School of Medicine
Showing 1-10 of 221 Results
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Yonatan Winetraub
Instructor, Structural Biology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy interests span non-invasive imaging for early cancer diagnosis and space exploration.
I'm focusing on utilizing Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and machine learning to create virtual histology tools to image cancer non invasively at a single cell resolution, allowing physicians to skip biopsy (read more about the research). Prior to my PhD at Stanford, I co-founded SpaceIL, a non-profit organization that launched the first private interplanetary robotic mission to the Moon launched 2019. -
John Wachtel
Clinical Professor, Obstetrics & Gynecology - General
BioDr. Wachtel has been practicing general obstetrics and gynecology for 38 years and has personally delivered over 6,000 babies. He continues to have an active practice in general ob/gyn, serving as a Clinical Professor. He is a nationally recognized expert in patient safety, peer review and data driven quality improvement and has served numerous roles in the field and lectured nationally and internationally. Dr. Wachtel is the Assistant Secretary for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and currently serves on the ACOG National Executive Board and Executive Committee. He is the immediate Past Chair for ACOG District IX (the state of California) and also previously served for three years on the ACOG national Executive Board. He also serves on the Executive Committee for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative and is an Expert Medical Reviewer for the Medical Board of California.
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Lynn C. Waelde, Ph.D.
Adjunct Clinical Professor, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
BioLynn C. Waelde, Ph.D. is an Adjunct Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine and Professor Emeritus in the Psychology Department at Palo Alto University. Dr. Waelde’s many collaborative publications address the impacts of traumatic events and ways to use mindfulness and meditation to promote resilience and recovery from stress and trauma. She founded and directed the Inner Resources Center which offered intervention groups and trainings to thousands of participants, clients, and therapists over the past 15 years. Dr. Waelde is the author of Mindfulness and Meditation in Trauma Treatment: The Inner Resources for Stress Program, published in 2022. She has taken a special interest in family caregivers and the Inner Resources for Stress program has been named a Best Practice by the Benjamin Rose Institute on Aging. She recently coauthored Family Caregiver Distress, which is forthcoming in 2023. She is on the editorial board of Journal of Traumatic Stress and an Associate Editor of Mindfulness.
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Todd Wagner
Professor (Research) of Surgery (Surgery Policy Improvement Research and Education Center) and, by courtesy, of Health Policy
BioTodd Wagner is a Professor in the Department of Surgery at Stanford University. He studies health information, efficiency and value, and health care access. He is particularly interested in developing learning health care systems that provide high value care. In addition to his role at Stanford, he Directs the Health Economics Resource Center at the Palo Alto VA, where he is a VA Research Career Scientist and he co-directs the VA/NCI Big Data Fellowship.
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Karen Wai, MD
Clinical Assistant Professor, Ophthalmology
BioDr. Wai is a board-certified ophthalmologist and fellowship-trained vitreoretinal surgeon with Stanford Health Care Byers Eye Institute. She is also a clinical assistant professor of ophthalmology in the Department of Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Dr. Wai is a retina specialist who diagnoses and treats retinal and macular diseases, including age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, retinal vascular occlusions (blockages), and retinal tears/detachments. The retina is a tissue layer in the back of the eye. It converts light into signals that the brain then interprets as images. The macula is the part of the retina responsible for central (straight ahead) vision. Diseases of the retina and macula can cause low vision and vision loss.
Dr. Wai’s research interests include working with data from electronic health record databases to improve patient outcomes. She has researched morbidity and mortality (illness and death) rates in patients with retinal vein occlusions and retinal artery occlusions. A retinal vein occlusion is a blocked vein to the retina that can cause vision loss. A retinal artery occlusion is when an artery to the retina is blocked, which is also sometimes referred to as eye stroke. Dr. Wai has also examined the effects of systemic medications on the retina. She has won several ophthalmology awards, including the Heed Fellowship and Harvard Medical School’s Excellence in Clinical Instruction Resident Award.
Dr. Wai has published in more than 40 peer-reviewed journals, including Ophthalmology, American Journal of Ophthalmology, and JAMA Ophthalmology. She has presented research at meetings and conferences around the United States.
Dr. Wai is a member of the American Board of Ophthalmology. -
Soichi Wakatsuki
Professor of Photon Science and of Structural Biology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsUbiquitin signaling: structure, function, and therapeutics
Ubiquitin is a small protein modifier that is ubiquitously produced in the cells and takes part in the regulation of a wide range of cellular activities such as gene transcription and protein turnover. The key to the diversity of the ubiquitin roles in cells is that it is capable of interacting with other cellular proteins either as a single molecule or as different types of chains. Ubiquitin chains are produced through polymerization of ubiquitin molecules via any of their seven internal lysine residues or the N-terminal methionine residue. Covalent interaction of ubiquitin with other proteins is known as ubiquitination which is carried out through an enzymatic cascade composed of the ubiquitin-activating (E1), ubiquitin-conjugating (E2), and ubiquitin ligase (E3) enzymes. The ubiquitin signals are decoded by the ubiquitin-binding domains (UBDs). These domains often specifically recognize and non-covalently bind to the different ubiquitin species, resulting in distinct signaling outcomes.
We apply a combination of the structural (including protein crystallography, small angle x-ray scattering, cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) etc.), biocomputational and biochemical techniques to study the ubiquitylation and deubiquitination processes, and recognition of the ubiquitin chains by the proteins harboring ubiquitin-binding domains. Current research interests including SARS-COV2 proteases and their interactions with polyubiquitin chains and ubiquitin pathways in host cell responses, with an ultimate goal of providing strategies for effective therapeutics with reduced levels of side effects.
Protein self-assembly processes and applications.
The Surface layers (S-layers) are crystalline protein coats surrounding microbial cells. S-layer proteins (SLPs) regulate their extracellular, self-assembly by crystallizing when exposed to an environmental trigger. We have demonstrated that the Caulobacter crescentus SLP readily crystallizes into sheets both in vivo and in vitro via a calcium-triggered multistep assembly pathway. Observing crystallization using a time course of Cryo-EM imaging has revealed a crystalline intermediate wherein N-terminal nucleation domains exhibit motional dynamics with respect to rigid lattice-forming crystallization domains. Rate enhancement of protein crystallization by a discrete nucleation domain may enable engineering of kinetically controllable self-assembling 2D macromolecular nanomaterials. In particular, this is inspiring designing robust novel platform for nano-scale protein scaffolds for structure-based drug design and nano-bioreactor design for the carbon-cycling enzyme pathway enzymes. Current research focuses on development of nano-scaffolds for high throughput in vitro assays and structure determination of small and flexible proteins and their interaction partners using Cryo-EM, and applying them to cancer and anti-viral therapeutics.
Multiscale imaging and technology developments.
Multimodal, multiscale imaging modalities will be developed and integrated to understand how molecular level events of key enzymes and protein network are connected to cellular and multi-cellular functions through intra-cellular organization and interactions of the key machineries in the cell. Larger scale organization of these proteins will be studied by solution X-ray scattering and Cryo-EM. Their spatio-temporal arrangements in the cell organelles, membranes, and cytosol will be further studied by X-ray fluorescence imaging and correlated with cryoEM and super-resolution optical microscopy. We apply these multiscale integrative imaging approaches to biomedical, and environmental and bioenergy research questions with Stanford, DOE national labs, and other domestic and international collaborators.
