Maeve Geary takes her art and design skills into the medical sector
From The Manchester College to Boston Children’s Hospital, Maeve Geary’s travelled far to take her art and design skills into the medical sector.
Maeve returned to education through The Manchester College at the age of 23 and found it to be the stepping stone she needed to launch herself into a new career that came with life-changing opportunities. She studied on the Foundation Degree in Art and Design and rekindled her interest in design, developing many new and existing creative skills. She realised the direction she needed to go in and developed her ways of thinking, ideas and portfolio in an excellent environment, surrounded by the creativity of her tutor and peers.
The Manchester College was the stepping stone to my journey back into education that I could barely have dreamed of and am most grateful for.
From the foundation course Maeve went on to study the special effects development design degree at Bolton University and graduated with a first in 2014. Whilst on that degree she focused on medical simulation – mannequins and body parts used in medical education for various examinations and treatments – and created a variety of simulators with a focus on male genitalia. She was awarded a scholarship to take a PhD at Bolton University researching and developing the impact of visual and tactile fidelity in medical simulation.
A year and a half into her PhD and Maeve has been invited to join Boston Children’s Hospital (a Harvard Medical Teaching Hospital) as a research scholar and FX designer, to finish her PhD from their brand new simulations lab. She’s now creating clinical and surgical simulators to train experienced doctors, surgeons, nurses and students on a variety of life-saving procedures. She’s using the skills she developed in art and design and special effects, to sculpt and cast ultra-high fidelity (extremely realistic) simulators, whilst completing her PhD research.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the journey that has brought me to Boston; it all began when I was interviewed at The Manchester College for the foundation degree course!
