About Lauren

I'm Lauren Maggio.

I'm a tenured professor, researcher, journal editor, and Penn-certified executive coach. I've spent my career working across academia, healthcare, and leadership and thinking deeply about how people learn, develop, make decisions, and build meaningful careers.

I know that career decisions don't happen in a vacuum.

They happen inside organizations, professions, relationships, and systems with their own expectations with some explicit and some much harder to see.

Throughout my career, I have seen professional advancement from multiple vantage points: as a faculty member, researcher, editor, mentor, leader, and chair and member of promotion, tenure, hiring, and admissions committees.

Those experiences have given me a close view of how careers develop, how advancement decisions are made, and how expectations shift as people take on new roles and greater responsibility.

They shape not only what I understand about professional life, but also how I approach coaching.

My Coaching Philosophy

Coaching with context

Professional decisions are shaped by the systems, cultures, relationships, and expectations around them. My approach to coaching takes that context seriously while keeping the client at the center of the work.

I approach coaching as a collaborative, client-centered partnership. I believe clients are creative, resourceful, and capable, and my role is not to provide the answer or prescribe a path, but to create the conditions for careful thinking by asking questions, surfacing assumptions, and helping clients examine the possibilities, priorities, and tradeoffs in front of them.

How I work

My approach is evidence-informed and context-aware. I bring structured coaching practices together with an understanding of the systems, cultures, relationships, and expectations in which professional decisions are made. Our conversations may focus on clarifying goals and values, increasing self-awareness, and making deliberate, well-reasoned choices that fit both the person and the context.

I intentionally keep this practice small and high-touch. Working with a limited number of clients allows for confidentiality, sustained attention, and the kind of thoughtful engagement that complex career and leadership questions often require.

Experience matters. So does knowing when to use it.

My professional background helps me understand the environments and questions clients bring to coaching. I know the language, structures, expectations, and pressures of academia, healthcare, and leadership, so we can spend less time establishing context and more time exploring what matters.

That experience informs the questions I ask and helps me notice assumptions, tensions, or possibilities that may be worth examining. But it does not determine the answer. The client's goals, judgment, and choices remain at the center of the work.

I bring experience to the conversation as context, not as a prescription for what you should do.

Credentials & Background

Grounded in evidence, shaped by experience

Certified Executive Coach, University of Pennsylvania
Tenured Professor and Director of Research, Department of Medical Education
Service and leadership roles on promotion, tenure and hiring committees
Internationally recognized scholar with 200+ peer-reviewed publications

My career has included work in research, education, scholarly publishing, mentorship, and leadership. I completed my PhD in health professions education at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in collaboration with the University of California, San Francisco. I also hold master's degrees from the University of British Columbia and Simmons University, as well as a bachelor's degree from Tufts University.

Today, I am a professor and Director of Research in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois Chicago College of Medicine and serve as Editor-in-Chief of MedEdPORTAL, the Association of American Medical Colleges' journal of teaching and learning resources.

Across these roles, I have worked with faculty, researchers, clinicians, educators, and leaders at many stages of their careers. I have spent years reviewing scholarship, mentoring colleagues, serving on promotion, tenure, hiring, and admissions committees, and taking part in the conversations where important professional decisions are made.

This experience gives me a broad view of both individual careers and the systems in which people work and advance.

Ready to think through what comes next?

Book a complimentary 20-minute conversation