Lisa Simmons

Dr Lisa Simmons is a Senior Lecturer in Health Professional Education in the College of Medicine and Dentistry at James Cook University and an Accredited Clinical Exercise Physiologist. Her leadership strengthens educators' capabilities, builds authentic clinical education systems, and creates evidence-informed approaches to evaluating learning, service, and workforce impact.

Lisa’s work addresses a central challenge in health professional education: clinicians, researchers, academics and supervisors are often disciplinary experts, but need practical support to develop educational expertise. She responds to this by creating systems, resources, communities and recognition pathways that help educators teach, assess, supervise, evaluate and lead with confidence.

Across clinical exercise physiology, postgraduate health professional education and medicine, Lisa has led curriculum design, placement development, assessment renewal, faculty development, clinical partnerships and evaluation frameworks. Her work consistently translates educational ideas into practical systems that improve student learning, educator confidence, workforce preparation and community benefit.

In Clinical Exercise Physiology, Lisa established and led the Master of Clinical Exercise Physiology and helped develop the JCU Exercise Physiology Clinic as a clinically authentic work-integrated learning environment. Through this work, she expanded placement capacity, strengthened accreditation readiness, embedded simulation and case-based learning, and built sustainable systems for supervision, authentic assessment and community-based service delivery. This leadership positioned the clinic as both a learning environment and a service model, demonstrating how student-led healthcare can support learner development while responding to regional health needs.

In her current role, Lisa leads postgraduate teaching and curriculum development in Health Professional Education. She designs and coordinates subjects in clinical teaching, innovative teaching, and action research, supporting working health professionals across medicine, nursing, allied health, and education to identify educational problems, apply evidence-informed teaching practices, evaluate impact, and lead improvement in their own settings. Her teaching makes educational theory, research and evaluation practical, relevant and achievable.

As co-lead of the Teaching Excellence and Collaborative Hub, Lisa builds College-wide capacity for teaching excellence. She creates structures that support clinicians, researchers, and academics in strengthening assessment design, feedback practice, scholarly teaching, supervision, and recognition. Through this work, she helps shift teaching development from isolated individual effort to shared, collaborative and sustainable educational improvement.

Lisa’s research strengthens the evidence base for clinical education and student-led healthcare services. She developed the HELP-C Guiding Framework to support the systematic evaluation of learning, service, and cost outcomes, helping educators and services make educational impact visible, measurable, and sustainable.

Across teaching, research and engagement, Lisa builds people, practices and systems that enable health professional education to be more authentic, evidence-informed, collaborative and impactful.