Over the last four years, NYU Grossman School of Medicine has transformed their anatomy labs from traditional cadaveric dissection aided by textbooks into a multimodal learning experience that integrates digital and physical resources for students in the lab space and at home.
Our speaker, Kristen Ramirez, Research Instructor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, walked us through this transformation and highlighted some of the digital tools NYU relies on today, including 3D models produced in-house, interactive medical imaging, and embedded models from BioDigital Human, an interactive 3D platform for visualizing anatomy, disease, and treatment.
About the speaker
Kristen joined the faculty at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in 2018 teaching Human Gross Anatomy and Histology. She has engaged in scholarship by documenting anatomical variations discovered in the cadaver lab and novel teaching tools and modalities in conference abstracts and research articles. Over the past four years, she has contributed to the development and refinement of Living Anatomy, a new and clinically integrated anatomy curriculum, and its various iterations in response to remote teaching during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the socially-distanced return to in-person learning. She has developed and implemented novel strategies to incorporate digital assets into the anatomy curriculum, including evaluating outside resources and the creation of in-house visualization solutions, 3D models, and interactive experiences deployed on computers and in virtual reality.
Kristen Ramirez is a PhD candidate studying physical anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), part of the New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (NYCEP). She holds a Bachelors of Science in Biological Anthropology from the George Washington University and a MPhil in Anthropology from the Anthropology from CUNY Graduate Center where she is completing her PhD. Her work focuses on human evolutionary biology and she is especially interested in the relationship between behavior, ecology, and morphology in extant and fossil primates. Past research projects include interspecific variation in primate dental morphology in response to local competition for food resources, variation in human growth patterns in non-industrialized populations due to environmental conditions and subsistence strategy, and reevaluating claims of pathology in fossil hominins. Her dissertation research integrates paleontology and biomechanics to test hypotheses on the evolution of bipedality in the hominin lineage by examining joint morphology in fossil specimens and extant humans, primates, and other mammals.
