Lara K. Varpio PhD

Dr. Lara Varpio is an Associate Professor of Medicine, and Associate Director of Research for the Health Professions Education graduate degree program at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USU). Dr. Varpio completed her Ph.D. in English in 2007 (University of Waterloo) in collaboration with the Wilson Centre for Research in Education at the University of Toronto. This award-winning research investigated Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and their impact on medical trainee socialization (2008 Outstanding Dissertation NCTE; 2007 University of Waterloo Alumni Gold Medal). Dr. Varpio spent the first 6 years of her career at the University of Ottawa before moving to the Washington DC area to work with USU.

Among the many awards she has won over her career, Dr. Varpio was most recently honored with the 2016 Diana Forsythe Award in recognition for the year’s best paper at the intersection of Social Sciences and Medical Informatics, and with inclusion in the 2016 Yearbook of Medical Informatics as one of the best papers addressing clinical information systems. Dr. Varpio is a Deputy Editor for the Journal of General Internal Medicine, an Associate Editor for Perspectives on Medical Education (PME), and the Special Edition Editor for Lessons Learned from Health Professions Education Failures Surprises for PME. She has served on the Association of American Medical Colleges’ national Medical Education Meeting planning committee since 2013 and has recently joined the Association for Medical Education in Europe’s research committee where she is Chair of the Grants Committee.