News Release
First Trust Bank / University of Ulster Distinguished Graduate of the Year Award Professor Anthony G Gallagher, BSc Hons Psychology1988
16th December 2008
Anthony Gallagher (Tony) left school at the age of 17. He has since progressed from being a general labourer on a building site in Castlederg to Professor of Human Factors at the National Surgical Training Centre at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
In doing so, he has become one of the leading experts in the world on the new training paradigm in procedural medicine disciplines such as surgery and interventional cardiology.
He started his professional career as a nursing assistant and then was accepted into nurse training (RMN) in 1977, which he completed successfully before going to work in London. On returning to Northern Ireland he was accepted at Ulster as a mature student on a full-time course leading to the award of BSc Hons Psychology, graduating in 1988.
Professor Gallagher completed his PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 1992 and subsequently went to work in the School of Psychology at QUB where he pioneered a new way of training surgeons using virtual reality (VR) simulation.
In 2000, he was the first academic in Ireland to be awarded the UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship, which he used to continue his VR simulation work in the Department of Surgery at Yale University.
Professor Gallagher is considered by his international peers in medicine and engineering as one of the leading experts on the development, deployment and validation of VR training and assessment in medical disciplines such as surgery, interventional cardiology, electrophysiology, interventional radiology and military emergency medicine.
His training as an experimental psychologist has proved extremely beneficial, since he has taken the knowledge and methodology from that discipline and applied it to an entirely new area in medicine. He has developed and validated, both methodologically and clinically, a new objective, transparent and fair way of training doctors to perform high skill/high risk procedures such as carotid artery stenting.
For further information, please contact:
Trina Porter
Telephone: 028 71675511
Email: Trina Porter
