Marilynne A. Hebert

Marilynne A. Hebert, PhD is an Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Community Health Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, University of Calgary. Her role includes research and teaching as well as administrative responsibility for 140 students in the MSc/PhD program. She has received several awards related to her contributions in Graduate Education, including the 2007 McLeod Distinguished achievement award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Hebert has held an Adjunct Assistant Professor position in the School of Health Information Science at University of Victoria since 2002.

Dr. Hebert’s research and teaching interests include Knowledge Transfer through technology mediated learning and mentoring. She conducts mixed methods research in understanding the impact and effectiveness of e-health/e-learning in health.

Most recently she has been using a realist review perspective to help understand why some projects are successful and others are not. Many times the story is told of how a particular system is successfully implemented, where in another context the same system is implemented but results in failure. What happens in-between these two end-points is where realist reviews help uncover the underlying mechanisms for how implementation can or cannot be expected to lead to results.

This approach, coupled with outcome mapping, underpins several of her projects in graduate education including identifying the linkages between program delivery and resulting student competencies in a Master of Public Health program in Tanzania. Other projects include laddering post-graduate education opportunities in health leadership and a multi-university, web-based graduate program in healthcare epidemiology.

Storytelling is an important element in both realist reviews and knowledge transfer. Dr. Hebert is currently working on a series of “webisodes” that chronicle women’s experiences with heart attack. The project captures the stories digitally and transfers them to audiences via cell phones, email and web-posting. Understanding how and why behavior changes as a result of transferring knowledge through stories is the intended outcome.