Department Anatomy: Missions and Perspectives

It has long been a strong determination and a clear mission for Mahidol University to be a top “Research University” in Thailand and become world-class university. Apart from the mission of being research excellence, MU also aims to excel in teaching, service and internationalization.

Along with the foundation of Faculty of Science for five decades, Department of Anatomy also has its long determination to be excellent in teaching, research, service and internationalization to serve MU world-class mission. From our long teaching experience in pre-clinical subjects in Anatomy, we have developed our E-learning system for all departmental subjects that facilitate both student learning center and student-teacher interaction. In the near future, the state-of-art medical imaging technology including 4D-CTscan, MRI will be integrated into our teaching curricula to ensure the most up-to-date knowledge that we deliver to our undergraduate (medical and paramedical) and graduate students. Graduate programs will also be re-shaped to make all curricula more modernized (in terms of coursework and research oriented-base) and also well serve the requirement of our students and recruiters.

For research and internationalization, Department of Anatomy has many well-established and well known research groups along with their strong research networking both in-house connections and international collaborations. There are many diverse research areas being conducted as research groups in the department. These include the areas of 1) Stem cell biology, 2) Drugs and vaccine developments for fasciolosis, dengue virus and cancer, 3) Neuroscience in neurological diseases, 4) Shrimp molecular biology and biotechnology and 5) Reproductive biology and endocrinology of the aquatic animals. These research areas have established the strong links with many overseas universities to strengthen their research activities. Such connections would open up the opportunity for our Ph.D. students to be trained abroad in specific research areas under the support from available scholarships. It should be emphasized that over 80% of our Ph.D. students have been awarded the scholarships from both Thailand Research Fund (TRF-RGJ) and Commission on Higher Education (CHE) that provide them the overseas training experience. In addition, started from year 2008, Faculty of Science has launched the scholarships to give 2-year support for master students and partial support for Ph.D students. Tuition and allowance supports from Faculty as well as from individual researcher grant money are also available for international students.

In the regular basis, we have launched many academic “outreach” programs to serve community as part of our missions – academic service excellence. In each year, our Human Gross Anatomy laboratory has welcomed around 10,000 students and visitors in the occasions of the Faculty “Open House” and some specific group activity requests throughout the year. We also co-organize the soft-cadaveric workshop with Ramathibodi Hospital for medical specialist training to acquire their medical skills such as orthopedics surgery or endoscopy. Some of our research projects, for instance, from the groups of Shrimp Molecular Biology & Biotechnology, Embryo Transfer Technology and Fasciolosis, have also been transferring research knowledge and technology (from bench-top to field) to a broad community in order for them to apply the knowledge for improving the quality of social living. Get to know us more in the website contents and feel free to contact us through both E-mail or Facebook.