The Faculty of Medicine and Surgery together with the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry are very proud to announce that they will be hosting Fulbright Fellow Prof. Kevin Ahern during the 2019-2020 academic year. Prof. Ahern will be contributing to teaching and course development in biochemistry and related topics. The department teaches biochemistry to the students enrolled in the Medicine and BSc(Hons) Medical Biochemistry programmes of studies. The recently established Medical Biochemistry course has now reached its third year and is coordinated by Prof. Therese Hunter.
Prof Ahern is a Professor of Biochemistry/Biophysics and Elizabeth P. Ritchie Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University, USA, where he has served as head of department and director of undergraduate research. He is best known for his popular YouTube video lectures on biochemistry that have been watched (over 4 million hits) by students in every country. Along with Indira Rajagopal, Kevin is also author of two popular Open Educational Resource (OER) textbooks available for iPads and personal computers. "Biochemistry Free and Easy, (released 2012)" is an elementary textbook on the subject and “Biochemistry Free For All (released 2016)” is a more advanced one. Combined, the two textbooks have been downloaded over 275,000 times by students the world over. Taking full advantage of electronic delivery, the textbooks abound with multimedia educational content, including full sets of the YouTube video lectures, rotatable 3D molecules, adaptive learning exercises, full electronic linkage to Internet resources, and recordings of Metabolic Melodies, an extensive collection of songs about biochemistry that he uses to teach the subject.
He is also author of a well-known textbook of biochemistry (Biochemistry by Mathews, Van Holde and Ahern published by Addison Wesley). He has published over 700 articles and has served as editor or contributing editor for Science, Genetic Engineering News, Biochemistry Software and Internet Journal and BioTechniques.
