Academic Staff
Teaching and Clinical staff
The Teaching staff are all fully qualified and insured TCM practitioners. Most were themselves trained at the Irish College of TCM. This means that they have first-hand awareness of the demands and challenges facing their students.
The College encourages their different teaching styles and approaches to the material. Each brings their own varied clinical experience to the classroom, benefiting the students.
Such variety makes the teaching interesting and dynamic. However, the teachers’ main excellence lies in their whole-hearted commitment to enabling their students to become the best Acupuncture TCM practitioners they can possibly be. They do so by offering encouragement, advice, help and support to students. We chose to have small student groups to enable the students to benefit from this.
All Clinical Supervisors who provide training and supervision in the third (clinical) year have busy and successful Acupuncture TCM Clinics. Additionally, in order to become Clinical Supervisors, they undertook a number of years of training with the Clinical Director to widen their range of clinical experience and expertise.
Many of the Teaching Staff and Clinical Supervisors are not only Acupuncture TCM specialists but are also qualified in Chinese Herbal Medicine and/or Medical Qigong.
The most senior College staff, who set up the college in the 1980s, are fully qualified teachers. After completing their first degrees and before changing careers into Chinese medicine, they received Postgraduate Certificates in Education from Cambridge University. These senior staff members have decades of experience teaching adult students in Ireland and beyond.
The Clinical Director is an established TCM practitioner running a busy clinic in Dublin. He has undertaken training in China on many occasions and has spent time there working in large city hospitals with some of the most experienced and famous Chinese teachers in the People’s Republic of China.
Staff are also occasionally assisted by relatively recently qualified TCM Acupuncturists who are keen to share their experience of Point Location practice and other aspects of college life with new students.
All Staff have their own interests and specialisms within the broad field of TCM and are committed to providing a conducive learning environment for their students.
Specialist Qigong Staff
All the Medical Qigong programmes run by the College are under the auspices of the late Professor Xia Shuangquan who was the Honorary President of our Medical Qigong Department. In addition to being a renowned Master of Medical Qigong, he also held the post of Professor of Medical Qigong at GUCM, Guangzhou, China – an affiliate of the College and one of the leading Chinese Medicine Universities in China.
Since 2006, Professor Song Xinhong, the current head of the Department at GUCM and ICTCM, has overseen the Medical Qigong Programmes.
The Medical Qigong teaching staff have been personally taught Medical Qigong by both Professor Xia Shuangquan and Professor Song Xinhong. They regularly attend and contribute papers to Medical Qigong and Qigong Conferences around the world and have committee roles within WASMQ and other international Qigong bodies.
These staff also teach, time permitting, the Open Workshops in Health-promoting Qigong.
Details about the founder and Director, Professor Thomas J Shanahan can be seen on the next page.