School of Medicine
Showing 801-820 of 1,225 Results
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Nnamdi Orakpo, MD, PhD
Clinical Assistant Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences - Sleep Medicine
BioDr. Nnamdi Orakpo is a fellowship-trained sleep medicine specialist with Stanford Health Care. Dr. Orakpo is also a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Division of Sleep Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Dr. Orakpo specializes in sleep medicine and sleep psychiatry. He focuses on sleep-related conditions, including chronic insomnia, narcolepsy, sleep apnea, restless leg syndrome, and trauma-associated sleep disorders. Dr. Orakpo also treats patients with ADHD, depression, anxiety disorders, neurocognitive disorders, and post-traumatic stress disorder. He offers interventional psychiatry treatments, including ketamine therapy and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Dr. Orakpo led a pioneering study on virtual reality neurofeedback to treat insomnia and chronic centralized pain. He has also studied managing sleep apnea and obesity using GLP-1 medications. His other research has looked at the development of a rare movement disorder (propriospinal myoclonus) after taking metoclopramide during pregnancy.
Dr. Orakpo has published his research in peer-reviewed journals, including Sleep, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, and Frontiers in Psychiatry. He co-wrote a clinical sleep medicine textbook with his colleagues, contributing chapters on chronic insomnia, isolated sleep paralysis, sleep-related eating disorders, sexsomnia, and exploding head syndrome. Dr. Orakpo has presented to his peers at international and national meetings of the World Sleep Congress/World Dentofacial Sleep Society, the American Academy of Neurology, and the American Public Health Association.
Dr. Orakpo is a member of many professional organizations, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the American Psychiatric Association, the North American Neuromodulation Society, and the World Sleep Society. -
Karen Osilla
Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Public Mental Health and Population Sciences)
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDr. Osilla conducts health services research with a focus on supporting families impacted by substance use. Dr. Osilla has been conducting addictions research since 2006 and has been involved in clinical trials evaluating cognitive behavioral therapy, collaborative care, and motivational interviewing interventions (web and in-person) among youth, adult, military, family members, and other hard-to-reach populations.
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Michael Ostacher
Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Public Mental Health and Population Sciences)
On Partial Leave from 05/16/2026 To 06/15/2026BioDr. Ostacher is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He is the Site Director for the Addiction Medicine Fellowship at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, where he also serves as the Medical Director of the Pharmacology of Addiction Recovery Clinic, the Director of the Bipolar and Depression Research Program and the Co-Director of the VA/Stanford Exploratory Therapeutics Lab, the Director of Advanced Fellowship Training in Mental Illness Research and Treatment for MDs for the VISN 21 MIRECC, and the Site Director at the VA Palo Alto for Advanced Fellowship Training for Stanford. A graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Harvard Medical School, he completed his training at The Cambridge Health Alliance at Harvard Medical School in Adult Psychiatry, Public Psychiatry, and Geriatric Psychiatry, and is currently board certified in Psychiatry, Addiction Psychiatry, and Addiction Medicine. He is the Digital Content Editor for the journal Evidence-Based Mental Health and is on the editorial boards of Bipolar Disorders, the International Journal of Bipolar Disorders, the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Current Psychiatry, and Psychiatric Annals. His current research includes roles as Site Investigator for VA-BRAVE, multicenter, randomized trial comparing long-acting injectable buprenorphine to sublingual buprenorphine/naloxone, and trials of psychedelic drugs in psychiatric disorders in Veterans. With funding from NIDA, he studied, along with Jaimee Heffner, Ph.D. at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, smoking cessation in people with bipolar disorder using a novel online psychotherapy derived from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. His work using a Capnometry Guided Respiratory Intervention (CGRI) for PTSD led to the FDA clearance for Freespira, a digital therapeutic, for the treatment of PTSD. His primary research interest is in large clinical trials mental health and addiction, and the implementation of evidence-based mental health practices.
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Saisha Pal
Affiliate, Psych/Public Mental Health & Population Sciences
BioDougherty Valley High School Class of 2027
Youth Researcher & Advocate -
Heather Ryan Pankow
Life Science Rsch Prof 2, Psych/General Psychiatry and Psychology (Adult)
Current Role at StanfordLife Science Research Professional 2 in The Depression Research Clinic
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Sara Pardej
Postdoctoral Scholar, Psychiatry
BioSara Pardej earned her BA in Psychology and BS in Cognitive Science at Marquette University. Afterwards, she attended the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee under the mentorship of Dr. Bonita P. Klein-Tasman, where she earned both her MS and PhD in Clinical Psychology. There, she worked on several studies focusing on youth with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), including behavioral phenotyping work, psychometric studies, and a social skills intervention study. Her dissertation study, which was funded by a Young Investigator Award from the Children's Tumor Foundation, focused on examining event related potentials using EEG by comparing children with NF1 to children with idiopathic ADHD and unaffected children. She completed her Doctoral Internship in Clinical Psychology at Penn State Health in Hershey, Pennsylvania. While at Penn State, she also worked on research examining safety and psychopathology in youth with ADHD and/or autism. Her clinical interest is neuropsychology, and her research interests include issues of psychometrics, behavioral phenotyping, and the neuropsychological development (and subsequent areas of intervention) of individuals with NF1 across the lifespan.
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Karen J. Parker, PhD
Truong-Tan Broadcom Endowed Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Medicine
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe Parker Lab conducts research on the biology of social functioning in monkeys, typically developing humans, and patients with social difficulties.
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Akshay Paruchuri
Postdoctoral Scholar, Psychiatry
AI4ALL Graduate Mentor, Stanford Pre-Collegiate StudiesBioI'm a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, advised by Professor Ehsan Adeli. I'm affiliated with the Stanford Translational AI (STAI) Lab and the Stanford Vision and Learning (SVL) Lab. I earned my PhD in computer science at UNC Chapel Hill under the advisement of Professor Henry Fuchs. I build and evaluate multimodal AI systems, from general-purpose methods for interactive computing to applications in healthcare. Currently, I'm working toward a future where multimodal AI can safely and reliably integrate into healthcare systems in order to improve the entire patient journey, from advanced diagnostic imaging and surgical support to all-day health monitoring and management, with the aim to achieve better therapeutic outcomes for cancer and aging-related diseases. I'm generally interested in opportunities that would allow me to continue to deepen my research expertise while leading and working on projects that benefit people everywhere, whether through foundational research, real-world products, or shaping how these systems are evaluated and deployed.
Previously, I was a visiting researcher at IDSIA USI-SUPSI working with Professor Piotr Didyk on the interpretability of multimodal language models (MLMs) with respect to capabilities such as visual perception. I've published in leading venues on topics such as remote health sensing (WACV, NeurIPS), 3D reconstruction (ECCV, MICCAI), LLM-based conversational agents for personal health (EMNLP, Nature Communications), and energy-efficient operation of smart glasses (ISMAR). I've done internships at Google AR/VR, Google Consumer Health Research, and Kitware. -
Sergiu P. Pasca
Kenneth T. Norris, Jr. Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Director of the Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsA critical challenge in understanding the intricate programs underlying development, assembly and dysfunction of the human brain is the lack of direct access to intact, functioning human brain tissue for detailed investigation by imaging, recording, and stimulation.
To address this, we are developing bottom-up approaches to generate and assemble, from multi-cellular components, human neural circuits in vitro and in vivo.
We introduced the use of instructive signals for deriving from human pluripotent stem cells self-organizing 3D cellular structures named brain region-specific spheroids/organoids. We demonstrated that these cultures, such as the ones resembling the cerebral cortex, can be reliably derived across many lines and experiments, contain synaptically connected neurons and non-reactive astrocytes, and can be used to gain mechanistic insights into genetic and environmental brain disorders. Moreover, when maintained as long-term cultures, they recapitulate an intrinsic program of maturation that progresses towards postnatal stages.
We also pioneered a modular system to integrate 3D brain region-specific organoids and study human neuronal migration and neural circuit formation in functional preparations that we named assembloids. We have actively applied these models in combination with studies in long-term ex vivo brain preparations to acquire a deeper understanding of human physiology, evolution and disease mechanisms.
We have carved a unique research program that combines rigorous in vivo and in vitro neuroscience, stem cell and molecular biology approaches to construct and deconstruct previously inaccessible stages of human brain development and function in health and disease.
We believe science is a community effort, and accordingly, we have been advancing the field by broadly and openly sharing our technologies with numerous laboratories around the world and organizing the primary research conference and the training courses in the area of cellular models of the human brain.
