Stanford University
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Lara Zwittlinger
Visiting Researcher Student, GR Visiting Researcher
BioLara Zwittlinger is pursuing her PhD in comparative politics and is currently a Visiting PhD Researcher at the Europe Center, Stanford University. She is supervised by Jessica Fortin-Rittberger and Simon Bornschier. Her research focuses on cleavage politics, democratic trajectories, and the ways citizens navigate emerging political conflicts. In particular, she examines how structural factors and situational threats shape political attitudes such as hostile sexism, ethnocentrism, and political polarization, as well as how interactions between political elites and citizens influence democratic development, with a strong focus on quantitative methods.
Zwittlinger completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in political science at the University of Salzburg within only three and a half years. Her bachelor’s thesis explored the relationship between cultural value orientations, implicit gender stereotypes, and gender segregation in STEM education and labor markets, while her master’s thesis examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on political attitudes and party preferences. In 2025, she received the Young Investigators Award for the best dissertation project at her home university after only one and a half years in the PhD program. -
Corinna Zygourakis, MD
Associate Professor of Neurosurgery
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy goal is to translate research into real-world action and decision-making so that my work can impact patients and the institutions in which they receive care. With a research focus on healthcare cost and quality of care, I approach neurosurgery in a unique way—one that applies business operations, economics, and healthcare delivery principles to our field. I have pursued formal LEAN business training, and believe in the importance of working together with other departments and administrators, as well as physicians and surgeons on the hospital and national level, to effect change. During my residency, I developed and led a multi-departmental prospective study at UCSF called OR SCORE (OR Surgical Cost Reduction Project) that brought together surgeons from the neurosurgery, orthopedics and ENT departments with nurses and administrators. OR SCORE successfully reduced surgical supply costs by nearly one million dollars in its first year by providing >60 surgeons with price transparency scorecards. This work led to a first-author publication in JAMA Surgery, but more importantly, set the foundation for further quality improvement and cost reduction efforts across the UCSF hospital system.
A volunteer neurosurgical mission trip to Guadalajara, Mexico, where limited resources create an OR environment that is strikingly more frugal than the U.S., inspired me to lead another project aimed at quantifying and reducing operating room waste at UCSF. I have also conducted research looking at the safety and outcomes of overlapping surgery, as well as several projects to define the factors underlying variation in cost for neurosurgical care using UCSF’s hospital data and national databases like the National Inpatient Sample, Vizient (formerly known as University Health Consortium), and Medicare.
As a clinical fellow at Johns Hopkins, I continued and expanded these research efforts. I designed and implemented an Enhanced Recovery after Surgery (ERAS) protocol at the Johns Hopkins Bayview hospital. This protocol standardized care for our spine patients, emphasizing pre-operative rehabilitation, psychiatric and nutritional assessments, and smoking cessation, as well as intra- and post-operative multi-modal pain therapy, early mobilization, and standardized antibiotic and bowel regimens. I also collaborated with engineers in the Johns Hopkins Carnegie Center for Surgical Innovation to develop better algorithms for intra-operative CT imaging, and provided assistance with operations to a basic science study looking at the role of cerebrospinal fluid drainage and duraplasty in a porcine model of spinal cord injury.
At Stanford, I am building a research group focused on: (1) perfecting paradigms for delivery of high-end technology in spinal care, including robotics and navigation, (2) implementing cost and quality strategies in large healthcare systems, and (3) computational analysis of big-data to effect real-time risk stratification and decision making in spine surgery. I'm excited to collaborate with my peers across surgical and medical departments, as well as business and engineering colleagues. -
Pelin Çılgın
Ph.D. Student in East Asian Languages and Cultures, admitted Autumn 2025
Undergrad Mentor, East Asian Languages and CulturesBioPelin Çılgın is a film critic/curator from Istanbul and a PhD researcher at Stanford University. They currently curate films for several international and local NGOs and organizations with a focus on queer, genre, and East Asian works. Their academic research areas include East Asian film and media, the horror genre, film curation, and queer feminist readings. Alumnus of Berlinale Talents, Talents Sarajevo, among others. Voting member of the European Film Academy.
