Catherine Giroux, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy, McGill University, and MUHC. She is also a Part-time Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. Catherine has a diverse and interdisciplinary background. She obtained an Honours Bachelor of Social Science degree in International Development, with a focus on international health and education. Catherine subsequently obtained her Bachelor of Education and Master of Education degrees from Nipissing University, where she studied educational psychology. Catherine’s PhD, from the University of Ottawa, focused on how nursing students use social media for teaching and learning purposes. Her SSHRC-funded postdoctoral work, conducted at McGill University’s Institute for Health Sciences Education, focused on exploring whether and how health professions educators and researchers use social media as a mechanism of knowledge translation.

Catherine has worked in a range of education, health services, and health professions education settings. Her previous research has investigated the psychosocial and accessibility experiences of postsecondary students with chronic illnesses, maternal perspectives on interprofessional collaboration for children with complex medical needs, and engaging patients/caregivers as teachers in health professions education. Catherine’s current research interests lie in health professions education, social media, and knowledge translation.-centered care.

My program of research focuses on understanding the relationships between formal and informal teaching, learning, and knowledge translation in technologically mediated health professions education (HPE). I have taken a programmatic approach to my postdoctoral work to date, designing three inter-related studies that aimed to a) investigate the evidence for using social media as a mechanism of dissemination and KT; b) compare the Twitter content shared using a prominent medical education hashtag with the KT framework put forth by the Canadian Institute of Health Research; and c) understand how health professions educators take up knowledge shared through social media into their own educational practices. We have discovered that the terms ‘knowledge translation’ and ‘dissemination’ remain ill-defined in the HPE literature, even if researchers are engaging in KT activities without naming them as such. This represents a potential knowledge gap within the field of HPE regarding what KT is and how social media may be used as a mechanism of KT.

Going forward, I aim to explore how emerging technologies, like social media, can blur the boundaries between those sharing and receiving new knowledge, as well as the implications of algorithms on the hidden curriculum of HPE. I also aim to cultivate new expertise in digital health, quantitative methods, and implementation science.