Professor Kevin Eva is awarded the Karolinska Institutet Prize for Research in Medical Education

Professor Kevin Eva’s work has greatly advanced health professions education research in many key areas and had a profound effect on an entire generation of educators and researchers.

Professor Eva will receive the award and a generous monetary prize in Stockholm in October 2022. This international prize is awarded for outstanding research in medical education and is currently awarded every second year. The purpose of the prize is to recognise and stimulate high-quality research in the field and to promote long-term improvements of educational practices in medical training, the term “Medical” in this context, including all education and training for any health science profession.

Commenting on his prize win, Professor Eva says:

“Nothing could be more humbling for me than to have my name associated with the Karolinska Institutet Prize. I have learned immeasurable amounts from every prize winner who came before me, know countless others who are exceptionally deserving, and will receive the award only thanks to the hundreds of colleagues, support staff, mentors, students, and family who have propped me up.”

Impact on health profession education

Kevin Eva has had a profound effect on an entire generation of educators and researchers.

Professor Kevin Eva has had a tremendous impact on health profession education for the past 25 years by providing new ideas, perspectives, and scientific writing skills. His work as editor of a leading research journal in medical education has had a remarkable impact on health profession researchers across the world, highlighting the importance of scientific rigour, says Professor Sari Ponzer, Chair of the Prize Committee.

Kevin’s research is diverse. It has impacted on medical school admissions by introducing multiple mini interviews as a rigorous process with which to select trainees based on their interpersonal skills. His work has also advanced understanding of clinical reasoning, guided improvements in experts’ ratings of student performance, and fundamentally altered how the field thinks about self-assessment, feedback and their role in performance improvement.

Discussing the finer nuances of his work, Kevin explains:

“I consider my work as spanning the lifespan of the health professional, ranging from issues of student selection through to maintenance of competence for ageing practitioners. I have tried to be a generalist, lending methodological and conceptual support to advance other people’s interests, but the work that is core to my research program tends to have issues of judgement as the central theme. I have appreciated the opportunity health professional education provides to engage with an eclectic array of topics as a means of comparing and contrasting how judgement impacts upon education and practice in different contexts, enabling insight to be drawn from their juxtaposition.”