Heather A. Billings, Ph.D.

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SUMMARY

Heather A. Billings, Ph.D., M.A., is a Mayo Clinic career educator who works with an interprofessional team of educators and social scientists to create, facilitate and assess faculty and mentorship development programming. As part of this work, Dr. Billings and her colleagues conduct action research to demonstrate the impact and value of innovative instructional methodologies, iterative and dynamic curricular design, and formative and summative assessment strategies in health professions and biomedical education.

As a complement to this work, Dr. Billings is actively involved in the development, application and evaluation of methodologies to increase multidisciplinary team cognition and outcomes. Her recent work includes referencing conceptual frameworks to guide the creation of team science education and resources to advance multidisciplinary effectiveness and outcomes across disciplines and organizational boundaries. Through this work, Dr. Billings and her colleagues developed and disseminated a framework of individual and team competencies to guide education and training and processes for assessment and evaluation.

Focus areas

• Team science education and training. Dr. Billings is the course director for CTSC 6170, The Science of Team Science: Strategies for Success, offered through the Mayo Clinic Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. In this course, she guides students through the basic principles of teamwork and multidisciplinary collaboration in order to accelerate translational research and strengthen the alignment of discovery science with clinical practice.
• Individual and team competencies in translational teams. Through a series of consensus-building methods, Dr. Billings and her colleagues proposed a collection of competencies grounded in five domain constructs that can be used to create education and training, develop knowledge, skills and attitudes, and assess readiness to participate in and lead translational teams.
• Mentor and mentee development. Dr. Billings and her team develop, facilitate and study the effectiveness of mentorship relationships in biomedical and translational sciences and the impact of education and development interventions.

Significance to patient care

Dr. Billings' research builds on the science of teaching and learning in health professions and biomedical education, and the fields of team science and mentorship. Through this work, the learners of today will be better prepared to serve as the health care professionals and translational scientists of the future, able to lead and participate in multidisciplinary research teams and to demonstrate adaptive expertise to meet both the known needs of patients today and the unknown needs of future patients.

Professional highlights

• Director, Faculty Development, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, 2016-present
• Associate Director, Academy of Educational Excellence, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science, 2018-present
• President-Elect, International Network for the Science of Team Science (INSciTS), 2021-present
• Chair, Graduate Medical Education, Central Region Group on Educational Affairs, Association of American Medical Colleges, 2020-present