Online journal launched at Emory for those who teach health professionals
MARCH 2025
Many faculty at academic medical centers are not trained to teach, while even fewer are familiar with the scholarship of teaching and learning. Intersections, a new online, open access, peer-reviewed journal for research on education of health professionals at Emory, seeks to address this gap.
The founders, Kathryn Garber, PhD, associate professor of human genetics in the School of Medicine, Linda Lewin, MD, professor of pediatrics, and Michaela Jenkins, a graduate student in sociology, say their "mission is to support a diverse cadre of health science educators in refining their scholarship and writing skills and to provide a forum for showcasing their work. By doing so, we hope to build confidence among our authors and reviewers and envision that these successes will encourage them to subsequently submit manuscripts to national and international journals."
Intersections welcomes work from any member of the Woodruff Health Sciences Center including faculty, staff, students, trainees, and educators from Emory Healthcare and its affiliated hospitals and clinical sites. It also accepts submissions from others in the Emory University community who teach about health or healthcare. The journal's content includes pieces that represent all four types of scholarship as defined by Ernest Boyer: the scholarship of discovery, the scholarship of teaching and learning, the scholarship of application, and the scholarship of integration.
Unlike most academic journals, Intersections aims to publish all submissions following a paired process of peer review and coaching. Initial submissions that are not ready for review are assigned a lead editor to mentor authors through an early revision process before moving through formal peer review. To date, the journal has published 20 articles in 18 months and gained views from more than 3,700 individuals in 10 countries.