Meet Dr. Linda Pololi, Director of the C-Change Project
Linda Pololi, MBBS, FRCP (hon)
Director, National Initiative on Gender, Culture and Leadership in Medicine: C-Change, and the C-Change Mentoring & Leadership Institute, Brandeis University
Dr. Pololi is nationally recognized for her research and innovative contributions to the professional and personal development of faculty in academic medicine, including women and persons historically underrepresented by race and ethnicity in medicine. She developed and is a leading proponent of an evidence-based collaborative peer group approach to mentoring and leadership development that is predictably reliable in facilitating career enhancement for medical school faculty. Her extensive and multi-institutional research on the academic medical environment showed the importance of the organizational “culture” to faculty vitality, challenging academic leaders to be change agents.
Dr. Pololi’s research and efforts to improve education for faculty, medical students, and residents have emphasized humanizing the learning environment, learner-centered and relationship-based methods to foster enhanced vitality and learning, physician-patient communication, mentoring, diversity, and productivity. A recipient of numerous grants and contracts, she has served as consultant to many medical schools, the NIH, Oxford University, and Uppsala University in Sweden. The various C-Change Surveys that assess the culture of academic medicine for faculty, physicians-in-training, and students, are used widely in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Her much lauded annual C-Change Mentoring & Leadership Institute conferences are keenly attended by research and medical faculty from across the country.
Formerly the principal investigator and founding director for the U.S. Public Health Service-funded National Center of Leadership in Academic Medicine at ECU, she was the recipient of the largest ever multi-year research award to a single individual by Josiah Macy Foundation. Dr. Pololi is presently the principal investigator for the five-year NIH-funded randomized controlled trial: Career Advancement and Culture Change in Biomedical Research: Group Peer Mentoring Outcomes and Mechanisms, and co-investigator in other multi-year NIH grants.
Dr. Pololi is a graduate of the University of London Middlesex Hospital Medical School, and has held professorial faculty and senior administrative positions at the Universities of Illinois, East Carolina, Brown, and Massachusetts. For her contributions to facilitate the careers of women, she is the recipient of the 2011 Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) Women in Medicine and Science Leadership Development Award, and she is an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (UK).