Internal Medicine
Faculty
Heather E. Harrell, MD
Associate Professor
Heather E. Harrell, M.D. is Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine, Medicine Clerkship Director, and Director of Fourth Year Programs at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She is a Board-certified general internist who earned her BA, BS, and MD with honors from the University of Florida where she received numerous awards including election to the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical Honor Society during the junior year and the John Gorrie Award for the “best all-around student showing promise of becoming a practitioner of the highest type”. She trained in Internal Medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and completed the Master Educators of Medical Education Program at the University of Florida.
She is an active teacher in all 4 years of the medical curriculum and has been recognized as one of the College of Medicine’s exemplary teachers every year she has been eligible. She is the youngest member ever inducted into the College of Medicine’s prestigious Society of Teaching Scholars; she is in the Chapman Chapter of the Gold Humanism Society and has been honored as an Outstanding Young Alumnus of the University of Florida. Since assuming the role of Clerkship Director in 2001, the Department of Medicine has won the Golden Apple for best clinical clerkship four times. She is an active member of the Curriculum Committee and has experience in curriculum design including the design of an Ambulatory Medicine curriculum for the Internal Medicine residency program, and at the national level co-chairs the APDIM/CDIM Residents as Teachers task force, which developed and disseminated a curriculum for Program Directors. She is active in many professional organizations and is currently on the council of the Clerkship Directors of Internal Medicine.
Dr. Harrell’s main area of research interest is the application of portfolios in medical education to promote reflective and self-directed learning. She initiated one of the first programs in the country to successfully incorporate portfolios into the clinical years. She recently was awarded Clerkship Directors in Internal Medicine Louis N. Pangaro, MD Educational Program Development Award for her work with portfolios. Her current research involves qualitative studies of the impact of portfolios on the future attitudes and learning behaviors of graduating medical students and qualitative analyses of reflective writings by students. Several of her students have now had some of their reflections from this portfolio published in national, peer-reviewed journals.