Leadership

Associate Professor Francis Geronimo

BS MBB, MD, PhD

Dr Geronimo obtained his medical degree at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine and completed advanced training in Internal Medicine and Cardiology at the Philippine General Hospital. He pursued a postgraduate research fellowship in lipidology at the Heart Research Institute and the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. At the University of Sydney School of Medicine, he received his PhD in Medicine.

He gained extensive teaching and leadership experience by being a coordinator in Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology and a member of the Teaching and Learning Committee at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) School of Life Sciences. Funded by teaching grants, he implemented innovative teaching designs. At the same time, he was the Program Director for the Advanced Degree in Pre-Medicine and the Program Director for Basic Clinical Sciences for medical students studying at UTS.

He moved from UTS to University of Notre Dame Australia School of Medicine Sydney to assume the position of Head of Assessment of the Doctor of Medicine program.

In 2023, he accepted the role of Course Director and Head of Assessment of the Doctor of Medicine program at CSU School of Rural Medicine.

Since 2015, he has been a deputy medical editor at the Medical Journal of Australia, the leading general medical journal in Australia.

Professional Memberships:

Australia and New Zealand Association of Clinical Anatomists
Australia and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators

Interests in Anatomy, Physiology and Pharmacology

Dr Geronimo delivered lectures, designed curricula and assessments, and managed multiple subjects in anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, and pharmacology to undergraduate students in Medical Science, Nursing, Pharmaceutical Science, and Pre-Medicine and to medical students. As an active member of teaching and learning committees, he was involved in discussions about curriculum development, assessments, and subject reviews. He was part of the working groups that developed the guidelines and policies for academic integrity, language competency assessment, OSCEs, rubrics, professionalism, and AI in assessments. He conducted exam writing workshops and facilitated benchmarking activities of high-stake assessments of medical students. To create teaching modules and assessments and to generate analytics and grade summaries, he utilised Blackboard, Canvas, Kahoot, Mentimeter, Quizziz, Google tools, Qualtrix, and ExamSoft.

Research interests: pedagogy, assessment design, medical education

Together with a colleague, Dr Geronimo analysed the correlation between script concordance and OSCE among medical students in their clinical years.

Dr Geronimo received grants for pedagogical activities. His collaboration with other academics enhanced learning by using digital media as assessments. With the funding from the First-Year Experience (FYE) grant, he developed a teaching and learning module on problem-based learning using clinical case scenarios in anatomy and physiology for Nursing students. The module addressed the diversity in the cohort of students enrolled in anatomy and physiology subject and provided them a systematic approach on how to apply anatomy and physiology in their profession. The FYE grant is part of the Widening Participation Strategy (WPS) FYE project, a project under Retention and Success (R&S), one of four strategies within Widening Participation at UTS. The Vice-Chancellor’s learning.futures teaching and learning grant funded his project on blended (online and face-to-face) flipped learning approach in teaching pharmacology for undergraduate students. A Learning Experience grant supported the development and implementation of his interactive teaching strategy for pharmacology that used game-based drug identification in the tutorials.