Shifting Roles in Neurology Education: Insights From the 2025 AUPN Annual Meeting

Tamara Kaplan, MD

The 2025 AUPN (Association of University Professors of Neurology) Annual Meeting, held on September 13^th in Baltimore, serves as a focused leadership incubator, providing academic neurologists with the latest tools, peer networks, and strategic insights to navigate faculty development, education innovations, and institutional leadership. Highlights for the upcoming meeting include interactive workshops, a “Meet the Chairs” forum, as well as a keynote speech by National Institutes of Health director Walter Koroshetz, MD, among others.

Prior to the meeting, NeurologyLive® sat down with clinician expert Tamara Kaplan, MD, one of the speakers in the Neurology.Educators.Advancing.Teaching (N.E.A.T.) workshop, which takes place prior to the keynote speech. Kaplan, who serves as vice chair of education for the department of neurology at Mass General, discussed how her framework addresses the unique challenges faced by teaching faculty, the practical tools attendees will gain, and the importance of balancing innovation with sustainability in medical education. Furthermore, she reflected on how neurology education has evolved over time, giving insights on how roles for chairs, faculty, and trainees have shifted as education is increasingly recognized as a rigorous path in its own right.

NeurologyLive:For our clinical audience, give a little bit of some insights on this session and why it’s a topic of interest for you.

Tamara Kaplan, MD: My session is called Clinician Educator: A Framework for Meeting the Needs of Teaching Faculty. I’ve spent much of my career as both a neurologist and an educator, and I’ve seen firsthand how critical clinician educators are for the future of our field. Yet these individuals often face barriers when it comes to career advancement, recognition, and support.

At Harvard Medical School, our dean of medical education, Dr. Bernard Chang, who is also a neurologist, recognized this issue and asked me to help form a task force. Our charge was to really study this problem and understand what could be done. In this talk, I’ll be sharing the framework we developed—essentially, a set of recommendations designed to better support teaching faculty.

We identified five key areas that we felt were most important: creating a community of practice, ensuring opportunities for professional development, building a culture of respect and recognition, establishing clear paths for promotion, and aligning compensation with educational contributions. To me, this work is close to my heart, because it’s about ensuring that those who dedicate themselves to teaching are valued and have a clear, sustainable path for success and advancement in their careers.

What types of specific skills or lessons should attending clinicians hope to gain from this session? What are some take-home things they’ll be able to bring back to their institutions?

What I hope people will take away is both insight and practical tools. I’ll be walking through how we gathered faculty input and evidence to identify the biggest challenges—and then how we translated that into actionable solutions.

While the specific solutions I’ll share are tailored to our institution, many of them are broadly applicable. This could mean developing new communities of educators within a department, designing more transparent promotion pathways, or aligning compensation more closely with teaching contributions.

After my short talk, the workshop will move into small group sessions where attendees can practice applying the framework. They’ll think through different scenarios based on career stage—assistant professor, associate professor, full professor—and discuss what challenges those individuals might be facing and what solutions could help. The idea is to make it interactive, so people can leave with ideas they could implement at their own institutions.

On a more general note, how has neurology education evolved and changed over the years? What have been some of the positives, and what have been some of the challenges?

Neurology education has changed quite a bit. On the positive side, there’s been a strong push to make neuroscience more approachable and reduce what’s sometimes called neurophobia. We’ve realized the importance of building a strong pipeline of future neurologists, and that’s led to exciting innovations—case-based learning, simulation, and even global collaborations using new technologies.

Another positive shift is the recognition that education itself is a legitimate career path. In the past, it was assumed that if you were in academia, you would also take on teaching responsibilities, almost by default. But now we understand that being an educator is its own skill set—one that can and should be developed deliberately.

Of course, there are challenges. Faculty today are under more clinical and administrative pressure than ever, which makes it harder to carve out time for teaching. Funding for teaching is always a struggle. And curricula are constantly being reformed and updated, which can feel overwhelming for educators who are already stretched thin.

So while we’ve made important strides in innovation, we also need to focus on sustainability. If teaching isn’t rewarded or supported, even the best innovations won’t last.

How have the roles of specific chairs, faculty, and trainees changed in neurology education? What shifts have you noticed in terms of responsibilities or expectations?

The roles have definitely evolved. Department chairs today aren’t just responsible for clinical care and research—they’re also expected to set the culture for education and create an environment where teaching is truly valued.

Faculty, meanwhile, have had to become much more versatile. They’re balancing patient care, research, and teaching, while also learning to use new methods like simulation and AI-based tools. The skill set required to be effective has broadened significantly.

For trainees, mentorship is now more important than ever. Many are looking for role models who can demonstrate diverse career paths—not just the traditional clinician-scientist track, but also careers as clinician educators. Seeing education recognized as a legitimate academic path helps trainees feel that they, too, can pursue this work in a meaningful way.

I think the biggest shift overall is that education is no longer seen as something you do “in addition” to your main role. It’s being recognized as a rigorous, valid career path in its own right, and that’s a change I’m very excited to see.