Marie-Eve LeBel

Image of Dr. LeBel

Current Appointments

Centre Fellow
Assistant Professor, Division of Orthopaedic Surgery,  Department of Surgery, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University




Educational Background

MD, Laval University
Orthopaedic Surgery Residency, Laval University
Orthopaedic Surgery & Sports Medicine Fellowship, University of Western Ontario

Research Program Highlights

  • What are the basic skills in arthroscopy?
  • How can we influence the learning of arthroscopic skills in novices?

Publications from Google Scholar

Personal Biography

Like her mother and grandfather before, Marie-Eve found herself drawn to teaching from a young age. One of the recent seminal texts in education research is Alison King’s “From a Sage on the Stage to a Guide on the Side.” It discusses the merits of interactive and collaborative learning versus observational learning, which is, by the by, omnipresent in surgical education. The message of this essay has come to ring clearer and clearer to Marie-Eve, first as she began to train new surgeons, and later as she has been progressing through her own research training in medical education.  Now, in her role as a researcher, she studies both the fundamental ways trainees learn and the increasingly sophisticated methods used in surgical education.

In her research, Marie-Eve attempts to get the core of how learners think and act through a number of related research studies. In one project, she extends King’s ideas about the difference between observation and collaboration in teaching into the surgical context. The idea is to delineate between different kinds of observation and their respective strengths: what happens cognitively, for instance, when a young surgeon watches a procedure performed by a non-expert surgeon?  Marie-Eve also studies the difference between the movements of experts and novices, in order to design simulated training environments to teach the basic skills required to perform specific procedures competently and safely. These and other studies build into a research program here at Western that is breaking new ground in surgical education and aiming to improve patient safety by improving surgeon training.

Marie-Eve’s clinical speciality is sports-related, arthroscopic orthopedic surgery. But education research gives her a window into the experience of all medical professionals, and, even more broadly, it gives her access to the nature of medicine’s duty to society. By studying education research, and, specifically, simulation-based training, Marie-Eve is developing a body of work that understands and facilitates the transition from novice surgeon to expert and reduces the risk of errors and negative outcomes for patients who find themselves part of the training process. Moving forward, Marie-Eve’s work will be a part of the development of new training programs and a new generation of surgical simulators which adapt to trainees’ knowledge gaps and provide the structure necessary to learn one of the most complex acts that one person can trust another to perform.