Overview | FAQ | Faculty | Requirements

Faculty

Please find below a list of the course directors, presenting faculty, and coaches.

• Course Directors
• Presenting Faculty
• Teaching Assistant
• Coaches

Course Directors

Tandy Aye , MD (taye@stanford.edu)is an Assistant Professor in the division of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes. Her research focuses on the neurocognitive effects of blood glucose values in young children.

Elizabeth D. Mellins, MD (mellins@stanford.edu) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and a member of the Steering Committee of the Center for Clinical Immunology at Stanford (CCIS). She carries out molecular immunology research in her laboratory and cares for children with rheumatologic disorders.

Presenting Faculty

Tyler Aguinaldo, MD (Tyler.Aguinaldo@hhs.sccgov.org) is the Director of the Center for Diabetes and Metabolism and Associate Chief of the Division of Endocrinology at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, California.He is also a Clinical Assistant Professor at Stanford University Hospital and Clinics.His interests include management of hyperglycemia in the hospitalized patient, diabetes technologies such as insulin pumps and continuous glucose sensors and innovative approaches to chronic disease management.

Srinivas Akkaraju, MD/PhD (srini@nlvpartners.com) is the Managing Director and Lead of New Leaf Venture Partners West Coast Biopharmaceutical Practice.  New Leaf Venture Partners is a leader in healthcare technology venture investing. Our investment professionals bring a unique blend of technological, clinical, and operational experience to our investments. We work closely with our entrepreneurs to help build successful portfolio companies. We focus primarily on later stage biopharmaceutical products, early stage medical devices, and laboratory infrastructure technologies.

Laurence Baker, PhD (laurence.baker@stanford.edu) is chief of Health Services Research at Stanford University . He is an economist interested in the organization and economic performance of the US health care system. His research focuses on: the effects of managed care on the health care system; the effects of regulation on health care markets; the determinants and effects of technological change in medicine; the ways the internet and email influence health care delivery and outcomes; and physician incomes and career choices. He received his BA from Calvin College , and his MA and PhD in economics from Princeton University .

Bruce Buckingham, MD (buckingham@stanford.edu) is a Professor in the Department of Pediatrics. He is a pediatric endocrinologist who is the PI on a multicenter NIH study to assess continuous glucose monitoring in children. He is also the PI on a Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation grant to develop a closed-loop "artificial" pancreas. He is also an investigator in the NIH-funded Diabetes Prevention Trial.

Bertha Chen, MD (bchen@stanford.edu) is an Associate Professor in Obstetrics/Gynecology.

Amar Das, MD/PhD (das@stanford.edu) is an Assistant Professor in Medicine-Stanford Medical Informatics and Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine.  His research focuses on the advancement of Semantic Web technologies to support temporal reasoning, data integration and collaborative research in healthcare and the life sciences.

Rajiv Doshi, MD is an Assistant Consulting Professor and Executive Director of the Stanford- India Biodesign program.  He is also Founder and CEO of Ventus Medical, a venture capital-backed pulmonary device startup in Woodside, CA. Prior to founding Ventus, he was a Principal at De Novo Ventures where he served as a board member or observer for Ovalis, Spinal Kinetics and Paracor. A Lecturer in the Stanford University Department of Medicine, Rajiv also co-teaches two medical device design courses. The first, “Medical Device Design” is a prototyping-intensive, graduate level course within the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The second, “Medical Device Innovation” is an undergraduate course within the Department of Bioengineering that teaches the fundamentals of medical device entrepreneurship. Rajiv earned a BS in chemical engineering, an MSE in biomechanical engineering, and an MD, all from Stanford University. He also serves on the Medical Advisory Board of Lunar Design. Rajiv has roughly twenty US patents issued or pending.

Richard Eastman, MD (dickms@gotsky.com) graduated from Stanford University in Biology and Harvard Medical School. He is board certified in Internal Medicine and Diabetes, Endocrinology, and Metabolic Diseases. For the last 25 years of his career he has been involved with clinical trials of new therapies and devices for the treatment and prevention of diabetes, including the DCCT, EDIC, DPP, and DPT-1.

Dan Garza, MD (garza@stanford.edu) is the course director for Biology 112/212 (Human Physiology) and lectures on physiology to the Human Biology Core lecture series. Research interests include the role of bedside cardiac markers in patients with chest pain, the efficacy of B-type natriuretic peptide in assessment of congestive heart failure n the emergency department, and the role of emergency physicians in treatment of acute sports injuries.

David Hirschberg, PhD (Hirschberg@stanford.edu) is the director of the Human Immune Monitoring Center.  The center brings together the latest technology for exploring the immune system in one room.  The unique facility has a straightforward goal: to run as many tests as possible on one sample—such as a vial of blood—to extract the most information from the least amount of material. Results are integrated to capture an immunological "snapshot" of a person.  The lab provides a dozen different tests, including genetic analysis and cell sorting that can pick out extremely rare immune cells from a blood sample. The center is also establishing its own database so that so that researchers can survey across the many different diseases with immunological components to look for similarities and differences.

Yiming Lit, MD (yzlit@stanford.edu) is a Staff Physician in the Department of Medicine/Nephrology. Her research interests include studying renin-angiotensin system blockade in diabetic nephropathy.

Chris Longhurst, MD, MS (clonghurst@lpch.org) is an assistant professor of pediatrics. His background and research interests are in clinical informatics and utilizing information technology to facilitate clinical decision support in the pediatric space. He is currently working on the LPCH Information & Knowledge System (LINKS) project.

Michael McConnell, MD (mcconnell@stanford.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and the Clinical Director of Cardiovascular MRI in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford University . Dr. McConnell received BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT and then his MD from Stanford. He trained in cardiology and was on faculty at Brigham & Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School before returning to Stanford. Dr. McConnell's research involves applying novel MRI techniques to image coronary artery disease and atherosclerotic plaque.

Craig Milroy, PhD (Milroy@stanford.edu) serves as Senior Lecturer at Stanford University in the Design Division of Mechanical Engineering and manages the Product Realization Lab, a teaching facility where over 470 Stanford students come to learn design, manufacturing, and prototyping. His concentration is on product conceptualization, and strategic planning during the design process. Craig teaches over four courses each year in design and engineering, including the first course at Stanford devoted solely to the development of medical devices.

Sara Nakashima, Esq is a licensing associate with the Office of Technology and Licensing.

Marianne Neuwirth, PhD (neuwirth@stanford.edu) comes to the Oral Communication Program with 14 years of teaching experience, and an interest in facilitating others’ effective translation of thoughts and ideas into clear exchanges and presentations. She thinks the effective use of one’s voice and one’s body is fundamental to connection with audiences.

Rita Popat, PhD (rpopat@stanford.edu) is a Lecturer and Research Scientist in the Department of Health Research and Policy. She has a PhD in epidemiology and also holds masters degrees in biostatistics and physical therapy. She co-directs the first course in research methods, Design and Conduct of Clinical and Epidemiologic Studies (HRP 225) and is also developing a course- Genes and Environment in Disease Causation: Implications for the Practice of Medicine and Public Health (HUMBIO 138). Her research focuses on the epidemiology of Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, specifically evaluating the genetic and environmental contributions to these neurodegenerative disorders.

Daria Mochly-Rosen, PhD (mochly@stanford.edu) is the George D. Smith Professor of Translational Medicine, the Senior Associate Dean for Research and a Professor in the Department of Chemical and Systems Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine.  She received her B.S. in life sciences from Tel Aviv University, her Ph.D. from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the department of biochemistry at UC Berkeley. Dr. Mochly-Rosen's research focuses on the rationale design of peptides that interfere with protein-protein interactions to study signal transduction in normal and disease states.  Also, her research encompasses the role of individual protein kinase C isozymes in eukaryotic cell signaling, with current emphasis on the intracellular trafficking of PKC isozymes. Her group has designed peptides that act as specific agonists and antagonists for individual PKC isozymes.  These are applied to determine the role of PKC in cardiac hypertrophy and in protection from ischemia-induced cardiac infarction, in stroke, cancer and Parkinson’s Disease. Recent animal studies by Dr. Mochly-Rosen led to exciting new data related to the treatment of heart attack. She found that one of the peptides that inhibits binding of a particular PKC isozyme to its RACK reduces infarct size in animals subjected to heart attack by more than 70%. Importantly, the peptide could be given after the heart attack, when the cardiologist reopened the flow of blood into the heart muscle. Heart functions were so greatly improved that the animals appeared as though they had not had a heart attack. The same peptide also reduced the consequences of stroke, and prolonged the function of transplanted hearts in other animal models.  Such clinical trials are extremely expensive and cannot be carried out using public funding. After failing to “sell” this idea to large pharmaceutical companies (it does not fit well with the current drug discovery approach), Dr. Mochly-Rosen recently raised venture capital to form KAI Pharmaceuticals, Inc. The goal of the company is to test her peptides in the treatment of patients who suffer, for example, a heart attack. Although the data in animal models are promising, the challenge is to determine whether patients with heart attacks will equally benefit from this treatment. >

Steve Sanislo, MD (ssanislo@stanford.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology. His research interests include age-related macular degeneration and retinal surgery.

Jeffrey Schox, Esq. (Jeff@SchoxPLC.com) founded the Schox Patent Group, a boutique patent firm devoted to startup ventures. Drawing on his own mechanical and electrical engineering degrees, he has filed over 200 patent applications in a road range of cutting-edge technologies. As a Lecturer for Stanford University, he teaches ?Patent Law and Strategy to engineering and business school students and ?Patent Prosecution? to law students. He joined the Keiretsu Forum in early 2007, and has invested in several startup ventures.

Yuen So, MD, PhD (ytso@stanford.edu) is Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences. His research interests include neuropathies, myasthenia gravis, ALS and other diseases of the peripheral nervous system.

Alfreda Stadlin, PhD (alfredar@stanford.edu) recently joined the Stanford faculty after having taught gross and neuro anatomy for the past 30 years at various universities in Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong.

Chris Stave, MLS (cstave@lanelib.stanford.edu) is an online and instructional services librarian at Lane Medical Library.

Julie Theriot, PhD (theriot@stanford.edu) is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Microbiology and Immunology. A microbiologist, cell biologist, and biophysicist, Theriot's research focuses on the mechanism of bacterial propulsion, specifically on the role of the structural protein actin. Through her research, Theriot illuminates basic biophysical processes underlying movement of cells and the pathogens that invade them. Her research has been published in such academic journals as Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, and the Journal of Cell Biology.

Jodi Thomas, PhD (jthomas@chconline.org) is a Pediatric Health Psychologist with the Children's Health Council at Stanford, and also in private practice. She has worked with medically fragile children and their families for over ten years, with a focus both on clinical work and research. Research and clinical interests include adherence to medical regimens, coping, trauma, the efficacy of self-regulation and self-hypnosis, pain control, and the building of disease-related self efficacy. After earning her Ph.D. at the University of Connecticut, she completed her internship at UCLA, and did her post doctoral fellowship at Children's Hospital Orange County. She frequently works with and consults to various medical teams LPCH

Darrell Wilson, MD (dwilson@stanford.edu) is Professor and Chief of the Division of Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes at Stanford University Medical Center . He runs the Stanford portion of the Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet, a multi-center NIH-funded study to examine agents for the prevention of diabetes. He is also one of the lead investigators in the newly funded multi-center study of glucose sensors in children.

Teaching Assistants

Li Li (dilithium.li@stanford.edu) is a MD/PhD student in the Neurosciences Program at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Keyan Salari (ksalari@stanford.edu) is an MD/PhD student in the Genetics Program at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Coaches

Abhi Vase (abhi.vase@gmail.com) is a Stanford Biomechanical Engineering alum who has a passion for healthcare innovation, entrepreneurship and the developing world. He is currently working as a research engineer in a neuromodulation startup that is developing therapies for various metabolic diseases. Abhi has been an evaluator for the Worldbank's Development Marketplace from 2005-2007, and has also successfully launched MicroClinic - a franchise-based healthcare service delivery operation based in Ghana.

Fraser Cameron (fraser@stanford.edu) is a PhD student in Aeronautics and Astronautics working on closed loop control for Insulin Dependent Diabetes Mellitus using insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors. As an alumnus of this course, and an engineer infiltrating the field of medical research he is familiar with the issues faced by entrants from non-medical backgrounds. While not a medical doctor, Fraser's research makes him well-informed about the mechanics of diabetes (the effects and duration of food, insulin, glucagon, growth hormone, exercise, autonomic response, etc), basic human physiology (biosci 212), common diabetic treatment (while not diabetic, he likes wearing blood glucose sensors and stabbing himself for finger stick glucose measurements), the extraction of information from diabetic data (half of his research) and its use for predicting future blood glucose values (the other half). In particular, he is very well suited to project #2: "Design a device to predict and prevent nocturnal and post-exercise hypoglycemia." since he is currently working on an FDA submission with this very goal.