A small team obsessed with how medicine is taught.
ECLIME — the Ed Curtis Laboratory for Innovation in Medical Education — is a working group inside the Department of Surgery at SIU School of Medicine. We build extended-reality and AI-driven training environments. We do it with clinicians, not for them. And we ship.
Why a lab, and why here.
AI has reshaped how whole industries work. Medicine has been slow to adopt it, and medical education slower still. Physicians still learn judgment one case at a time, on whoever walks through the door, and find out how they did when it's already real. That can change now — and we're moving in.
ECLIME was built around a shift: artificial intelligence can now carry the parts of training that never scaled. It examines a physician's reasoning and names the gaps. It writes the cases that expose them. It tutors the learner through the ones they miss — on demand, without running out of patience. We build that intelligence across the full arc of training, with the clinicians who define what good looks like.
We work inside the Department of Surgery at SIU School of Medicine, alongside the surgeons and educators who train physicians in the same building. Our work is published, presented, and cited. But we hold ourselves to something quieter: whether a physician who trained against our systems makes a sharper call when it counts.
Four principles, kept small on purpose.
Clinician-embedded
We start in the clinic, not the codebase. Every tool answers a problem a physician named first.
Built to be measured
We design with the trial in mind. Outcomes data is part of the prototype, not an afterthought added at peer review.
Honest about what's hard
XR doesn't fix bad pedagogy. AI doesn't fix unclear scenarios. We use the technology where it earns its keep — and stop where it doesn't.
Open about the work
We publish, present, and write between publications. The lab's notebook is the lab's most useful artifact.
Six people, one lab.
We're deliberately small. Each person owns a slice of the lab end-to-end — from question to prototype to writeup.
Tiffany Shuma
Operations, partnerships, the business of a research lab.
Jordyn Crouch
Keeps protocol moving from prototype to publication.
Jakob Crabtree
Builds the systems behind the lab's research output.
ECLIME operates inside SIU School of Medicine, sharing a roof with one of the largest academic simulation complexes in the region. Its AI and XR work is funded by a grant from the Springfield Memorial Foundation.
