Student Perspectives: AAA Anatomy Connected 2025

This year, just like the last, some of the ATLAS Research Lab members had the opportunity to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for Anatomy! Anatomy Connected sees thousands of researchers, educators, thinkers, and makers come together for an extended weekend of learning and collaboration on all things anatomy. Anatomy Connected 2025 brought us, the ATLAS lab, to Portland, Oregon! This blog post is a collection of our group’s highlights and experiences, featuring presentations given by our members in the conference. If you’d like to read about our experiences in the 2024 conference, check out last year’s blog post linked here.

Image caption: Select members of the ATLAS research team. From left to right: Angelo Sotto, Dr. Danielle Bentley, Callie Silverton.

Student Perspectives: Callie

Callie here! A few months ago, I finished my Masters in Anatomical Sciences at Queen’s University, including a capstone research project where I worked alongside Dr. Bentley and others to investigate body diversity in anatomical teaching materials. We submitted this research to the AAA’s annual call for abstracts and ours was chosen as an Education Research Poster Award finalist — our research was Portland-bound! Though this year marked my second time attending the AAA’s annual meeting, Anatomy Connected 2025 was a series of firsts for me: first time travelling internationally to present my research; first time visiting Portland, Oregon; and first time winning a research award!

Anatomy Connected may have been far from home, but there was no shortage of familiar faces. As I boarded the small plane from Vancouver to Portland, I realized half of the passengers were other anatomists I knew from Ontario universities.  The opportunity to present our research to a wider audience of anatomy educators was exciting and slightly nerve-wracking; I’d done smaller poster presentations here and there in my undergraduate studies, but never at a conference, let alone a conference as big as this one and in another country. Luckily, there were so many people I knew from last year that it hardly felt like I had travelled far.

Our flight touched down in Portland to a true Pacific North-West welcome — pouring rain. But you know what they say about rainy showers bringing flowers, and Portland, Oregon was in full bloom. Anyway, I came prepared with my rain gear and set out to explore a new city. In between conference talks and preparation for my poster, I became acquainted with some local spots in Portland: coffee shops, street food, gardens, and more. It was such a treat to visit a new city, and one as cool as Portland!

Sunday of the conference rolled around, and it was time for my poster presentation. As a poster award finalist, I was asked to present to the AAA’s Committee for Early Career Anatomists (CECA), who acted as the judges for the finalists. We had a maximum of 5 minutes to present and explain our research, but time was reserved afterwards for questions. It was challenging trying to explain all my work in a concise, time-efficient manner, but Angelo and Dr. Bentley helped me iron out the kinks in my presentation, so I was all set when the judges came around! I’m also glad I prepared well for the Q&A with the judges; a lot of the questions they asked, I saw coming, and I was able to answer confidently. When it was over, I knew I had done the best I could and I was happy with that, no matter what happened at the awards ceremony the next day. As it turned out, the judges thought I did well too, and it was so nice to receive that recognition.

Image caption: Callie and Dr. Bentley pictured with the Graduate Student Poster Presentation Award (left); Callie pictured presenting her poster titled "Visual diversity in anatomy teaching material imagery and its relationship with student belonging: a retrospective study of anatomical teaching materials" (right).

All in all, Portland proved to be a fun adventure — to a new place and to new territory of academia, and I’m so glad I went!

Student Perspectives: Angelo

Hi! I’m Angelo, the webmaster and one of the work-study RAs for the lab. Like Callie, this was also not my first AAA conference, but it was my first time in Portland, and my first international conference! I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. I’ve spent a lot of my time in the lab this year working on our pacing project, investigating the impact of anatomy lab exam pacing format (bell-paced vs. self-paced vs. being able to freely choose between the two) on test anxiety and student performance. This work is being prepared for publication, and was selected as an educational poster for Anatomy Connected 2025. I presented this work on the second day of the conference (Sat, May 29) to the largest audience I’ve ever had for a research presentation. I had so many insightful conversations about how other educators run their lab exams, saw how much enthusiasm there was for my work, and met so many wonderful people along the way.

Image caption: Angelo presenting his poster titled "Self-selection of lab exam pacing serves as an early intervention for test anxiety: a prospective, mixed-methods, cohort study".

This was my second time presenting in Anatomy Connected, and I loved being able to connect with folks I met last year and building on the work I previously presented. It’s so fulfilling to return to a conference year-after-year and find that you are able to spot more familiar faces in the crowd. A lot of my time there was spent attending the educational platform sessions, and I was inspired by so many initiatives spearheaded by the community - ranging from studies that look at underrepresented students’ experiences with representation in anatomy, inclusive sex and gender practices in pedagogy, how to build a degree program from scratch and appraise it, to innovative teaching practices like using AI and VR as teaching modalities! This has been such a valuable learning experience as a budding educator myself, and my favourite part was that I felt genuinely welcomed in these spaces, and I felt that my opinions and thoughts were considered despite how early on I am in my training.

Admittedly, I also spent a good chunk of “scheduled conference time” exploring Portland with Callie, and fellow colleagues from the Division of Anatomy. We explored the Portland Japanese Gardens, sampled the infamous Portland food trucks (soooo good and so much variety), and I took some time to myself near the end of my visit to walk around the waterfront and ruminate on the experiences I had at Portland and the journey I’ve been on throughout my time at the ATLAS Research Lab.

I’m so grateful and excited to keep doing more! Stay tuned to see what we will be up to next year at Anatomy Connected 2026 in Albuquerque, New Mexico…

Published abstracts for the presentations given by our group will be linked here once they become available, later this summer 2025. To see the posters presented by our group, please check the Presentations page of our website.