School of Medicine


Showing 1-10 of 38 Results

  • Jennifer Anne Rabbitts

    Jennifer Anne Rabbitts

    Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative & Pain Medicine (Pediatric) and, by courtesy, of Pediatrics

    BioJennifer Rabbitts, MD is Professor and Chief of Pediatric Pain Management at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Rabbitts directs an NIH-funded research laboratory focused on improving long-term pain and health outcomes in children and adolescents undergoing surgery. Her research is devoted to understanding and preventing chronic postsurgical pain, a disabling condition affecting 20% youth undergoing major surgery. Her current research studies investigate the role of biopsychosocial mechanisms including child psychosocial factors, parental/family factors, and psychophysical processes underlying acute to chronic pain transition. Current clinical trials focus on testing feasibility and efficacy of psychosocial and complementary and integrative interventions to improve acute postsurgical pain and prevent transition to chronic pain.

    Dr Rabbitts is passionate about mentoring, and is a PI for the NIH HEAL PAIN Training grant in Maternal and Child Pain and Health at Stanford. She serves as section editor for Psychology, Psychiatry and Brain Neuroscience Section for Pain Medicine, and serves on the editorial boards for Pediatric Anesthesia and Journal of Pain.

    Read more about the Rabbitts Lab and opportunities here: https://rabbittslab.stanford.edu/

  • Marlene Rabinovitch

    Marlene Rabinovitch

    Dwight and Vera Dunlevie Professor of Pediatric Cardiology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOur research program seeks to identify the cellular and molecular programs regulating vascular and lung development, through the use of cultured cells and tissues and mouse and rat models. We then determine how these programs are perturbed by genetic abnormalities or injurious processes associated with disease, focusing on pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a fatal complication in children with heart defects, and a condition of unknown etiology primarily in young women.

  • Nilima Ragavan

    Nilima Ragavan

    Clinical Professor, Pediatrics - Neonatology

    BioDr Nilima Ragavan is an experienced clinician who has expertise in the care of newborns ranging from critically ill to well babies. She is passionate about education and is the director of the Stanford pediatric resident rotation in the neonatal intensive care unit. She has led several multi disciplinary teams to India, and has organized and conducted international neonatal and perinatal conferences. She is a member of the palliative care team and serves as a mentor to junior faculty. She is the medical director of the Packard Special Care nursery at Sequoia, and also attends in the NICU at Stanford.

  • Alireza Raissadati, MD, PhD

    Alireza Raissadati, MD, PhD

    Instructor, Pediatrics - Cardiology
    Fellow in Pediatrics - Cardiology

    BioDr. Raissadati is a Pediatric Cardiology Attending Physician at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital specializing in Advanced Cardiac Therapies. With dual PhDs in medicine and biotechnology, his research focuses on developing non-invasive molecular tools to understand and treat heart failure and transplant rejection, with the goal of identifying new diagnostic and therapeutic targets for acute rejection and vasculopathy of the heart transplant.

  • Nitya Rajeshuni

    Nitya Rajeshuni

    Clinical Instructor, Pediatrics - Critical Care

    BioDr. Rajeshuni is a Clinical Instructor in the Department of Pediatrics at Stanford University. She is faculty with the Stanford Center for Asian Health Research and Education (CARE), the Center for Innovation in Global Health (CIGH), and the Maternal Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI). Dr. Rajeshuni earned her BS, MS in Epidemiology and Clinical Research, and MD from Stanford University. She completed residency training at the University of Pennsylvania and a Biodesign innovation fellowship at Harvard University.

    Her research centers on advancing health equity among racial and ethnic minorities, with a particular focus on Asian populations. She investigates health disparities, access to care, and the implementation and evaluation of public and digital health solutions in the U.S. and low- and middle-income countries. Current projects include studying the impacts of maternal education and intimate partner violence on child outcomes. Her broader interests encompass promoting resilience and well-being in vulnerable communities worldwide and leveraging digital health to reduce health disparities. She is a recipient of a Career Development Award through the CHIME Health Equity Scholars program funded by PCORI and will be studying the effects of social supports on resilience in pregnant people of minority descent. Her global collaborations include work with NGO Arogya World on diabetes prevention in India. She is also the Director of South Asia Outreach at Stanford CARE.

    Dr. Rajeshuni is deeply committed to teaching and mentorship. At Stanford, she serves as Associate Program Director for CARE Scholars and the Team Science Fellowship, year-long data science programs that provide emerging researchers with structured mentorship, advanced analytical skills, and interdisciplinary collaboration to drive health equity research. She is Faculty Co-Director of FAMMED 210: The Healer’s Art, an international program offering a reflective, experiential course designed to nurture compassion, resilience, and the humanistic values essential to medicine. She mentors graduate, undergraduate, and high school students at Stanford and beyond, and serves as Faculty Advisor in the Department of Human Biology.

    Outside academia, Dr. Rajeshuni is an accomplished vocalist, performing professionally with world music ensembles Wobbly World and San Francisco’s Peña Pachamama Carnaval Arts Program.

  • Sneha Ramakrishna

    Sneha Ramakrishna

    Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Hematology/Oncology)

    BioSneha Ramakrishna obtained her B. A. from the University of Chicago and her M.D. from the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. In medical school, through the Howard Hughes Medical Research Scholar Award, she joined Dr. Crystal Mackall’s laboratory, where she designed and developed various GD2 CAR-Ts and tested them in preclinical models. During her residency training in Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, she cared for some of the first patients treated with CD19 CAR T cells, learning the power of this therapy first-hand. During her fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at the Johns Hopkins/National Cancer Institute combined program, she worked with Dr. Terry Fry. She evaluated the mechanism of CD22 CAR T cell relapse in patients by developing an antigen escape model and establishing a deeper understanding of the effects of antigen density on CAR-T phenotype, expansion, and persistence (Fry…Ramakrishna…Mackall Nat Med, 2018; Ramakrishna, et al., Clinical Cancer Research, 2019). Since arriving at Stanford, Dr. Ramakrishna leads an interdisciplinary team that designs, develops, and successfully implements a robust correlative science platform for our novel CAR-T therapies. Analyzing patient samples from our first-in-human GD2 CAR-T trial (NCT04196413) treating a universally fatal cancer, diffuse midline glioma (DMG), we identified that intracerebroventricular CAR-T administration correlates with enhanced pro-inflammatory cytokines and reduced immunosuppressive cell populations in cerebrospinal fluid as compared to intravenous CAR-T administration (Majzner*, Ramakrishna*, et al., Nature 2022 *co-first authors). Her research program evaluates unique sets of patient samples using novel single-cell immune profiling to identify the drivers of CAR-T success or failure. Building on these findings, her team assesses approaches to enhance CAR-T efficacy and translate these findings to the clinic.

    Clinically, Dr. Ramakrishna cares for children with solid tumors and treats hematologic, solid, and brain tumor pediatric patients with CAR T cell therapies in the Cancer Cellular Therapies program.

  • Julia Raney

    Julia Raney

    Clinical Assistant Professor, Pediatrics - Adolescent Medicine

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAdolescents are dying from drug overdoses at unprecedented rates, largely secondary to fentanyl contamination in the drug supply. A Youth Overdose Prevention Toolkit for school-based health centers is needed to combat this trend. The toolkit should include key stakeholder-informed harm reduction approaches that focus on reducing injury or death from fentanyl and other opioids without exclusively recommending abstinence; this approach is evidence-based and critical to saving lives.

  • Anoop Rao

    Anoop Rao

    Clinical Associate Professor, Pediatrics - Neonatology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWearable senors, unobtrusive vital sign monitoring, natural language processing/text mining