Professor Mark Maconochie

Profile

I am involved in setting up a new medical degree as part of the new joint programme with Nanchang University, China in Clinical Medicine (Biomedicine).

As part of this programme I am also responsible for preparing and delivering the Cell Biology and Anatomy modules.

Teaching

I am committed to furthering the student learning experience using new technologies. Currently I am using different technologies to portably record and produce lecture recordings together with student participation using Turningpoint software. I am also exploring the development of remote tutorial systems. I am keen to encourage the use of electronic submission of assessments and the active participation of students in bulletin boards/internet fora.

I would like to continue to pursue these further, for example the use of  “open hours” at different times of the day to support the learning of students, where students can have access to individual lecturers and/or specialist tutors, although I am continually surprised at the reluctance of students to engage in these technologies compared to their willingness to use these technologies for social purposes!

My suspicion is that this is a generation of change for students, and that future students will be ready to more fully engage in new technologies where they prove to be of use.  The advent of rapid access to data in many professions (Medical, Scientific and many other professions) means that the nature of learning and teaching in HE is also in a period of transition; the era of learning by rote is becoming obsolete and will be replaced with the demand that critical analytical skills, not remembering information per se, but rather information processing, will become the key skill required by employers. Information will be readily available through handheld phone or other data source, and the truly competent professional will be able to use their critical thinking skills to arrange and prioritise those data relevant to the particular task in hand.

Research

Research Interests:

My research interests have been based around Developmental Neurobiology, focused on understanding the development of the mammalian inner ear and deafness. I have carried out research programmes to understand both the regulation and the function of different signaling pathways in forming the inner ear, and made contributions towards identifying the role and regulation of FGF and IGF signaling in the embryo. 

I have a long-standing interest in animal welfare, and continue to actively explore ways in reducing the impact of biomedical research on research animal welfare.

Publications

• Book Chapter: Function and Regulation of Fibroblast Growth Factors in the Developing Otic Epithelium. (In Press)  Androulla Economou and Mark Maconochie, In Molecular signaling in the developing mammalian inner ear, Nova Biomedical Books, New York
• Book Chapter: Retinoic Acid Signaling in the Developing Otocyst. (In Press)  Dorothy A Frenz and Mark K Maconochie., In Molecular signaling in the developing mammalian inner ear,  Nova Biomedical Books, New York
• Gata3 directly regulates early inner ear expression of Fgf10 (2013)  Androulla Economou, Preeta Datta, Vassilis Georgiadis, Stephanie Cadot, Dorothy Frenz and Mark Maconochie  Developmental Biology In Press: