Associate Professor Arvin Damodaran

A/Prof Arvin Damodaran is the Head of Randwick Clinical Campus, School of Clinical Medicine, UNSW Medicine and Health, appointed in 2025. As an education focussed clinical academic, he remains engaged in clinical rheumatology, teaching and health professions education research. He provides clinical service as a rheumatology specialist at Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick and in private practice.

Arvin graduated from UNSW Medicine in 1996, before completing Rheumatology specialist training in 2004. He completed a Masters of Medical Education with University of Sydney in 2006. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) and the Australian and New Zealand Association for Health Professional Educators (ANZAHPE). He is the recipient of multiple awards for teaching, including UNSW Medicine's 'Teacher of the Year' in 2018.

From 2005 to 2011 Dr Damodaran was a Rheumatology staff specialist and Network Director of Physician Training at Liverpool Hospital, before moving to Prince of Wales Clinical School in 2012 to become more involved in undergraduate medical education. Over this career, Arvin has served in multiple leadership roles in education and workforce across the continuum of medical training. For UNSW, he has been the Director of the Clinical Teaching Unit at Prince of Wales Hospital since 2012 and was the Director of Teaching for the School of Clinical Medicine, UNSW Medicine from 2022 to 2025. At the Junior Medical Officer (JMO) level, Arvin has been the Chair of the General Clinical Training Committee which overseas JMO conditions for Prince of Wales Hospital since 2020. At the vocational level, Arvin has been a Network Director of Physician Training and was a National/Senior Examining Panel member for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) from 2012 to 2022. He remains actively engaged in basic and advanced physician training at Prince of Wales Hospital. For his national specialist society, the Australian Rheumatology Association (ARA), he has held several roles including serving as Secretary then President of the NSW Branch of the ARA from 2019-21, being a previous Board Member for the ARA, and chairing the ARA's Education Training and Workforce Committee (ETWC) from 2022-24.

Arvin has been an involved advocate for Interprofessional Education (IPE) throughout his clinical career and has co-Chaired the Interprofessional Education Working Group, Randwick Health and Innovation Precinct (RHIP) since 2024. 

His areas of research include medical education, particularly the transition from medical student to doctor and workplace based learning and assessment, and also clinical research in musculoskeletal medicine. Arvin's doctoral thesis, 'Trust and risk in clinical teaching: a mixed methods study', explored trust as experienced by clinical teachers, identifying how perceptions and relationship with risk influence decision making in clinical task delegation.

Arvin is an active member of the International Competency-based Health Professions Educators Collaborative.