Keynotes
We are delighted to announce our keynote speakers Professor Dame Jane Dacre and Professor Colin Melville, as well as our Calman Lecturer Professor Arunthathi Mahendran
Conference Keynote Speakers and 2026 Calman Lecturer
Professor Colin Melville
Honorary Professor of Medical Education at Manchester University and former Director of Education and Standards at the GMC.
Professor Colin Melville is a strategic healthcare leader, educator, and former senior clinician with 20+ years’ experience shaping
policy, governance, medical education and medical regulation for the NHS and
internationally.
Colin has held senior clinical leadership
roles including Clinical Director, Medical Director, Director of Medical Education and Foundation School Director. He went on to senior academic leadership positions at HYMS, Warwick and Lancaster medical schools before joining the GMC as Medical Director and
Director of Education and Standards in 2017.
In the eight years of this executive role, he
led significant regulatory developments including the education and ethics response
to the COVID pandemic, the development and implementation of the Medical Licensing Assessment (UK MLA), and the revision and updating of the key professional and education standards.
Colin is also a Non-executive Director (and
Senior Independent Director) for Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust,
Honorary Professor of Medical Education at University of Manchester, and Visiting Professor at Anglia Ruskin University.
He was involved in the establishment of the
NHS Clinical Entrepreneurs Programme and remains an active part of the programme. He also provides mentoring and coaching to early career doctors and other professionals to support and encourage the next generation of potential medical leaders. He continues to maintain a portfolio of educational research,
co-authoring papers and chairing steering committees for NIHR funded research
programmes.
Professor Dame Jane Dacre
Lead of the Medical education and Training Review Phase 2, and Emeritus Professor of Medical Education at UCL
Dame Jane is the lead of the Medical education and Training Review Phase 2.
She is Emeritus Professor of Medical Education at UCL, and a specialist advisor to parliament on the Health and Care Committee, where she chairs an Expert Panel, responsible for evaluation Government Pledges. She is the President of the Royal Medical Benevolent Fund, and President of the Medical Womens
Federation. She is the immediate past President of the Medical Protection
Society She was the lead for the Department of Health and Social Care review of the Gender Pay Gap in Medicine, with Professor Carol Woodhams from Surrey University Business School. This review ‘Mend the Gap: The
Independent Review into Gender Pay Gaps in Medicine in England’ was published in December 2020 and she now chairs the DHSC gender pay gap implementation advisory group. She was the co- chair of the Commission on Professional Leadership in Pharmacy, published in 2023 and is leading an independent review into the Prescribing Skills Assessment for the Medical Schools Council.
Jane is the former Director of UCL Medical School and honorary consultant physician and
rheumatologist, at Whittington Health in London. She is past president of the Royal College of Physicians of London, only the third woman to hold that position in the College’s 500 year history. Her research is in medical education, assessment, gender, and equality in healthcare.
The Academy's Annual Calman Lecture will take place on 20 October. We are delighted that our Calman Lecturer is Professor Arunthathi (Arundi) Mahendran
Professor Arunthathi Mahendran
Founding Director of the SHAPE Institute for Health at Queen Mary University of London
Professor Arunthathi (Arundi) Mahendran is the Founding Director of the SHAPE Institute for Health at Queen Mary University of London, where she works alongside local residents, community partners and colleagues to reimagine health and healthcare as a local,
neighbourhood venture grounded in the reality of people’s actual lives. A former Director of the medical school at QMUL and a
Consultant Transplant Surgeon (Honorary) at Barts Health NHS Trust, she brings together experience from higher education and
clinical practice — but mostly, she brings curiosity, care and a belief that better, meaningful health begins in everyday life.
Arunthathi’s career has been shaped by a simple conviction: when healthcare begins with the real lives, values and experiences of the people it serves — honouring what matters most to each person — it can become deeply authentic, profoundly effective and genuinely respectful of both our shared humanity and our individual differences. Driven by this belief, she has spent over a decade widening opportunities for those often overlooked in medical training, including students with disabilities, neurodivergent learners, young people from lower-income backgrounds and minority ethnic communities. She feels incredibly fortunate that this work has been recognised with a National Teaching Fellowship (2023) — but even more grateful to the students and teachers who continue to challenge, inspire and shape her thinking.
Her journey through medicine and ethics has taken her across cities and disciplines — from
transplant surgery training in London and New York, to an ethics fellowship in Chicago, and later an award winning PhD in Educational Philosophy at Goldsmiths, University of London.
These experiences shaped her book Moments of Rupture, where she explores how the often
unspoken and non-visible sights, sounds and sensory experiences of healthcare can unsettle
us, creating powerful ruptures in our understanding that open our eyes to what care truly means. By paying attention to these powerful, messy moments instead of pushing them aside, she shows how practitioners can become more thoughtful, impactful and human in their work — an idea that strongly echoes the community-rooted values at the heart of SHAPE Health.
At SHAPE Health, Arunthathi now works with communities across East London to understand what health means to them — and what gets in the way. Together with residents, frontline workers and public services, she is helping to co-create practical, neighbourhood-based approaches to prevention and care that reflect people’s real lives and aspirations for their future.
What motivates her most is the possibility of building communities where people feel
connected, supported and able to live well in the places they call home. She sees this work not as her own, but as a collective effort — one rooted in trust, shared learning and the belief that small, local changes can help shape a more caring and sustainable future for everyone.
