CEIS Team
James A. Gordon, MD, MPA
James Gordon is the inaugural Chief Learning Officer for Massachusetts General Hospital. He directs the Learning Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, and serves as Chief of the Division of Medical Simulation in the hospital’s Department of Emergency Medicine. He is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he directs the Gilbert Program in Medical Simulation and serves as an Academy Scholar. Dr. Gordon co-founded the Institute for Medical Simulation at the Center for Medical Simulation in Boston, Massachusetts.
After studying intellectual history at Princeton, Dr. Gordon attended medical school at the University of Virginia and completed his training in emergency medicine at the University of Michigan. Following residency he completed a fellowship in the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and earned a master’s degree in public administration, later serving as a Morgan-Zinsser Teaching Fellow at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Gordon served as principal investigator and national co-chair of the first federally-funded research consensus conference on simulation in healthcare, and was a founding board member of the international Society for Simulation in Healthcare. He received the Hal Jayne Excellence in Education Award for outstanding career contributions from the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, and received the Founders Recognition Award for distinguished service to its Simulation Academy. His work has been featured in the New Yorker magazine, and highlighted as medical news in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Arabella Simpkin, MD, MMSc
Arabella Simpkin, MD, MMSc is the Associate Director of the Center for Educational Innovation and Scholarship. Dr. Simpkin joined the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in 2016 to help develop and grow CEIS, which aims to promote medical education research for faculty.
She has formal training in cognitive and behavioral psychology, instructional design, and faculty development and is committed to designing and researching innovative approaches to the teaching of medicine particularly in diagnostic reasoning, medical decision-making, resilience, and embracing uncertainty. With this focus, Dr. Simpkin hopes to reduce burnout, increase engagement and satisfaction, and increase patient safety especially looking to reduce diagnostic errors.
Dr. Simpkin is a graduate of the University of Oxford where she studied medicine. She trained in adult medicine and pediatrics in the UK, and holds Membership to the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Dr. Simpkin has a Master of Medical Sciences in Medical Education from Harvard Medical School, graduating in 2016 from the inaugural class. She was the Co-founder of a new curriculum for medical students at Imperial College, London - the Integrated Clinical Apprenticeship - and directed this program from pilot through to implementation.
Emil Petrusa, PhD
Emil Petrusa, PhD, is a senior educational researcher with more than 40 years of experience in health professions education with more than 100 peer-reviewed publications. His PhD is in educational psychology. Dr. Petrusa has held national leadership positions and served as an associate dean and director of offices of medical education at Duke and Vanderbilt schools of medicine. He has taught in master’s degree programs at Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Harvard medical schools and the MGH Institute for Health Professions. He has been with the MGH Department of Surgery and Learning Lab since 2012. His role here is to consult, collaborate and mentor clinician educators interested in education, to design high quality programs and to conduct the research necessary to evaluate program effectiveness. Dr. Petrusa views every educational innovation as an opportunity for scholarship.