Mairead Fountain

Biography

 This week we’d like to introduce Mairead, Lead Relationship Manager in the Education Team at ADInstruments. With a background in neuroscience and a love of educational content that is really, truly interactive, Mairead has designed lessons and laboratories in LabChart, LabTutor and Lt, for universities and colleges all over the world. She is a knowledgeable scientist, a dab hand at illustration and video, and a strong advocate for innovation in learning! As well as spending a month in Brazil visiting universities in Rio de Janeiro, Natal, Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre, Mairead also spent a summer in Aberdeen, in the north of Scotland, working with the School of Pharmacy and Life Sciences at Robert Gordon University. Here, Mairead talks about what she does, what she enjoys most about it and how we can help when you start to create content in Lt learning software. Tell us a bit about what you do I describe it as Customer Success Management. I work directly with customers to implement their plans for eLearning using Lt. It’s all about what they want to achieve. This means I do a little bit of everything. Project scoping and management, liaising with stakeholders, instructional design, illustration, film production, training and support, educational research, general cheerleading! If you want to know on a day to day basis, it can be hard to say - it’s always different! Some days I might be helping create lessons on clinical skills, like how to conduct pre-diagnosis interviews or collecting blood samples. Other days, I might be working on pharmacokinetics or medicinal chemistry laboratory classes. Essentially, I help to plan undergraduate coursework so it achieves student learning outcomes, but also so it fits in effectively with the customer’s educational technology environment and university culture. What’s the best part of your job? I love being able to take educators’ ideas and turn them into reality. Lt has a way of always exceeding their expectations for rich, interactive learning and it’s such a buzz to see their delight at an innovative solution. But my absolute favourite is when I learn from them. Especially when a customer creates something new in Lt that they are really proud to share with us. I think it says a lot about ADInstruments as a company that our customers know we will be as excited for them as they are for themselves! How did you become interested in life science education? Did you always want to work in this field? Was there an ‘aha’ moment? For many years, I worked as a Poisons Specialist at the National Poison Centre - an organisation which provides information to people who are worried about toxic plants, medicines, or hazardous chemicals and I found that I loved communicating medical information to all kinds of people. We’d get calls from clinical consultants, nurses, people concerned about a child or pet - it was good to be able to help. I also come from a family of educators, so I know how much they care, how hard they work, what a difference they make, and how undervalued they can be. Here at ADInstruments, it’s fantastic to be able to connect all the dots between my passions for science, people and education. Do you have a science/education hero? Who has inspired you? I genuinely find new heroes in every place I visit. My latest education hero is Alison Strath, Professor of Community Pharmacy Practice at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. RGU is a new university, so they have a focus on innovation in teaching and are keen to try a whole new approach to learning. Alison inspires me through her work ethic, optimism and pragmatism and the genuine affection she has for all her students.  What advice would you give to someone starting out in this career? You’ll need great project management skills, a solid grounding in educational design and an ability to get creative. But, importantly, don’t conflate professionalism with formality! Customer success management is all about relationships, being genuinely interested in, and engaged with, your customers. It’s good to be someone who loves to meet people and find out what makes them tick! For you, is your work about the journey or the destination? Do you enjoy the process or the outcome most? You can’t have one without the other and there are joys in both. With professional content services, it’s extremely important to focus on the deliverable - that’s what our educators really need and that’s what the students will benefit most from. But I also firmly believe in “teaching a man to fish”...Teaching educators to make their own great lessons using our software is empowering for them and for us - it gives them the freedom to make a difference for their students and we get to see truly how far Lt can go when we see how creative educators can be.

Research Interest

 surgery