Dr Dawn Jackson is an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of Birmingham, a GP partner in south Birmingham, and a senior leader in health professions education. She is currently Director of the Education for Health Professionals (E4HP) PGCert, Diploma, and MEd programmes, providing strategic leadership for postgraduate education that supports clinicians and educators across professional groups and career stages. She also serves as MBChB Faculty Development Lead, with responsibility for supporting and developing educators across the undergraduate medical programme.
Dawn brings considerable experience in undergraduate medical education leadership, having previously served as Deputy Academic Lead for Year 4 of the MBChB programme. In this role, she was closely involved in curriculum delivery, assessment planning and implementation, and the facilitation of high‑quality teaching and learning across clinical placements. This experience has given her a deep understanding of the operational, pedagogical, and relational dimensions of large‑scale medical programmes, and continues to inform her approach to faculty development and educational leadership.
Alongside her programme leadership, Dawn has contributed to Medicine Admissions, with a particular research interest in sociodemographic diversity within medical student cohorts. Her work in this area reflects a broader commitment to equity, inclusion, and widening participation, and to understanding how structural and cultural factors shape access to, and experiences within, medical education.
Dawn’s research interests centre on professional identity development and how learners and educators make sense of becoming, being, and belonging within complex clinical and educational systems. She is particularly interested in the role of meaningful conversations, narrative, and reflective dialogue in shaping professional identity, and in how educators can support learners to engage productively with uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity. Her scholarly work spans undergraduate and postgraduate contexts, reflecting her view of professional development as a longitudinal, dynamic process rather than a series of discrete educational stages.
Dawn has extensive experience in postgraduate supervision, having supervised at Master’s and PhD level, and is committed to developing scholarly capacity within health professions education. She is Chair of the Education for Health Professionals Conference Committee, leading the organisation of an established interprofessional conference that supports dissemination, dialogue, and community‑building within the field.
She also chairs the Health and Biomedical Education Research Group, an interprofessional community of scholars within the College committed to educational research and scholarship. The group focuses on communication, capability‑building, and the translation of educational research into practice, aligning closely with Dawn’s passion for faculty development.
Across her roles as clinician, programme director, researcher, supervisor, and faculty developer, Dawn is committed to fostering educational cultures that support thoughtful learning, professional growth, and scholarly engagement with the realities of healthcare practice.
Teaching
Programme Director for Education for Health Professionals PGCert/PGDip/M.Ed. programme
Faculty Development Lead for MBChB (undergraduate Medicine)
Doctoral Supervision
Dawn has extensive experience in postgraduate supervision, having supervised at Master’s and PhD level. She is particularly interested in research using narrative methods, exploring professional identity formation and socio-cultural approaches.
Research
A unifying theme in Dawn’s research work is the meaningful exploration of complexity in clinical education. She is interested in how educational structures, assessment practices, institutional cultures, and professional expectations interact, and how educators can design learning environments that acknowledge and work with complexity, rather than seeking simplistic solutions. This perspective underpins both her teaching and her research supervision.
Current Projects:
‘Medicine’s Broken Heart’: A member of this programme team, which represents an inaugural cohort of Institutional Collaborators with the Institution for Ethics and the Common Good (University of Notre Dame): an international group of academics and senior administrators conducting ambitious research projects developing the love ethic.
Institute for Ethics and the Common Good Launches New Institutional Collaborator Program, Selects Inaugural Cohort | News | News & Events | Ethics and the Common Good | University of Notre Dame
Evaluation of Curriculum 2030: A programme of research that is designed to evaluate the design and implementation of the University of Birmingham’s new curriculum; Curriculum2030