BBASS is delighted to be joined by Roger Kneebone who is a British Professor of Surgical Education at Imperial College London. He is one of the foremost experts on expertise and has expanded the thinking of Erickson’s 10 000 hours. He directs the Imperial College Centre for Engagement and Simulation Science (ICCESS), based within the Division of Surgery on the Chelsea & Westminster campus. Roger and his co-director Professor Fernando Bello lead a multidisciplinary research team whose aim is to advance human health through simulation, collaborating closely with clinicians, scientists, patients, publics, and experts outside medicine.
Roger also directs the Royal College of Music (RCM) - Imperial College Centre for Performance Science. This ambitious collaboration, launched in 2016, explores challenges of performance across domains, from the arts, education and business to medicine, science and sport and brings together experts in magic, puppetry, embroidery, cooking, chemistry, illustration, percussion and combat flying.
Roger trained first as a general and trauma surgeon, working both in the UK and in Southern Africa. After finishing his specialist training, he decided to become a general practitioner and joined a large group practice in Trowbridge, Wiltshire. In the 1990s he pioneered an innovative national training programme for minor surgery within primary care, based around intensive workshops using simulated tissue models and a computer-based learning program. In 2003, Roger left his practice to join Imperial.
Roger is committed to education in its widest sense. In July 2011 he became the first Imperial academic to receive a Higher Education Academy National Teaching Fellowship Award. Roger established and (with Dr Kirsten Dalrymple) leads the UK’s only Masters in Education (M Ed) in Surgical Education, which started in October 2005.
Much of Roger’s research has focused on simulation. Key research concepts include Hybrid Simulation (the combination of professional actors with inanimate models to create realistic clinical encounters), Distributed Simulation(low-cost, portable yet highly convincing environments such as the ‘inflatable operating theatre’) and Sequential Simulation (concatenated sequences that model clinical pathways from multiple points of view).
Roger publishes widely and speaks frequently at national and international conferences. He has a wide range of professional interests and is especially interested in collaborative research at the intersections between traditional disciplinary boundaries. Roger is fascinated by the embodied ways of knowing developed by experts in different fields and how these can inform one another
The award of a prestigious Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellowship in 2012 provided a unique opportunity for him to develop engagement and simulation science within and beyond Imperial.
Imperial's Chemical Kitchen is an innovative collaboration with Alan Spivey (Professor of Synthetic Chemistry at Imperial) and Jozef Youssef (Chef Patron of (KitchenTheory)
Roger and his ICCESS colleagues were awarded the 2016 Imperial President's Medal for Excellence in Societal Engagement. In recognition of his innovative work, Roger has been awarded Honorary Membership of the Royal College of Music (HonRCM), become the first Honorary Fellow of the City & Guilds of London Art School (and been elected a full member of the Art Workers Guild.
In January 2019 Roger was elected Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts, the fourteenth to hold this post since William Hunter at the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1768.