School of Medicine
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Mirko Uljarevic
Clinical Associate Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
BioI am a medically trained researcher focused academic with a background in developmental psychopathology, psychometrics and big data science. My research takes a life-span perspective and is driven by the urgent need to improve outcomes for people with autism and other neuropsychiatric (NPD) disorders and neurodevelopmental conditions (NDD). My primary research interest has focused on combining cutting-edge psychometric procedures and a big data approach to better understand structure of clinical phenotypes across autism and other NPD and NDD and on using this knowledge to improve existing and develop new clinical assessments that are more effective for screening and diagnosis, tracking the natural and treatment-related symptom progression and for use in genetic and neurobiological studies. In addition to my focus on the development of outcome measures, I have collaborated with leading psychopathology researchers and groups in the United States, Europe and Australia on numerous projects spanning a range of topics including genetics, treatment and employment, with a particular focus on understanding risk and resilience factors underpinning poor mental health outcomes in adolescents and adults. Most recently, through several competitively funded projects, I have led the statistical analyses to uncover the latent structure of social and communication and restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRB) clinical phenotypes across NPD and NDD. These findings have enabled us to (i) start capturing and characterizing a highly variable social functioning phenotype across a range of disorders and understanding mechanisms underpinning this variability, (ii) combine phenotypic and genetic units of analyses to advance our understanding of the genetic architecture of RRB, and (iii) focus on identification and characterization of subgroups of individuals that share distinct symptom profiles and demonstrate clinical utility and neurobiological validity. Importantly, this work has provided key information for developing a programmatic line of research aimed at developing novel, comprehensive assessment protocols that combine parent and clinician reports, objective functioning indicators and incorporate state-of-the-art psychometric, mobile and connected technologies and procedures.
I am a co-director of the recently established Program for Psychometrics and Measurement-Based Care (https://med.stanford.edu/sppmc.html) that aims to bring together world-leading expertise in clinical science, psychometrics, and big data analytics to bridge the gap between the science of measurement development and clinical practice and bring improvements to both clinical care and research. -
Maxine Umeh Garcia
Instructor, Neurosurgery
BioMaxine was born and raised in Sacramento, CA and transferred to UC Merced in 2007 after attending a community college for 2 years. She received her B.S. in Developmental Biology with a minor in Psychology in 2010. During the last year of her undergrad, Maxine was invited to do research in the lab of Dr. Michael Cleary, studying nervous system development. Because of this research experience, Maxine decided to stay at UC Merced to pursue her Master’s in Quantitative and Systems Biology, graduating in 2013. Immediately after graduating, she started her Ph.D. at UC Davis, where her research centered on triple negative breast cancer – a type of breast cancer that has a high incidence in Black and African women.
After completing her PhD in Biochemistry, Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology with an emphasis in Translational Research in 2019, Maxine became a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in the department of Neurosurgery. Dr. Umeh Garcia’s research focuses on breast cancers that metastasize (or travel) to the brain. Maxine was recently promoted to an instructor position in her department after receiving a major career development award from the National Cancer Institute (K99/R00), which will fund the remainder of her postdoctoral research and provide 3 years of funding for Maxine to establish her own independent research lab. Using her background in bench research, informatics, and translational research, Dr. Umeh Garcia hopes to bring together biologists, data scientists, and clinicians to make important advances in breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Additionally, as a women and underrepresented minority, Dr. Umeh Garcia is keenly interested in mentoring women and underrepresented students, and in developing novel strategic approaches to increasing diversity in biomedical sciences and academic research. -
Ndidi Unaka
Clinical Professor, Pediatrics
BioDr. Unaka is the inaugural Chief Health Equity Officer (CHEO) for Stanford Medicine Children’s Health (SMCH) and a Clinical Professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine. Prior to her transition to SMCH in July 2024, Dr. Unaka was a faculty member in the Division of Hospital Medicine at Cincinnati Children's Hospital. In addition to her clinical role as a pediatric hospitalist, Dr. Unaka served as the Associate Program Director of the Pediatric Residency Program from 2011 – January 2022. She served as the medical director of a 48- bed inpatient unit primarily for patients admitted to the Hospital Medicine service. In this role, Dr. Unaka was involved in several equity-oriented quality improvement initiatives which included work to identify, and address hunger among caregivers of hospitalized children insured by Medicaid.
Dr. Unaka worked on institution-level community health initiatives at Cincinnati Children’s. She served as the Medical Director of Quality Improvement and Data Analytics for Cincinnati Children’s Medicaid- focused, accountable care organization (HealthVine). In this role, she developed and led initiatives designed to improve the quality and efficiency of health care delivery to HealthVine’s patient population and helped lead the change management associated with the movement toward a population-health care model that improves quality, narrows equity gaps, streamlines care, and reduces costs. She helped define appropriate health care delivery, equity, and population health measures and quality benchmarks. Additionally, Dr. Unaka was a faculty lead within Cincinnati Children's Fisher Child Health Equity Center, and she specifically focused on working with operations leaders to ensure equity was embedded within all strategic plans, goals, and metrics across all sites of care. Dr. Unaka partnered with several colleagues to lead system-wide quality improvement initiatives including work accelerated via learning networks. She was the co-lead of Cincinnati Children's Health Equity Network (HEN), an initiative borne out of the pursuit of excellent and equitable health outcomes for youth in Greater Cincinnati. The HEN supports clinical teams seeking to eliminate disparities in child health outcomes by race, ethnicity, and/or socioeconomic status via targeted interventions and best practices by addressing both medical and social factors known to confer poor health outcomes. -
Crystal Unzueta, MD
Clinical Assistant Professor, Medicine - Primary Care and Population Health
BioDr. Unzueta is a board-certified family medicine physician. She specializes in providing primary care services to people of all ages. Her services include annual check-ups, monitoring chronic conditions, and performing minor in-office procedures.
She is also a clinical assistant professor in the Stanford School of Medicine Department of Family Medicine.
Dr. Unzueta’s practice focuses on providing compassionate and comprehensive care. She specializes in providing bilingual and bicultural care for patients in underserved populations. She has traveled to Belize on a medical mission to provide free, basic primary care to vulnerable communities. Her mentoring work includes building a network of Latino medical students to help support each other throughout medical school. She has also worked on numerous volunteer projects, such as researching the benefits of a community yoga program for minorities in underserved areas. -
Alexander Eckehart Urban
Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Major Laboratories and Clinical Translational Neurosciences Incubator) and of Genetics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsComplex behavioral and neuropsychiatric phenotypes often have a strong genetic component. This genetic component is often extremely complex and difficult to dissect. The current revolution in genome technology means that we can avail ourselves to tools that make it possible for the first time to begin understanding the complex genetic and epigenetic interactions at the basis of the human mind.
