School of Medicine
Showing 11-19 of 19 Results
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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.
