Valerie Fulmer

Valerie Fulmer is the Operations Director and Standardized Patient (SP) Educator for the Standardized Patient Program of the Office of Medical Education, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She is a past president of the international Association of Standardized Patient Educators (ASPE), an association dedicated to best practice in SP Methodology. She was named Educator of the Year for ASPE in 2021 . ASPE’s Standards of Best Practice were published in 2017 in the open access journal Advances in Simulation, and are advancing the integrity of the field and acceptance of the need for adherence to standards in SP Methodology. Valerie is passionate about making the SP program at Pitt a place of safety for the learners and SPs in addition to keeping the quality of event programing and SP training current with high international standards. 

Valerie has worked at the school of medicine since 2002, and oversees all operations, SP session design, and the hiring and training of SP's at the Medical School. In addition to supporting over 40 repeating events within the medical school curricula, the SP Program also works with the University of Pittsburgh health sciences and other clients from a variety of backgrounds such as nursing, pharmacy, dental, physician assistants, residency programs, education, business, psychology, and Veteran Affairs.

Valerie has presented dozens of workshops, posters and keynotes on behalf of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (UPSOM) at international standardized patient, simulation, and educational association conferences, winning awards for educational innovation. Her work is published on Med Ed Portal, the medical education materials site for the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and in the European Journal for Person Centered Health Care.

Valerie has also served the ASPE organization as Editor-in-Chief of the e-News online journal, Chair of the Publications Committee, member of the Board of Directors, and Co-Chair of the Abstract Review subcommittee. She is a member of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare (SSIH), the International Nursing Association for Clinical Simulation and Learning (INACSL), and the Society in Europe for Simulation applied to Medicine (SESAM).

In 2015, she assisted the U of Pitt, School of Medicine in the opening of the Standardized Patient Program for partner school, Nazarbayev University School of Medicine, Kazakhstan, which inspired her passion for helping implement new programs. Since then, she has presented on behalf of ASPE and UPSOM at institutions across the US and in China, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Scotland and France.