The medical curriculum can seem insurmountable at times for many students — both because of the amount and difficulty of the material to be learned and the implications of those lessons.

The pathology courses taught by Peter Anderson are known by students to be one of the biggest hurdles in medical school.

The pathology courses taught by Peter Anderson, D.V.M., Ph.D., are known by students to be one of the biggest hurdles in medical school. “The content in my courses is important, and I make no apologies for their rigor,” he says.

Anderson says he has been surprised to receive teaching awards because he is a taskmaster. So he was even more surprised to learn he had been selected for the 2009 Ellen Gregg Ingalls/UAB National Alumni Society Award for Lifetime Achievement in Teaching.

“I have high expectations of my students, and I don’t back down,” Anderson says. “The thing I’m especially proud of about this award is the letters of nomination from the students. I get 200 to 250 students a year between the dental, optometry, medical and graduate students, and I’ve been doing this since the late 1980s. That’s a heckuva lot of students to come through. It’s gratifying to know that they appreciate what we have tried to do for them.”

Anderson will be honored at the Alumni Leadership Recognition and Awards Luncheon Thursday, Sept. 24 at The Club. The award is presented annually to a full-time, regular UAB faculty member who has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to teaching throughout his or her career at UAB. To be eligible, faculty members must be past recipients of the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and have taught at UAB for 20 or more years.

Anderson is the coordinator of the pre-clerkship medical curriculum and director of pathology undergraduate education. He is a 1977 graduate of the University of Washington and a 1981 graduate of Washington State University from which he earned his doctorate in veterinary medicine. Anderson received his second doctorate in experimental pathology from UAB in 1986.

He came to UAB after veterinary school to participate in a National Cancer Institute-funded program designed to teach veterinarians about human medicine. In this program he participated in autopsy and surgical pathology services as though he were a regular pathology resident. As a result, Anderson gained broad experience in human diseases and in animal models of human diseases.

Developing digital assets
Pathology is a three-dimensional study that requires students to understand the makeup of human tissue, learn the processes of change that are normal and abnormal and identify these concepts in a dynamic human body in a clinical scenario.

Studying pathology requires a creative and complex approach, and Kuhn says Anderson and his staff teach students to study and use the principles of pathology through lectures, laboratory experiences with experts in specific fields and a thorough set of online educational aids.

“Medical students tend to use whatever tools they can find to help them master the material they need to study, and Dr. Anderson is well known around the country for being an expert and innovator in using Web-based teaching materials in pathology education,” Kuhn says. “He helps students by providing many resources that were helpful to us and I know are used by students around the country.”

Some of Anderson’s first teaching aids were created for laser disc when the Internet was in its infancy. He created discs with hundreds of images and cases showing students the difference between normal and abnormal tissues and organs.

That early innovation led to the development of the Pathology Education Instructional Resource (PEIR) Digital Library, an online, open-access repository for 45,000-plus multidisciplinary images for educational use in medical and health-science education.

The library at http://peir.net was developed under Anderson’s supervision to facilitate image search and retrieval and to foster the development of instructional resources among health-science educators worldwide. Images are searchable by collection, image type and keyword. The PEIR Digital Library search engine incorporates the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Thesaurus to maximize database-query results.

“Pathology is a very integrative discipline, and computers and the Internet are good tools for the integration of information,” Anderson says. “We were in the forefront, and we capitalized on the growth of technology. It was a perfect storm; as the technology developed we had the materials and the need for it all to come together. Now, our UAB students and people from all over the world use the PEIR Web site.”

A researcher, too
Anderson is a well-known researcher, and in the past 25 years his research has yielded more than 135 peer-reviewed publications and several patents, some of which also have benefitted UAB.

One of his patents was for a drug-eluting stent — a coronary stent placed into narrowed, diseased coronary arteries that slowly releases a drug to block cell proliferation and prevent scarring. Approximately 400,000 of these stents are placed in patients every year, and this invention has considerably improved patient care. 
This stent patent enabled Anderson to endow the Rev. Robert and Ruth Anderson Endowed Chair in Pathology, named for his parents. “It means a great deal to me that I was able to honor my parent’s memory in this way,” he says.

Students have benefitted from Anderson’s research mentorship. They’ve also benefitted from his desire to help them reach their goals — even when those goals seem unattainable.

Dwain E. Woode, chief resident in combined internal medicine and pediatrics at Wright State University and a UAB graduate, had the opportunity to work with Anderson on several teaching-aid-development projects. But Woode says he will always be grateful for the personal interest Anderson took in him during the lowest point of his tenure at UAB as a student.

“He was a source of encouragement and helped me stay focused on my goal of becoming a physician, even when my future in medicine appeared to be very bleak,” Woode says. “He provided an environment in which I excelled, and ultimately I regained the confidence to complete my medical education.

“I plan on pursuing an academic career and hope that someday I can have the kind of impact on medical students that Dr. Anderson had on me.”