School of Medicine
Showing 1-90 of 90 Results
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Lisa Bruckert
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Neonatal and Developmental Medicine
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCerebellar Circuitry in Development, Learning, and Clinical Conditions: While many recent studies document the importance of cerebral white matter circuitry in human development and learning, it remains unclear how circuits that connect cerebellum to the rest of the brain change with age, experience, and disease. I am interested in examining the white matter circuitry of the human cerebellum in normal development and in relation to healthy and disordered cognitive functioning.
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Christine Bui
Postdoctoral Medical Fellow, Cardiology
Fellow in Pediatrics - CardiologyCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsAlong with my internal medicine and pediatrics background, I have always been interested in palliative care and end of life. I would like to apply these interests to pediatric cardiology and adult congenital cardiology, as these patients often are critically or chronically ill, and would benefit from a palliative care perspective.
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Shivani Gaiha
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Adolescent Medicine
BioShivani is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Halpern-Felsher Lab in Adolescent Medicine. Shivani uses mixed-methods experimental and implementation research to develop and evaluate real-world public health education programs and methodologies that lead to healthy behaviors. Her current research focuses on three key areas:
(1) Assessing youth patterns of use and perceptions about electronic cigarettes, new tobacco products and other substances;
(2) Understanding why youth use e-cigarettes vapes as a means to cope with stress and manage mental health problems, such as depression; and
(3) Evaluating school-based educational interventions to reduce e-cigarette use.
In addition to research, Shivani enjoys teaching research methods and mentoring high school and college students.
Through her Ph.D., Shivani developed and evaluated an arts-based educational program to reduce mental-health-related stigma in India. The program had a large, significant and positive effect on participants - they desired greater social proximity to people living with mental health problems. During this time, she also became interested in the intersection between mental health and substance use, a common theme in her interactions with youth. She also refined her skills in statistical analysis, study design and project management. Her interdisciplinary Ph.D. research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine was supported by the PHFI-UKC Wellcome Trust Capacity Strengthening Award (2014-18). In 2017, she received the LSHTM Public Engagement Small Grant to strengthen school teachers’ understanding of mental health problems, which resulted in a monthly column in a popular educational magazine, reaching approximately 40,000 Indian teachers every month.
Previously, Shivani designed, implemented and evaluated health communication and behavior change initiatives at the Public Health Foundation of India from 2008-2014. She is especially passionate about designing educational public health programs to break silences around contentious public health issues, using participatory media and entertainment-education. At PHFI, she spearheaded health communication and community engagement programs aimed at changing behavior related to healthy lifestyles, sexual and reproductive health, maternal and neonatal care, menstrual hygiene, avoidable blindness and mental health. In partnership with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India and community-based organizations, she led three educational interventions: a community awareness campaign, which improved treatment-seeking behavior for mental disorders in underserved areas; a website targeting young people to improve their lifestyle; and entertainment-education-based participatory action research to improve sexual and reproductive health. -
Adriana Verenisse Gonzalez Sandoval
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Human Gene Therapy
BioAdriana Gonzalez is a postdoctoral researcher, who is part of the Walter & Berry Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Her research is related to gene therapy and chromatin organization, seeking for a better understanding of viral gene therapy mechanisms. Adriana holds a B.S. in Genomic Sciences from the National University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico and a Ph.D. in Genetics form the University of Basel, Switzerland. She is the author of several publications related to silent chromatin organization. Adriana is eager to learn new techniques and immerse into the field of AAV gene therapy and contribute to it.
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Alexander Kaiser
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cardiology
BioAlexander D. Kaiser is an applied mathematician who researches modeling and simulation of heart mechanics. His doctoral work focused on the mitral valve. He currently works in the Stanford Cardiovascular Biomechanics Computation Laboratory, led by Alison Marsden, on modeling cardiac disease.
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Nicole Krentz
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Endocrinology and Metabolism
BioNicole completed her PhD at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Francis Lynn in 2018. Her PhD research focused on pancreas development and endocrine cell genesis using mouse embryos and human embryonic stem cell differentiation as models. In 2018, Nicole joined Anna Gloyn’s group at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford. For her post-doctoral studies, Nicole is investigating the role of diabetes associated genes in pancreas development using genome-editing in human induced pluripotent stem cell models. In 2020, Nicole relocated to Stanford University where she will continue her post-doctoral research on the translation of genetic association signals for type 2 diabetes.
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Manjari Narayan
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Developmental Behavioral Pediatrics
BioManjari Narayan is a postdoctoral research scholar in the School of Medicine. Her current research interests combine high dimensional statistics, network science & statistical causal inference methods to analyze changes in brain networks either longitudinally or due to experimental perturbations. She received a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from Rice University in 2016 under the supervision of Dr. Genevera Allen and a B.S in Electrical Engineering from UIUC in 2007. Previously, she was a postdoctoral scholar in Psychiatry under the mentorship of Amit Etkin. Her dissertation work has been recognized by numerous student paper awards including the 2016 ENAR Distinguished Student Paper Award from the International Biometrics Society and the 2013 best paper travel award in Pattern Recognition in Neuroimaging.
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Martin Pfaller
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cardiology
BioI am a postdoc in the group of Alison Marsden, where I focus on cardiovascular blood flow simulations. As a visiting student researcher with Ellen Kuhl at Stanford, I became fascinated with the application of computer simulations to medical problems. I graduated from the Technical University of Munich with a Ph.D., where I co-founded a group dedicated to the prediction of cardiovascular diseases using simulation methods. Since then, my research mission has been to make simulations more accurate and more accessible for clinicians. During my doctoral studies, we enhanced mechanical models by studying the interaction between the myocardium and the pericardium. We demonstrated how model order reduction could be used to speed up model personalization from patient data, such as cine MRI or blood pressure measurements. We also showed how simulations could enable patient-specific therapy planning of radiofrequency catheter ablation in atrial fibrillation. I am currently working on an NIH-funded project to improve reproducibility in blood flow simulations with data curation methods. We are developing a public repository of patient-specific simulations where other scientists can submit their simulations and automatically regain feedback. My long-term vision is to develop combined physics-based and data-based approaches to enable personalized therapies for the cardiovascular system.
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Shamma Shakila Rahman
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Human Gene Therapy
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsImmunological pathophysiology of Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome
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Izabela Mauricio Rezende
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Infectious Diseases
BioI have a B.S. in Biology, M.Sc. in Immunology and Infectious diseases, Ph.D. in Microbiology, and a broad background in virology/microbiology and molecular biology applied to viral infectious diseases. I have a vast knowledge of classical virology, molecular biology, phylogenetic analysis, serological, and molecular diagnosis. I am working on recent YF outbreaks, focusing on viral dynamics, ecology, diagnosis, and the investigation of virological, immunological, and clinical aspects during the course of infection. We have supported the hospital and Secretary of Health of Minas Gerais with some laboratory testing applied to diagnosis of YF, viral genotyping related to YF patients suspected to have adverse events following vaccination, and other analysis. We also have been working on dynamics of the outbreak, on the virological, epidemiological, and immunological aspects during the course of yellow fever. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we also supported the Brazilian Ministry of Health with the SARS-CoV-2 diagnosis in human samples and also in the investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA in surfaces of density public areas of Belo Horizonte. Since Nov/2018 I had been an editor in the journal Docência do Ensino Superior (RDES / GIZ / UFMG) and in Jan/2020 I became Editor-in-Chief.
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Ece Canan Sayitoglu
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stem Cell Transplantation
BioExperienced Postdoctoral Researcher with a demonstrated history of working with genetically modified immune cells. Skilled in Genome Editing/Crispr, Multi-color Flow Cytometry, Molecular Biology, Cell Culture and Immunotherapy.
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Priscila Ferreira Slepicka
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Stem Cell Transplantation
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy postdoctoral research focuses on investigating innovative gene therapy strategies to improve stem cell transplantation in patients with pediatric malignant and non-malignant diseases.
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Jason Szafron
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cardiology
BioJason Szafron is a post-doctoral scholar in the lab of Alison Marsden studying growth and remodeling in the pulmonary vasculature. He completed his PhD in biomedical engineering at Yale University where his dissertation work focused on the design of tissue engineered vascular grafts for use in the Fontan procedure.
