School of Medicine
Showing 1-34 of 34 Results
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Fabiana Aellos
Postdoctoral Scholar, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy background in implantology and periodontology, combined with my microsurgical skills, has allowed me to tackle complex oral surgeries and intricate procedures. These skills have been instrumental in advancing the field and, more importantly, in improving the outcomes and well-being of my patients.
I've always believed in bridging the gap between fundamental research and its practical application in clinical settings. By amalgamating my clinical experiences with laboratory investigations, I've contributed to the development of surgical models that closely mimic human diseases and conditions. This approach enhances our understanding of how tissues respond to surgical interventions, paving the way for more effective treatments.
My research into mucosal integration of percutaneous implants and the role of Wnt signaling in implant osseointegration seeks to optimize the interaction between implants and surrounding tissues. This improved integration not only bolsters the stability of dental implants but also ensures their long-term success, ultimately enhancing the quality of life for our patients. My involvement in regenerative medicine research is driven by a passion for developing innovative strategies for tissue repair and regeneration. This work has the potential to revolutionize how dental professionals address challenges such as bone defects and periodontal tissue loss, leading to better patient outcomes.
One of my greatest joys is nurturing the next generation of dental professionals. Through my dedication to training and mentoring undergraduate and pre-dental students, I aim to equip them with advanced research and clinical skills. Fostering curiosity and empowering young minds to contribute to scientific advancements in dentistry is a responsibility I hold close to my heart.
I'm grateful for the international grants and collaborations that support my work. These resources not only enable my research but also contribute to the broader progress of our research laboratory. Together, we pursue innovative projects that have the potential to impact dental care on a global scale.
Recognizing the importance of effective communication, I've committed myself to enhancing my communication skills and engaging in professional development activities. Effective communication is key to translating research findings into clinical practice, influencing dental policies, and sharing knowledge within our professional community.
As I gaze into the future, I envision a dentistry landscape where my work may lead to more advanced and efficacious dental treatments, refined surgical techniques, and enhanced patient care. In the challenging realm of bone-anchored percutaneous implants, plagued by the persistent issue of implant failure due to infections at the soft tissue-implant interface, I confront this concern head-on. My mission is to meticulously investigate the biological and biophysical intricacies of this interface, with the aim of enhancing its barrier function through innovative strategies.
My journey from the confines of clinical practice to the expansive realms of research has been underpinned by a humble desire—a desire to forge a lasting impact on the field of dentistry, to ignite the flames of curiosity in future generations of dentists, and to contribute to the enhancement of dental care for all. -
M. Usman Ahmad
Postdoctoral Scholar, General Surgery
BioDr. Ahmad is currently a postdoctoral research fellow under the mentorship of Prof. George Poultsides in the Section of Surgical Oncology at Stanford University. In addition, he engages in basic scientific inquiry in tumor immunology under Prof. Amanda Kirane. As part of an interdisciplinary team, Dr. Ahmad is currently investigating the role of the intratumor microbiome and response to treatment for patients with pancreatic cancer funded by the Stanford Cancer Institute (SCI) and Sarafan ChEM-H. He entered his current position after completing 2 years of general surgical training at Stanford University and the University of Colorado.
Dr. Ahmad received his medical education at the University of South Florida (USF) where he was the recipient of numerous scholarships and awards including the Galen Scholarship, SELECT Koch Award, Anderson SELECT Scholarship, and Osler Award. During medical school, Dr. Ahmad was productive in both basic science and research resulting in 3 peer-reviewed publications and induction into the Robert A. Good Honor Society bestowed upon the top 10% of medical students in research. Dr. Ahmad also received the Alpha Omega Alpha Carolyn A. Kuckein Fellowship to continue policy work on improving the organ supply for Americans requiring organ transplants. Early in medical school, he conducted basic scientific work transplanting immune cells on metastatic melanoma in a mouse model while a visiting researcher under Prof. Gavin Pettigrew & Prof. Reza Mottalebzadeh in the Department of Surgery at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Dr. Ahmad was also active in health policy work culminating in a role as Vice Chair of the Medical Student Section Committee of Legislation & Advocacy for the American Medical Association with several roles at university, county, and state levels in both Florida and Pennsylvania. Dr. Ahmad has an extensive record of volunteer activity serving at risk populations in the United States during medical school including HIV, LGBTQ, pediatric, and homeless populations. In addition, he spends time mentoring and reviewing scholarship applications for Greenhouse Scholars, program focused on developing under-resourced high performing American students from high school to first career and beyond.
Prior to medical school, Dr. Ahmad had a career in the life sciences industry after receiving a degree in Economics from Northwestern University where he primarily focused on bringing new medical technology to market. Dr. Ahmad was part of a team selected by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce as the most innovative company in 2010 winning a state-wide competition. He also volunteered his time as a board member re-vitalizing a 25 year old arts organization in Chicago and helping to develop a business incubator in Detroit shortly after the Great Recession.
Dr. Ahmad is a native Chicagoan hailing from a large family raised near the Southside of Chicago. In his free time he enjoys cooking, reading, history, traveling, working on cars, and developing his interest in aviation. -
Albaraa A Basfar
Postdoctoral Scholar, General and Vascular Surgery
BioAlbaraa Basfar Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the S-SPIRE Center at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Research and Evaluation from Ohio University in 2023. His research interests include program evaluation, research methodology, and education.
Dr. Basfar has a strong quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research background. He has experience in managing programs, conducting research, and analyzing data. He is also proficient in using SAS, R, SPSS, and Python.
Prior to joining the S-SPIRE Center, Dr. Basfar was a Research Analyst at Pensacola State College. In this role, he was responsible for compiling, arranging, and presenting data reports for several communities and college departments. He also created and analyzed surveys, Tableau visual dashboards, and conducted data research related to grants and accreditations.
Dr. Basfar is passionate about using research to improve education and positively impact students' lives. He is excited to continue his research at S-SPIRE and contribute to the field of Pipeline Programs. -
Yi Liu
Postdoctoral Scholar, General Surgery
BioDr. Liu is a postdoc fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also a Chinese board-certificated, fellowship-trained clinician with demonstrated clinical and research expertise in Critical Care Medicine and interdisciplinary studies of nanomedicine.
She received her residency and fellowship training (Emergency Medicine & Intensive Care Medicine) at Chongqing Medical University (China) and Sorbonne Université (Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France). In addition to her MD degree, She undertook PhD training in nanomedicine for cancer/infectious disease early detection and to identify potential new treatments for severe infectious/cancer patients. Her postdoctoral training in nano-enabled therapeutic at Stanford has helped advance her knowledge of how nanotechnology improve the application of nanomedicine in early diagnosis of diseases. She has published numerous articles on a wide range of nanoplatforms-related topics. She has also received several academic and teaching awards related to clinical skills and research on molecular imaging. -
Kenneth Nieser
Postdoctoral Scholar, General Surgery
BioKen Nieser is a postdoctoral research fellow through the Big Data-Scientist Training Enhancement Program (BD-STEP) at the Palo Alto VA and in the Department of Surgery, Stanford School of Medicine. Ken received a BA in Physics and Mathematics from Swarthmore College and a PhD in Epidemiology with a minor in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During his PhD, Ken developed and applied statistical methods for improving algorithmic fairness of data analyses used to inform screening and treatment of mental illnesses. These projects included development of an approach for detecting sample subsets with differential psychological symptom patterns and a sample representation reweighting method for improving the precision of subgroup-specific treatment effect estimation.
Ken’s current research interests are in health care inequities, quality measurement, and algorithmic fairness. During his fellowship, Ken will be working on investigating the statistical reliability of quality measures and decomposing health care disparities to provide practical information for resolving inequities, with applications in mental health care and surgical care. -
Maia Nofal, MD MPH
Postdoctoral Scholar, General Surgery
BioDr. Maia Nofal is a general surgery resident at Boston Medical Center and a post-doctoral NIH-Fogarty Fellow in the Global Health Equity Scholars program at Stanford. Her research interests focus on improving peri-operative surgical care in low-resource settings. She works primarily on adapting implementation and evaluation of the Clean Cut program, a surgical quality improvement program run by Lifebox to reduce surgical site infections through strengthening systems of infection prevention and control. More recently, her work has focused on antibiotic prescribing practices, resistance patterns, and antibiotic stewardship systems at partner hospitals Ethiopia where she is developing quality improvement initiatives to promote evidence-based prescribing practices.
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Calvin Perumalla
Postdoctoral Scholar, General Surgery
BioDr. Calvin Perumalla joined the Stanford's TECI Center team as a postdoctoral researcher in February 2021. He received his Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of South Florida. His graduate research work involved building a novel cardiac rhythm monitor with enhanced diagnostic capabilities. He was also involved in building machine learning models to detect cardiac abnormalities. Dr. Perumalla later spent two years working at a late-stage startup where he was involved in building AI models to detect anomalies in computer networks. He is passionate about using AI to improve the quality of human life and his current research interests include Computer Vision, Image Segmentation and Surgical Data Science.
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Lida Safarnejad
Postdoctoral Scholar, Vascular Surgery
BioDr. Lida Safarnejad is a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University School of Medicine. She currently works in Ross lab, directed by Dr. Elsie Gyang Ross. Her research focuses on applying Computer Vision and NLP techniques to build models that detect Peripheral Artery Disease PAD. Dr. Safarnejad obtained her Ph.D. in Software and Information Systems from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her doctoral dissertation particularly focused on devising novel computational methods to effectively employ social media in the public health, especially for healthcare crisis management.
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Heather Selby
Postdoctoral Scholar, General and Vascular Surgery
BioHeather Selby is a postdoctoral scholar at the S-SPIRE Center in the Stanford Department of Surgery. She is advised by Dr. Arden Morris, Dr. Todd Wagner, Dr. Sandy Napel, and Dr. Vipul Sheth. Her research focus is building MRI-based AI models to identify patients with locally advanced cancer patients who achieve a clinical complete response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy to spare them from surgery and its associated risks.
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Saurabh Sharma
Postdoctoral Scholar, General and Vascular Surgery
BioDr. Sharma’s current endeavor is focused on addressing the critical need for effective therapies in CNS metastases of melanoma, an area in which modern systemic therapy has made minimal progress with patients continuing to show extremely poor outcomes in checkpoint refractory disease. Dr. Sharma has shown an aptitude for meticulous drug development and has rapidly developed important skills in the unique modeling of the metastatic tumor environment. Recently, Saurabh's application was accepted to the SITC Sparkathon-2023 in prestigious program for promising early investigators to develop high priority immunotherapy projects under direct mentorship of society leaders for development of brain nano targeted immunotherapy. Recently he has applied for the 2023 Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Bristol Myers Cancer Immunotherapy Translational Fellowship Award. Prior to joining the Prof. Amanda R. Kirane (Director of cutaneous melanoma surgery) at Surgery Department, Stanford School of Medicine, Stanford university, Dr. Sharma got the opportunity to work on novel immuno-nanoconjugates for brain cancer (Glioblastoma) as a Postdoctoral Chemist and Pharmacologist under the mentorship of Prof. Ali Khademhosseini (Biomaterial, Tissue Engineering Pioneer, EX-MIT and EX-UCLA Professor and Current CEO, Terasaki Institute) and Prof. Eggehard Holler (EX-Director of Nanomedicine, Cedar Sinai Medical Research Center, Los Angeles, California) at Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation, Los Angeles, California, USA. He worked as an assistant Professor at Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, School of Health Sciences, UPES Dehradun, India. He pursued his Ph.D (Doctoral Degree) from BITS-Pilani, Pilani Campus, Rajasthan, India. During the PhD research work, Dr. Sharma has designed & developed the novel drug delivery systems for the delivery of the genetic materials (e.g., miRNA, siRNA) and chemotherapeutic agents. The research has a significant contribution in the field of developing novel treatment strategies for cancer therapy. He has experienced significant success in his early career, prior to joining post-doctoral program, as evidenced by his guest Speaker in VIT, Parul University and International Virtual Conference on Recent Trends in Life Sciences. He received a Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR-SRF) Senior Research Fellowship Award and several presentation awards at various International conferences. Further in detail, Dr. Sharma has shown significant success and contribution in his field as evident by: Dr Sharma holds two granted patents one US patent, PCT and other Indian patent in the field of developing novel drug delivery systems. Dr. Sharma published more than 24 publications (Since 2018, Citations:218, h-Index:10, I10-Index:10) his work at Internationally reputed high-Impact factor journal which included: Advance Science, Small, Lab On a Chip, Acta Biomaterialia, Biomaterials Advances (Materials Science and Engineering: C), Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine, Regenerative Biomaterials, Applied Surface Science, Molecular pharmaceutics, International Journal of Pharmaceutics etc several others.
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Edward Vizcarra
Postdoctoral Scholar, Transplantation Surgery
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsImmunology, Epstein–Barr virus, Multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children
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Liming Zhao
Postdoctoral Scholar, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
BioDr. Zhao is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. He received his MD degree from Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2018.
