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Barbara Fifield Brandt 

Career Overview

Barbara Fifield Brandt, PhD, EdM, FNAP is the Founding Director and Senior Advisor of the National Center for Interprofessional Practice and Education at the University of Minnesota (UMN).  She currently lives in and work with the National Center team while living in North Carolina. 

Established in 2012, the National Center is a public-private partnership funded and founded by a cooperative agreement with the Health Resources and Services Administration in addition to grants and contracts from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Dr. Brandt is an emerita professor in the UMN College of Pharmacy, Department of Pharmaceutical Care and Health Systems.  She served as associate vice president for education in the UMN Academic Health Center from 2000-2017 and principal investigator and statewide director of the United States Health and Human Services, Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Minnesota Area Health Education Center from 2002-2013.

As AVPE, Dr. Brandt administratively led the creation of academic health center-wide interprofessional programs: the AHC Office of Education, Health Careers Center, the Interprofessional Education and Resource Center, the Minnesota Area Health Education Center from 2002-2013, the Center for Interprofessional Education, the Center of Allied Health Programs, the Academy of Excellence in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, and 1Health interprofessional curriculum framework. As charged to supplement Minnesota state investments in health professions education with external funding, the AHC Office of Education team, led by Jennifer Kertz, and I ultimately garnered over $22M in grants and contracts with $9.4M supporting University of Minnesota faculty and staff between 2002-2020. 

Before her senior and national administrative roles at the University of Minnesota, from 1990-2000 Dr. Brandt was a faculty member, associate director of continuing pharmacy education, and curriculum director for the Doctor of Pharmacy Program at the University of Kentucky College of Pharmacy. During this decade, she worked at UK and with the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy on the educational strategies for implementing pharmaceutical care curriculum related to national competencies. From 2000-2006, she served as a board member of the Accreditation Council of Pharmacy Education.  

While a UK faculty member, from 1992 to 2000 Dr. Brandt served as a consultant on projects for HRSA programs, such as the National Health Services Corps, the creation of the HRSA Office of Pharmacy Affairs, and research to understand issues in primary care practice underlying the federal 340 legislation. Working with numerous colleagues committed to health care for underserved populations, she was a founder and architect of the Association of Clinicians of the Underserved, first located in Lexington, Kentucky.

Before 1990, Dr. Brandt studied and taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the continuing education graduate program with an emphasis on how professionals learn, cognitive apprenticeships, business models in continuing education, and administration and organizational systems.  She was a staff coordinator in the Office of Continuing Education for Health Professionals at the University of Illinois Medical School with responsibility for developing programs throughout healthcare systems in sixteen counties in east central Illinois.

Scholarly Areas

Dr. Brandt’s areas of scholarly focus center on how professionals learn in practice, called workplace learning; reimagining academic-community partnerships, called the Nexus, especially for rural and underserved populations; optimizing workforce development of teams; educational design of interprofessional practice and education; the history of interprofessional practice and education; and knowledge generation using interprofessional informatics.

Education and Training

Dr. Brandt holds a bachelor of arts in the teaching of history from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a master of education and doctor of philosophy degrees in continuing education (specializing in continuing professional education for the health professions) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2013 she was recognized as a University of Illinois Distinguished Alumna. Her post-doctoral study includes a W.K. Kellogg Foundation-sponsored post-doctoral fellowship for faculty in adult and continuing education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the HRSA Primary Care Fellowship.