medicine. This is an open-access academic journal that Dr. Shah and I discuss as part of our conversation.
The Marshall Journal of Medicine focuses on rural health education and serves Appalachian communities, but submissions to the Journal come from all over. As Dr. Shah points out in our interview, rural communities are a part of many different parts of the world, and that helps with its broad appeal and interest to folks far beyond West Virginia.
You can learn about the Journal on their website.
This interview opens with an emotional story about how serendipity and factors within Dr. Shah’s personal and professional life led to her career in Faculty Development. Dr. Shah joined Marshall University as a postdoctoral fellow in the department of pathology in the early 1990s.
She started out as a young researcher and mother of two looking to juggle her valuable role at home while also learning to be an independent researcher in the lab. Dr. Shah also describes the unique ways that her PhD training led to some of the problem-solving skills that have aided her throughout her career in academic medicine.
Our conversation also touched on some really important factors for the next generation of faculty as we discuss issues of open access, alt metrics and other ways of measuring impact. You can learn more by listening to the entire episode through the embedded podcast player located above.
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