School of Medicine
Showing 1-19 of 19 Results
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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 sub-internship in Sorbonne Université (Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France) and Tiantan Hospital (Beijing, China). 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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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
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWe develop strategies to transport immunotherapeutic molecules across the blood-brain barrier for imaging and treating brain metastatic cancer. Currently, under the mentorship of Dr. Amanda Kirane, I have continued my work in cancer-targeted nanotechnology for the treatment of melanoma brain metastases. Immunotherapy of small peptides, small molecules.
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Banita Verma
Postdoctoral Scholar, General and Vascular Surgery
BioI am Banita Verma, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, currently working with Dr. Fredrick M. Dirbas at the Department of Surgery. Our research focus is to understand the type of cell death and the nature of immune responses triggered by FLASH versus conventional radiotherapy in various murine breast cancer models. Additionally, we aim to explore the role of DAMPs released by dying cells in generating immune responses after both FLASH and conventional radiotherapy. Furthermore, we are interested in studying the mechanism behind the low toxicity of the FLASH compared to conventional radiotherapy to the adjacent non-cancerous tissue. To accomplish this goal, our laboratory is actively collaborating with Dr. Bill Loo, who holds great expertise in the field of radiation oncology.
Before joining Stanford University, I served as a postdoctoral researcher at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden from 2021-2023. My research aimed to study the activation mechanism of Cholineacetyltransferase (ChAT), a pivotal enzyme in acetylcholine synthesis. This enzyme is known to be hypoactive in neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Our group successfully synthesized novel compounds capable of enhancing ChAT activity.
I completed my doctoral research in cancer biology at the Department of Experimental Medicine and Biotechnology, PGIMER Chandigarh, India, in 2021. My work was the evaluation of role of TNF-α mediated Necroptosis in breast cancer cells. My primary research interests are cancer biology and cell death pathways.
