UT Southwestern faculty members Philip Greilich, M.D., M.Sc., and Janine Prange-Kiel, Ph.D., have been selected to join the UT System’s Kenneth I. Shine, M.D., Academy of Health Science Education in recognition of their outstanding teaching. New members will be inducted at the Academy’s annual Innovations in Health Science Education Conference, scheduled Feb. 22-23 in Austin.

Dr. Greilich, Professor of Anesthesiology & Pain Management, and Dr. Prange-Kiel, Associate Professor of Surgery, will join 33 current and former UTSW faculty members inducted into the Academy, which supports and promotes excellence in health science education, scholarship, and leadership.

Established in 2005, the Academy is named after Kenneth I. Shine, former UT System Executive Vice Chancellor of Health Affairs. Annual nominations for membership may come from the President, Dean, Vice Dean, or Faculty Senate at any of the six health institutions in the UT System.

Philip Greilich, M.D., M.Sc.

“I’m excited about joining such a distinguished community of educators serving the needs of our respective academic institutions, as well as the Academy’s educational missions,” said Dr. Greilich, a UTSW faculty member since 1995.

Dr. Greilich first shared his passion for acute cardiovascular medicine with UTSW students, trainees, and faculty as the Department of Anesthesiology & Pain Management’s inaugural Director of the Intraoperative Echocardiography and Cardiothoracic Anesthesiology Fellowship Programs. About 15 years ago, his educational focus expanded as he transitioned to patient safety while mentoring and coaching students, trainees, faculty, and staff on quality improvement projects.

Since 2018, he has served as Director of the UTSW educational Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP): Team FIRST, a novel institutional program designed to build foundational teamwork competencies. Faculty development of clinician-educators is a central theme of his work as Director of the QEP, and duties on the institutional Promotion and Tenure Committee played an important role in guiding these efforts.

“My responsibility as a faculty and student adviser in the Office of Quality Safety and Outcomes Education in conjunction with my role as a Health System Quality Officer really impressed upon me the power of juxtaposing the teachings of health system science – to include improvement, implementation, teaming, systems thinking – with its real-world application,” Dr. Greilich said.

Dr. Greilich received his medical degree from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center School of Medicine and completed residency and subspecialty training at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine. He was recruited from Walter Reed Army Medical Center to become a member of the Division of Cardiothoracic and Thoracic Anesthesiology and the inaugural Chief of the Anesthesiology and Pain Management Service for the VA North Texas Health Care System.

“I am truly grateful for the arc of my experiences at UT Southwestern, which have allowed me to learn from a wide range of clinical, educational, and research experiences,” he added. “I’ve come to value the power of interdisciplinary and interinstitutional learning collaboratives to accelerate and scale change. I believe the use of educational learning laboratories and collaboratives are critical to discovering how to produce great team members and teams for institutions on their high reliability journey, like UT Southwestern.”

Janine Prange-Kiel, Ph.D.

As an anatomical science educator, Dr. Prange-Kiel finds that students learn isolated anatomical facts easily – but they often struggle to see the big picture and recognize the important relationships between structure and function. She takes pride in helping them bridge that gap.

“I use a constructivism-based approach by building on the students’ existing knowledge of anatomical structures and asking questions that stimulate their reasoning skills. Most often this helps them to recognize the underlying concepts on their own,” Dr. Prange-Kiel said.

A UT Southwestern Academy of Teachers (SWAT) member since 2019 who is serving as President of that group this year, Dr. Prange-Kiel said she is elated to join UT System’s Shine Academy: “I am deeply honored and thrilled to be elected. I am very much looking forward to working with outstanding professionals from the entire UT System who share the same interests and goals but come from different backgrounds and have varying tasks and experiences.”

At UTSW, she is co-Director for the human structure course for first-year medical students and also lectures in several integrative medicine courses and the neuroscience core course for graduate students. Dr. Prange-Kiel organized UTSW’s 12th annual Alfred G. Gilman Symposium on Education and has been a member of the Six-Year Plan – Medical Education Subcommittee since 2014.

Ironically, learning and teaching were accomplished concurrently after Dr. Prange-Kiel completed her doctorate work in cell biology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

“In Germany, research positions at medical institutes often come with teaching responsibilities. Suddenly, I was obligated to teach an unfamiliar topic – anatomical sciences – to medical students,” she said. “My mentor firmly believed in ‘learning by doing,’ so I simultaneously learned human anatomy and how to teach it by guiding a group of 10 medical students through their dissections.”

She found great satisfaction in teaching, then ultimately leading instruction in gross anatomy, microanatomy, and neuroanatomy, as well as embryology at two different medical schools. “Although teaching was not at the forefront of my mind when I started my first postdoc position, in hindsight I’m very glad that I took this route, which eventually led me to UT Southwestern in 2008,” Dr. Prange-Kiel said.