Professional Identity: What is it, when is it formed, and what is the role of anatomy in this developmental process?

Professional identity formation (PIF) has been described as an essential process by which medical students internalize knowledge, skills, and values of the profession to ultimately become physicians. This session will introduce the developmental process of PIF in medical students and will discuss its relationship to professionalism. The described model and its role in anatomy education is grounded in the results of a thematic analysis of nine medical students who shared how their training and anatomy education experiences shaped their professional identities and perceptions of professionalism. Overall, the evidence suggests anatomy educators can foster PIF by promoting a complex and reflective understanding of professionalism and by encouraging students to enact those professional values as components of their professional identities during team‐based experiences in both laboratory and didactic settings. Specifically, the values of respect, both for the patient (donor) and the team, duty, and good communication were found to be fostered through team‐based cadaveric dissection. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .