Lara Varpio

PhD

Department of Primary Appointment:
School of Medicine
Medicine
Location: Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, MD
Research Interests:

Education

Dr. Varpio completed her PhD in English in 2007 (University of Waterloo, Canada) in collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Research in Education at the University of Toronto. This award-winning research investigated Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and their impact on medical trainee socialization (2008 Outstanding Dissertation NCTE; 2007 University of Waterloo Alumni Gold Medal). Dr. Varpio spent the first 6 years of her career at the University of Ottawa before moving to the Washington DC area to work with USU.

Biography

Among the many awards she has won over her career, Dr. Varpio was recently selected as an inaugural Fellow for the Karolinska Institutet Prize for Research in Medical Education (2019). In 2020, she was awarded the Mentor Award from the Early Career Medical Educator's organization within the Canadian Assoication of Medical Educators in recognition of the support she offers to junior faculty in the field. In 2018, she had one of the top downloaded articles in both Medical Education and Perspectives on Medical Education. She has also been honored with the 2016 Diana Forsythe Award in recognition for the year’s best paper at the intersection of Social Sciences and Medical Informatics, and with inclusion in the 2016 Yearbook of Medical Informatics as one of the best papers addressing clinical information systems. Dr. Varpio is an Associate Editor for Perspectives on Medical Education and for Advances in Health Sciences Education. She has been an invited editor for several special journal projects including: the special edition about Lessons Learned from Health Professions Education Failures and Surprises for Perspectives on Medical Education, the Philosophy of Science Series for Academic Medicine, and the Qualitative Rip Out series for the Journal of Graduate Medical Education. She has served on the Association of American Medical Colleges’ national Medical Education Meeting planning committee since 2013 and sits on the Association for Medical Education in Europe’s research committee.