School of Medicine


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  • Alireza Raissadati

    Alireza Raissadati

    Postdoctoral Medical Fellow, Cardiology
    Fellow in Pediatrics - Cardiology

    BioAlireza Raissadati, MD, PhD is a fellow in pediatric cardiology at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Stanford. He obtained his medical degree, PhD in medicine, and PhD in biotechnology from University of Helsinki. His research focused on population-based long-term outcomes of patients following congenital heart surgery and the role of vascular growth factors and gene vectors as management strategies for heart transplant rejection.

    Dr. Raissadati completed his pediatric residency training at Boston Children's Hospital/Harvard Medical School and Boston Medical Center in Boston, MA. His clinical interest lies in treating pediatric patients with heart failure and following heart transplantation. His research is focused on understanding the intricacies of heart transplant rejection to find new therapeutic targets for acute rejection and coronary artery vasculopathy of the heart transplant.

  • Mahalakshmi Ramamurthy

    Mahalakshmi Ramamurthy

    Postdoctoral Scholar, Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics

    BioI am a postdoctoral scholar working with Dr. Jason Yeatman. With a background in optometry, vision science, psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience my long-term goal is to study the intersection of basic visual mechanisms and various neurodevelopmental disorders and to extend this understanding in creating effective early screening tools, and in advancing evidence-based therapeutic and remediation programs. Inherent to this interest is the need for developmental data in large and demographically diverse populations. I strongly believe that such inclusive research not only contributes to scientific advancements but can go beyond to bridge health and education disparities. I joined the Brain Development and Education lab at Stanford after taking a medical break. During my break, I had the opportunity to run a vision screening camp for a school for differently abled children. Many children with a learning disability are misunderstood to have a vision problem making optometrist the first people to diagnose the disability but intervention stops at that point. This kindled my curiosity and I soon discovered the lack of converging understanding on the role of visual processing in dyslexia that in turn limits the possibility of evidence-based intervention. I was deeply interested in understanding the role of vision and attention in dyslexia. Over the past three years, I developed visual measures based on the most cited hypothesis in the dyslexia literature. These measures were designed such that they inform us about the hypothesized construct in an ecologically relevant paradigm for reading. I developed a validation scheme where measures are first deployed on the adult population and various behavioral and eye tracking aspects of the measure are characterized. The measures are built on a browser-based platform (using PsychoPy© and jsPsych©) where they are validated against the laboratory-based measurements. All the web-based visual measures have timing parameters optimized to ensure measurement validity. Over the past year, I have focused on optimizing these visual measures to make them adaptive, short, and reliable for kindergarten and first grade children. My goal in the current project is to leverage this battery of visual measures to understand how visual deficits are linked to the development of reading disorders. The web-based assessments are designed to be deployed to a large and diverse population of unprecedented scale.

  • Rameshwar (Ram) Rao MD PhD

    Rameshwar (Ram) Rao MD PhD

    Postdoctoral Medical Fellow, Hematology-Oncology
    Fellow in Pediatrics - Hematology & Oncology

    BioMy scientific training spans over a decade of published research in the fields of vascularized bone tissue engineering, biomineralization, gene therapy, and spectral ultrasound. I earned my BS from UC Davis and MS/PhD in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan. I have aimed to form highly collaborative and multidisciplinary research groups at each level of training. This work has resulted in 21 publications, award-winning manuscripts, and multiple national conference research awards. My successful research career began during my undergraduate studies where my work in Prof. Kent Leach’s lab resulted in 3 publications and the Department of Biomedical Engineering Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award. My graduate thesis under the guidance of Prof. Jan Stegemann resulted in 12 publications (7 as first author) in high quality, peer-reviewed journals in the fields of engineering and biotechnology. My graduate studies were funded by an NIH T32 Training grant and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. My graduate work culminated in the 2013 Outstanding PhD Research Award from the Society for Biomaterials (SFB) and the 2013 Outstanding Student Award from the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine Society (TERMIS). Recognizing the gap in translation of bioengineering research into clinical practice, I opted to pursue an MD at the University of Michigan to become the physician-scientist that identifies clinical problems, engineers the solution, and delivers it back to the patient to advance treatments and improve survival outcomes. My success continued through medical school with 4 clinical research manuscripts and Graduation with Distinction in Research, awarded to 10% of the class.

    In the next phase of my training, I will complete my fellowship in Pediatric Hematology/Oncology at Stanford through the Accelerated Research Pathway by the American Board of Pediatrics. Prof. Sarah Heilshorn, Associate Chair of Materials Science at Stanford, will be my primary research and career development mentor. Together, we have designed an innovative approach targeting the extracellular matrix to improve survival outcomes in pediatric osteosarcoma.