ELIZABETH ‘ANNE’ KINSELLA, BScOT, MAdEd, PhD, is Professor and Director of the Institute of Health Sciences Education (IHSE) in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at McGill University. She is also an Associate Member of McGill’s Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy and the School of Physical and Occupational Therapy.
Professor Kinsella is an internationally recognized scholar in health professions education whose work explores the philosophical, ethical, and epistemological dimensions of professional education and practice. A sustained commitment throughout her academic career has been to advancing medical and health professions education as a scholarly domain, while also contributing to the development of innovative educational approaches and resources that support learning in professional and workplace settings. Her work has included strengthening the field’s theoretical and philosophical foundations, cultivating rigorous approaches to inquiry, translating scholarship into educational practice, and mentoring successive generations of scholars and educators.
Her scholarship is particularly concerned with questions about knowledge, reflection, judgement, and ethics: How do health professionals come to know what to do in complex situations? What forms of knowledge matter in practice? How might practitioners and educators cultivate practical wisdom in contexts characterized by ambiguity, uncertainty, and competing values?
Her program of research spans reflective and reflexive practice, practical wisdom (phronesis), epistemologies of practice, epistemic justice, embodiment, ethics, and the philosophical foundations of social inquiry. Across this work, she has sought to illuminate forms of knowledge and ways of knowing that are essential to professional practice, and that complement technical and evidence-based domains. More recently, her scholarship has extended to questions concerning ethical ambiguity, practical wisdom, professional knowledge, and reflective practice in relation to the integration of artificial intelligence in health professions education and workplace learning.
Professor Kinsella has an extensive record of scholarship across health professions education, professional practice, social inquiry, and related fields. She is the author of Professional Development and Reflective Practice: Strategies for Learning Through Professional Experience and co-editor of several books, including Phronesis as Professional Knowledge: Practical Wisdom in the Professions and Embodiment and Professional Education: Body, Practice, Pedagogy. Her scholarship has also contributed to conversations concerning arts-informed approaches to ethics education, critical reflection, social justice, and epistemic injustice in health care and health professions education.
Teaching, mentorship, and scholarly capacity-building are central to Professor Kinsella’s academic work. She has supervised and mentored graduate students and emerging scholars across health professions and interdisciplinary fields, with particular attention to theoretically informed scholarship, the development of scholarly voice, and the translation of knowledge into practice. Her contributions to mentorship have been recognized nationally with the 2025 Canadian Association for Medical Education Mentor Award for Early Career Medical Educators and the 2026 Meredith Marks Mentorship Award from Memorial University.
Before joining McGill, Professor Kinsella was a faculty member at Western University, where she served as Field Chair of the Health Professional Education graduate program and founded and directed the Epistemologies of Practice Lab.
As Director of the IHSE, Professor Kinsella has led the continued development of the Institute as a hub for scholarship, leadership, and graduate education in health sciences education, including the growth of its doctoral program and scholarly community. Her leadership is grounded in a commitment to cultivating an intellectually vibrant and interdisciplinary environment in which scholars and learners can flourish, and to advancing the intellectual, methodological, and practical contributions of medical and health professions education at McGill, nationally, and internationally.
Current Research Interests:
Teaching and Learning in Health Professions Education; Reflective and Reflexive Practice; Practical Wisdom (Phronesis); Professional Knowledge and Epistemologies of Practice; Ethics and Ethical Ambiguity; Artificial Intelligence in Health Professions Education; Epistemic Justice; Social Justice and Critical Approaches in Health Professions Education; Workplace and Practice-Based Learning; Embodiment in Professional Education; Hermeneutics and Interpretive Inquiry; Philosophical and Theoretical Foundations of Social Inquiry.
Professor Kinsella's publications are available here: Google Scholar
Email: elizabeth.kinsella [at] mcgill.ca