MCG faculty member recognized for work in educational simulation

It’s not a simulation that Augusta University instructors go above and beyond to create a comprehensive and effective educational atmosphere, and this year, one faculty member is being globally recognized for their meticulous and intensive work at the Interdisciplinary Simulation Center.

A.J. Kleinheksel, PhD, assistant dean for Educational Simulation at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University, was recently named a 2025 Society for Simulation in Healthcare Academy Fellow – a prestigious honor from the largest simulation health care organization in the world.

SSH is a 501(c)3 organization with more than 5,000 members from more than 60 countries. Its purpose is to enhance the quality of health care through simulation. 

“It’s an honor to be recognized by your peers. It’s really nice to know that what you’re doing in your own little space can be recognized and impactful to other people,” Kleinheksel said. “Simulation is a very technical and very specifically applied pedagogy, and it doesn’t get a lot of recognition because if I’m doing my job well, people don’t even realize I exist.”

The Interdisciplinary Simulation Center where Kleinheksel works is a 40,000-square-foot state-of-the-art facility designed to provide high-quality education for future health care workers. Located in the J. Harold Harrison, M.D. Education Commons, it’s accessible to all students within the health care disciplines at the university and offers resources like high-fidelity simulation mannequins, clinical exam rooms, standardized patients and more. 

There is also a smaller satellite simulation center at AU’s College of Nursing’s Athens Campus.

Kleinheksel runs the MCG Educational Simulation program, working behind the scenes in the ISC to ensure the simulation rooms are set up properly with enough supplies and working equipment, and making sure the performances of the students are being assessed in a valid and reliable way. 

“All of that should largely be invisible to learners because they should not pay a lot of attention to the environment. If they’re paying a lot of attention to the work I do, then I haven’t done it very well because it’s distracting. And so the better I do my job, the more invisible I am,” they said.

Before submitting an application and being nominated by their peers, Kleinheksel served on SSH’s Technology Committee for four years and led an initiative where they developed a cognitive aid to help people design better simulations. 

Their work at Augusta University and within the organization itself contributed to them being one of 135 professionals from 15 countries selected to be a fellow.

“I am thrilled that Dr. Kleinheksel’s hard work and dedication to simulation education at Augusta University is being recognized by the Society for Simulation in Healthcare. This honor is a testament to Dr. Kleinheksel’s significant and sustained contributions to advance simulation in health care education and research,” said Jennifer Sullivan, PhD, interim provost and dean of The Graduate School. “Their expertise and leadership in health care simulation have been instrumental in making our simulation center the outstanding resource that it is today.”

Kleinheksel first found themselves drawn to simulation while they were earning their PhD in Educational Technology at the University of Florida. After taking some courses in it, one of their professors reached out to them with a job opportunity.

“There was a computer science faculty at UF who was looking to recruit an instructional designer to his startup company, which was developing virtual patient simulations for nursing education,” Kleinheksel said. “He had developed a conversation engine where you could talk to a virtual patient, but he needed an instructional designer to overlay an educational framework and design the software in a way where the learning objectives could be met.”

Kleinheksel was hired early on to facilitate that process and graduated while working for the startup company. After the company was sold, they wanted to get back into academia – and MCG seemed like the right place to do it.

Kleinheksel said the college’s leaders were looking to integrate more simulation into its curriculum, so they were hired in 2017 and helped develop a robust program that sustained a redesign in 2019.

“They have been instrumental in developing the simulation-based curriculum that is part of the innovative MCG 3+ curriculum and creating statewide simulation structure to allow MCG students to have a consistent, reliable formative assessment using simulation at all of the MCG campuses,” said Matt Lyon, MD, associate dean of Experiential Learning at MCG. 

“I think it does highlight what we do differently and what we do well at the Medical College of Georgia,” Kleinheksel said. “We have simulation embedded much earlier in our medical education and much more frequently, and we also have more robust assessments of performance that are longitudinal in nature. So it’s not just plugging in a sim here or there to give students something more active to do.”

Kleinheksel said it’s never the goal to replace traditional bedside learning, but the simulation component is one of the reasons MCG graduates are recognized nationally as having exceptional clinical skills.

Mallory Cunningham, director of operations for Educational Simulation at MCG, who works under Kleinheksel, said the effort they put into creating a well-oiled machine out of the simulation program is unparalleled to other institutions, and the feedback they receive from students is a testament to that. 

“Students, faculty and facilitators don’t realize how resource-intense simulation is. So how much resources are taken into effect for organizing, planning, prepping, writing cases, piloting cases and implementing simulation,” Cunningham said. “We have students who do electives with Dr. Kleinheksel, and those students are like, ‘Wow, we did not realize how much y’all put into our curriculum for us to walk through these doors and have these learning experiences.’”

But Kleinheksel doesn’t want to stop there. They want to keep improving and advancing simulations in the space so many health sciences students learn.