Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI)
Showing 11-20 of 64 Results
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Namu Park
Postdoctoral Scholar, Biomedical Informatics
BioDr. Park is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Division of Computational Medicine at Stanford University, where he is co-advised by Dr. Tina Hernandez-Boussard and Dr. Yair Bannet. He received his PhD in Biomedical and Health Informatics from the University of Washington.
His research focuses on clinical natural language processing and large language models for healthcare. He develops clinically grounded information extraction methods and evaluation frameworks that reflect real-world clinical workflows. His work examines how large language models can be aligned with clinical reasoning and rigorously evaluated for safe and effective deployment in health systems.
Through interdisciplinary collaboration, Dr. Park aims to bridge advances in foundation models with measurable clinical impact, emphasizing reliability, transparency, and scalability in AI-driven healthcare applications. -
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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Julie Parsonnet
George DeForest Barnett Professor of Medicine, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am an infectious diseases epidemiologist who has done large field studies in both the US and developing countries. We research the long-term consequences of chronic interactions between the human host and the microbial world. My lab has done fundamental work establishing the role of H. pylori in causing disease and understanding its epidemiology. Currently, our research dissects how and when children first encounter microbes and the long term effects of these exposures on health.
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Sonia Partap
Clinical Professor, Pediatric Neurology
Clinical Professor (By courtesy), Neurosurgery
Clinical Professor (By courtesy), PediatricsCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research interests involve the epidemiology, treatment and diagnosis of pediatric and young adult brain tumors. I am also interested in long-term neurologic effects and designing clinical trials to treat brain and spinal cord tumors.
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Preethy Parthiban
Postdoctoral Scholar, Neonatal and Developmental Medicine
BioMy research centers on how the innate immune system shapes tissue remodeling in health and disease. During my PhD, I uncovered a key role for resident macrophages in driving cardiac fibrosis, identifying a macrophage-derived chemokine that directly activates cardiac fibroblasts. Building on this foundation, my postdoctoral work at Stanford focuses on neutrophil–macrophage crosstalk in disrupted alveolarization in neonatal mice and patients. By integrating cellular, molecular, and translational approaches, I aim to define how innate immune pathways orchestrate extracellular matrix remodeling. Ultimately, my goal is to identify critical therapeutic targets that improve outcomes in ECM-related diseases.
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Josef Parvizi, MD, PhD
Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences (Adult Neurology) and, by courtesy, of Neurosurgery
BioDr. Parvizi completed his medical internship at Mayo Clinic, neurology training at Harvard, and subspecialty training in clinical neurophysiology and epilepsy at UCLA before joining the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford in 2007. Dr. Parvizi directs the Stanford Program for Medication Resistant Epilepsies and specializes in surgical treatments of intractable focal epilepsies. Dr. Parvizi is the principal investigator in the Laboratory of Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, where he leads a team of investigators to study the human brain. http://med.stanford.edu/parvizi-lab.html.
Epilepsy patient story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXy-gXg0t94&t=3s -
Anca M. Pasca, MD
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a physician-scientist, neonatologist, and stem cell biologist whose research focuses on understanding mechanisms of human brain development, neuroinflammation, and neurological injury using patient-derived stem cell models.
I was among the early pioneers of three-dimensional human cortical organoid technologies and contributed to development of foundational protocols for generating region-specific human brain organoids from pluripotent stem cells. My work helped establish the feasibility of modeling human brain development and disease using stem cell-derived tissues and has contributed to the widespread adoption of organoid technologies across neuroscience, regenerative medicine, and translational research.
A major focus of my laboratory is the development of increasingly sophisticated multicellular organoid and assembloid systems that incorporate diverse neuronal and glial populations to model complex human brain circuitry and disease processes. We integrate stem cell biology, organoid engineering, CRISPR-based genome editing, single-cell transcriptomics, epigenomics, high-content imaging, and computational approaches to identify disease mechanisms and therapeutic targets. These technologies have been applied to studies of hypoxic brain injury, 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome), Trisomy 18, narcolepsy, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease. -
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 and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Hoover Institution
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.
