The Professor Ronald M. Harden Scholarship Award

This year's winner of the Scholarship Award

We are delighted to announce that the Professor Ronald M. Harden Scholarship Award for 2025 has been given to Anaïs Deere, a fourth-year medical student at UCL Medical School, London.

Under the supervision of Dr Alison Sturrock, Associate Professor in Medical Education, Anaïs’s project “Enhancing Portfolio Engagement Through Peer-Assisted Mentorship: A Pilot Project” seeks to reimagine how students engage with portfolios through collaboration and mentorship.

Purpose

The goal of the Professor Ronald M. Harden Scholarship Award is to advance the field of health professions education by recognising and supporting exceptional undergraduate or postgraduate students and trainees to engage in an innovative, feasible and scholarly project in education that would also focus on a multicultural or cross-cultural perspective of a specific topic.

Background

Professor Ronald M. Harden contributed enormously to the field of medical and health professions education (HPE) through his teaching, scholarship and vision.

In particular, Professor Harden encouraged the involvement of students in co-creating their educational opportunities and learning agendas and their active participation in programmatic improvements at their schools.

To honor and sustain his legacy, the Professor Ronald M. Harden Scholarship Fund has been established to provide the support for these scholarship awards.

Funding available

One Professor Ronald M. Harden Scholarship Award will be awarded each year.

Each award is worth a maximum of £4,000 to be spent on carrying out a scholarly project directly related to the training of future health professionals.

Award winners are expected to submit an abstract (related to the work funded by their award) to an annual AMEE conference.

The award will therefore also include free Student Conference Registration (or a discount of the equivalent amount at the member rate if they are no longer a student at time of presentation) for the conference at which they are accepted to present this work.

Timeline

The application process for the Professor Ronald M. Harden Scholarship Award will open in November 2025.
The pre-proposal deadline for the receipt of applications is 23 January 2026 (Midnight, UK time).
Decision form pre-proposal submissions will be announced in February and the full proposal deadline is 17 April 2026.
Final result swill be announced to applicants on 10 June 2026.

Eligibility

Primary applicant

Both at the time the application is submitted and throughout the duration of the Award, the Primary Applicant must be:

An undergraduate or graduate student working towards their primary qualification as a health professional in any of the healthcare professions (including pre-clinical and clinical health professions students)
An Individual Learner Member of AMEE (in either the ‘Student’ or ‘Resource Constrained Student’ category) or a learner at an AMEE Member Institution.

Mentor

The Mentor must be a fully-trained healthcare professional who is actively engaged in the teaching of future healthcare professionals as part of their formal work.

Project team

The Project Team will consist of the Primary Applicant, the Mentor, and additional Project Team Members. Additional Project Team Members may include clinical teachers, patient partners, learners, researchers, administrative stakeholders, and others whose input and assistance will contribute to the success of the project.

Project

Projects eligible for the Professor Ronald M. Harden Scholarship Award must:

Advance the practice of health professions education in a way that is innovative, feasible, evaluable, and scholarly;
Improve on an existing aspect of the training of health professionals (e.g., curricular offerings, educational activities, pedagogy, etc) and/or implement something entirely new related to such training;
Attend to local contexts and cultures, whether by incorporate an understanding of how they are affected by context (and could be extended beyond that context) or by being explicitly multicultural;
Be achievable within 12 months.

Selection criteria

Applications will be reviewed by members of the Professor Ronald M. Harden Scholarship Award Selection Committee. Depending on the number and nature of the applications received each year, the committee may set up a one-stage or two-stage process. At least two members of the committee will screen and/or review each application at every stage. Applications will be adjudicated according to the following criteria:

70% Project (20% Relevance and Potential Impact, 20% Innovation/Creativity, 20% Feasibility and Rigour, 10% Evaluability)

Project description
Budget

10% Potential of the primary applicant

Primary applicant CV
Primary applicant Self-Nomination
Mentor letter

10% Appropriateness of the Mentor and Impact of Mentor/Mentee Relationship

Mentor CV
Mentor letter
Primary applicant self-nomination

10% Appropriateness of the Full Project Team

CVs of all team members
Team Description/Justification

The fund steering committee

The Professor Ronald M. Harden Scholarship fund is administered by an independent Steering Committee.

They will appoint members to a Scholarship Award Selection Committee that will review the applications and select candidates to receive the award.

The Award Selection Committee will receive and review the final project report from the awardees and arrange for the awardees to present their findings at an AMEE conference.

Chair :

Aviad “Adi” Haramati

Members:

Ricardo Leon-Borquez, WFME
Anne Lloyd, CEO AMEE
Vishna Devi Nadarajah, Newcastle University, Malaysia
Madalena Patricio, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Subha Ramani, AMEE President/ Harvard Medical School, USA
Dujeepa Samarasekera, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Lawrence Sherman, AXDEV Global, USA

The Selection Committee

The recipients for the Professor Ronald M Harden Scholarship fund will be selected by a Committee which is Chaired by Ayelet Kuper