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BioIn contrast to bounded teams with static membership, dynamic teaming reflects the common challenge of interdisciplinary healthcare teams with changing rosters. Such dynamic collaboration is critical to addressing multi-faceted problems and individualizing care. At present, off the shelf interventions to improve the way healthcare teams work - often assume static and bounded teams. Dr Giannitrapani intends to leverage design approaches to build a new kind of healthcare “teaming intervention,” which respects the nature of their constantly changing membership and more closely aligns with how healthcare teams actually collaborate. Her expertise includes organizational behavior, building interdisciplinary teams, implementation science, mixed methods-research, quality improvement, pain and palliative care research, and global health.

In addition to the Assistant Professor role in Division of Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford University School of Medicine she serves as the quality lead for the section of Palliative Medicine. She is also a Core Investigator at the Center for Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i) in the VA Palo Alto Health Care System and serves as PI or co-investigator on multiple ongoing studies representing over 25 million dollars of competitive government grant funding. She is also a Director of the VA Quality Improvement Resource Center (QuIRC) for Palliative Care, supporting Geriatrics and Extended Care programs for 170 Veterans Affairs facilities nationally. In QuIRC she leads a portfolio of projects on improving the processes that interdisciplinary teams can leverage to improve pain and symptom management among high-risk patients; a specific focus of their work is to bridge the gap of poor palliative care integration in the perioperative period.

Dr Giannitrapani has given hundreds of presentations and have over 70 peer reviewed publications in high quality medical and health services delivery journals such as Medical Care, JAMA Surgery, the Journal of General Internal Medicine, the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management and Pain Medicine. She has received a 5-year VA Career Development Award on building better teams across disciplines and was an American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine Research Scholar for related work.

Rachaella Giannotta

Senior Event Manager, Alumni Center Services

William Giardino

Assistant Professor (Research) of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences (Sleep Medicine)

Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWe aim to decipher the neural mechanisms underlying psychiatric conditions of stress, addiction, and sleep/circadian dysregulation. Our work uses combinatorial technologies for precisely mapping, monitoring, and manipulating neural circuits that regulate emotional states. We are especially focused on the behavioral functions of neuropeptide molecules acting throughout the circuitry of the extended amygdala- particularly in a brain region called the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST).