Browse School of Medicine | Stanford Profiles

John Robert Caton

Clinical Associate Professor, Pediatrics - Cardiology

BioI am a general Pediatric Cardiologist providing clinical care for a wide variety of congenital and acquired heart disease. I see patients in the outpatient clinic and the inpatient Cardiology Acute Care Unit. I also interpret echocardiograms and exercise studies performed at LPCH.

Sierra Mei Lin Centkowski, MD

Clinical Assistant Professor, Dermatology

BioDr. Sierra Mei Lin Centkowski is a board-certified Clinical Assistant Professor of Dermatology at Stanford University. She received both her medical degree and Master’s in Bioethics from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and completed her dermatology residency at Stanford. Her clinical interests include general dermatology, including skin cancer, acne, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis and dermatologic surgery. She believes that patient empowerment and partnership provide the foundation for effective, compassionate and holistic care.

Contact Info
Mail Code: 5168
sierrac@stanford.edu

Alma-Martina Cepika

Instructor, Pediatrics - Stem Cell Transplantation

BioDr. Cepika is an immunologist with an extensive background in translational research, autoimmunity, autoinflammation, and human systems immunology. Her goal is to understand the mechanisms governing immunological tolerance, and to leverage this knowledge to cure currently incurable diseases.

Dr. Cepika received her MD degree and a PhD in Immunology from the University of Zagreb School of Medicine in Croatia. There, she focused on the immunomonitoring of patients with lupus, identifying how circulating DNA levels changed with therapy. Subsequently, she joined the lab of Dr. Virginia Pascual at the Baylor Institute for Immunology Research in Dallas, Texas. Dr. Pascual had previously discovered that IL-1beta is a key pathogenic player in systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis (sJIA), but the immune alterations contributing to IL-1beta-mediated inflammation remained unknown. To address this, Dr. Cepika developed a 3D in vitro stimulation assay to evaluate immune responses of blood leukocytes of pediatric sJIA patients. In combination with integrated bioinformatics analysis, this approach identified aberrant cellular responses, transcriptional pathways and genes that shed new light on immune dysregulation in sJIA. This assay (tollgene.org) can be further applied to dissect underlying immunopathogenic mechanisms in many human disorders.

Currently, Dr. Cepika is an Instructor in the Pediatric Division of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. There, she is working to uncover the underlying molecular mechanisms that govern the differentiation and function of antigen-inducible regulatory T cells called type 1 regulatory T (Tr1) cells, and use this knowledge to design Tr1 cell-based therapies to improve the outcomes of patients with cancer, autoimmunity, or receiving allogeneic cell or organ transplants.