RESEARCH FACULTY
Dr. VJ Periyakoil serves as the inaugural Director of Stanford Medicine’s Longevity, Equity and Aging Research Consortium. Dr. Periyakoil is a Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean of Research (Geriatrics and Palliative Care) at Stanford University School of Medicine and Associate Chief of Staff at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She founded the Stanford Palliative Care Education and Training Program. In 2009, she founded the Stanford Hospice and Palliative Medicine ACGME Fellowship Program and directed it until 2022. Dr. Periyakoil is a member of the study section for the National Institute of Aging, National Institutes of Health, the Senior Associate Editor of the Journal of Palliative Medicine and Associate Editor, the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. She is the Emerita Chair of the Ethnogeriatrics Committee of the American Geriatrics Society, was the founding Chair of the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Hospice/Palliative Medicine SEP Committee, Board member of the Council of faculty and Societies, founding Chair, Diversity Committee of the American Association of Medical Colleges. Her work has been and is funded by grants from NIH, HRSA, foundations as well as the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Jonathan H Chen MD, Ph.D. is a physician-scientist with professional software development experience and graduate training in computer science. He continues to practice Internal Medicine for the concrete rewards of caring for real people and to inspire his research focused on mining clinical data sources to inform medical decision-making. Chen co-founded a company to translate his Computer Science graduate work into an expert system to solve organic chemistry problems, with applications from drug discovery to a practical education tool distributed to students across the world. To gain first-hand perspective in tackling the greater societal problems in health care, he completed medical training in Internal Medicine and a VA Research Fellowship in Medical Informatics. He has published influential work in venues including the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, JAMA Internal Medicine, Bioinformatics, Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, and the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, with research awards and recognition from the NIH Big Data 2 Knowledge initiative, National Library of Medicine, American Medical Informatics Association, Yearbook of Medical Informatics, and American College of Physicians, among others.
John W. Etchemendy is Denning Family Co-Director, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence; Provost Emeritus, and Patrick Suppes Family Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University.
Etchemendy served as director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information from 1990 to 1993, senior associate dean in the School of Humanities and Sciences from 1993 to 1997, and chair of the Department of Philosophy from 1998 to 2000. He is a member of the American Philosophical Association, on the editorial boards of Synthese and Philosophia Mathematica, and a former editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic.
He served as Stanford University’s twelfth Provost. He currently serves as the Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
Rowena G. Gomez, PhD received her undergraduate degree at University of California at Berkeley, in psychology and social welfare. She obtained her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Washington University at St. Louis. She completed her postdoctoral training at Stanford University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. There, Dr. Gomez integrated her research in aging and neuropsychology with depressive disorders. She started as an Assistant Professor at Palo Alto University (PAU) in 2005 and is now tenured Professor in the Psychology Department. Dr. Gomez previous leadership roles include being Director of Clinical Training for the PhD Clinical Psychology Program for seven years. Furthermore, with fellow faculty senators, we founded the Faculty Senate at PAU when I served as Faculty Chair for two years. She recently became Psychology Department Chair at PAU and also currently is the President for the American Psychological Association (APA) Division 20 Adult Development and Aging.
As a teacher and mentor, Dr. Gomez has taught Adult Development and Aging for 15 years, chaired 24 aging-focused dissertations, and mentored numerous geropsychology graduate students. Mentorship especially of students of color and from other minoritized groups has been personally meaningful to her. Her mentorship leadership activities include coordinating the mentorship program for APA Division 20 as co-chair and volunteering in mentorship events at the university and at APA. Advocacy for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belongingness (DEIB) in clinical and research training, academia, and in professional organizations are values that she incorporates in her mentorship of students and in her support of them to be involved in advocacy.
Steven Goodman, MD, MHS, PhD is Associate Dean of Clinical and Translational Research and Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health, and Medicine. He is co-founder and co-director of the Meta-research innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS), a group dedicated to examining and improving the reproducibility and efficiency of biomedical research. He led the Stanford CTSA KL2 and TL1 training programs from 2012-2019.
Dr. Goodman’s own research concerns the proper measurement, conceptualization and synthesis of research evidence, with particular emphasis on Bayesian approaches to quantitation, and qualitative approaches arising from the philosophy of science.
David B. Grusky is Edward Ames Edmonds Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Professor of Sociology, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Faculty Fellow at the Center for Population Health Sciences, Director of the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality, coeditor of Pathways Magazine, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His research addresses the changing structure of late-industrial inequality and addresses such topics as the future of extreme inequality in the United States, recent trends in social mobility, the sources of gender inequality, the role of social classes and social closure in reducing opportunity, new ways to improve the country’s infrastructure for monitoring labor market outcomes, and new policies for reducing poverty and increasing mobility.
Victor Henderson is a professor of Epidemiology & Population Health and of Neurology & Neurological Sciences. His research focuses on risk factors for cognitive aging and dementia, and on interventions to help prevent and treat these disorders. He directs the NIH Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and co-directs the master degree program in Epidemiology & Clinical Research. He is an Honorary Skou Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Booil Jo, PhD, is Associate Professor of Biostatistics at the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. She has been at the lead in developing pragmatic statistical methods based on the intersection of causal inference and latent variable modeling. She has published on various methodological topics such as treatment noncompliance, handling of nested data such as from cluster randomized trials, causal mediation, missing data, propensity scores, and longitudinal heterogeneity. Her current program of research is focused on developing statistical methods that jointly utilize latent variable modeling, causal inference, and statistical learning with the goal of advancing the field of personalized medicine. She is also actively involved in biostatics education and collaborative work in various fields of psychiatry/mental health research. She has been a leading member of American Statistical Association and Prevention Science Methodology group.
Abby C. King is a professor of Health Research and Policy (Epidemiology) and of Medicine (Stanford Prevention Research Center). Recipient of the Outstanding Scientific Contributions in Health Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association, Dr. King’s research focuses on the development, evaluation, and translation of public health interventions to reduce chronic disease in the US and globally. Her current research focuses on expanding the reach and generalizability of evidence-based interventions through use of state-of-the-art communication technologies; community-based participatory research perspectives to address health disparities among disadvantaged populations; and policy-level approaches to health promotion. She has served on a number of government taskforces in the U.S. and abroad, including membership on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Scientific Advisory Committee on National Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Objectives for 2020, and the Science Board of the U.S. President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition.
Dr. Helena Kraemer is an internationally renowned biostatistician and the primary biostatistics of the SAGE center. Dr.Kraemer became a fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1987. She is a member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (1994) and the National Academy of Medicine (2003) She was awarded the Franklin Ebaugh Prize from Stanford University and the Harvard Prize in Psychiatric Biostatistics and Epidemiology (2001). In 2014, she was awarded an honorary degree from Wesleyan University. She served in NIH study section for many years and was a member of NIMH/NIH counsel. She serves as the primary biostatics expert for the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
Dr. Kozal was appointed Senior Associate Dean for Veteran Affairs at Stanford School of Medicine and Chief of Staff at VA Palo Alto Health Care System in 2021. Prior to coming to Stanford, he served as Associate Dean for Veteran Affairs at Yale University School of Medicine and the Chief of Staff at VA Connecticut Healthcare System.
Dr. Kozal is a translational researcher who has focused his research career on three areas: 1) investigating the genetic determinants of HIV and HCV drug resistance, 2) the development of new molecular methods to detect viral mutations, and 3) HIV and HCV clinical trials involving new drugs and diagnostic technology. Dr. Kozal is an expert in microarray and deep sequencing technology receiving patents for his work in genotyping. Dr. Kozal previously directed the Yale HIV Clinical Trials Group and has more than 20 years of experience in running clinical trials, serving as the principal investigator or site investigator on >40 HIV and Hepatitis C trials. He has served on multiple VA and NIH/NCI review panels and is a current a member of the DHHS/NIH Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents.
Jurij Leskovec is an Associate Professor of Computer Science. Dr. Leskovec’s research focuses on the analyzing and modeling of large social and information networks as the study of phenomena across the social, technological, and natural worlds. He focuses on statistical modeling of network structure, network evolution, and spread of information, influence and viruses over networks. Problems he investigates are motivated by large scale data, the Web and other on-line media. He also does work on text mining and applications of machine learning.
Kenneth Mahaffey is a professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) at the Stanford University Medical Center. Kenneth Mahaffey’s primary research interest is the design and conduct of multicenter clinical trials and analyses of important clinical cardiac issues using large patient databases. His research focuses on novel anticoagulation agents for the treatment of acute coronary syndromes and atrial fibrillation, the study of agents targeted to protect the myocardium during reperfusion therapy for acute myocardial infarction, and the evaluation of cardiovascular safety of diabetic therapies. I am also interested in the methodology of clinical trials. Current research activities include standardization of the definition of myocardial infarction used in clinical trials, the adjudication of suspected clinical endpoint events by Clinical Event Committees (CEC), and the efficient operational conduct of large multinational clinical trials.
Dr. Yvonne (Bonnie) Maldonado is Professor and Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Pediatrics at Stanford Medicine. She also directs Stanford’s Global Child Health Program and serves as the Medical Director of Infection Prevention and Control at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. In addition to her academic research portfolio, Dr. Maldonado serves as the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Diversity at Stanford Medicine.
Elizabeth Mormino is an Assistant Professor (Research) of Neurology. Dr. Beth Mormino completed a PhD in Neuroscience at UC Berkeley in the laboratory of Dr. William Jagust, where she performed some of the initial studies applying Amyloid PET with the tracer PIB to clinically normal older individuals. This initial work provided evidence that the pathophysiological processes of Alzheimer’s disease begin years before clinical symptoms and are associated with subtle changes to brain regions critical for memory. In 2017, Dr. Mormino joined the faculty at Stanford University in the department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences. Her research program focuses on combining imaging and genetics to predict cognitive trajectories over time, and the integration of novel PET scans to better understand human aging and neurodegenerative diseases.
Russell Alan Poldrack is Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology and Professor, by courtesy, of Computer Science. After completing his PhD in experimental psychology at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Poldrack spent four years as a postdoc at Stanford. I have held faculty positions at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, UCLA, and the University of Texas. I joined the Stanford faculty in 2014.
Nigam H. Shah is an Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) and of Biomedical Data Science. Dr. Nigam Shah is associate professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) at Stanford University, Assistant Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, and a core member of the Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program. Dr. Shah’s research focuses on combining machine learning and prior knowledge in medical ontologies to enable use cases of the learning health system.
Dr. Suzanne Tamang an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Immunology and Rheumatology, and a Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. She is also the Computation Systems Evaluation Lead at the VA Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention’s Program Evaluation Resource Center. Dr. Tamang uses her training in biology, computer science, health services research, and biomedical informatics to work with interdisciplinary teams of experts on population health problems of public interest. Integral to her research, is the analysis of large and complex population-based datasets, using techniques from natural language processing, machine learning, and deep learning. Dr. Tamang has developed open-source tools for the extraction of health information from unstructured free-text clinical progress notes and licensed machine learning prediction models to Silicon Valley health analytics startups. She is the faculty mentor for the Stanford community working group Stats for Social Good.
Dr. Xiao Su is the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research of the College of Engineering at San José State University. She joined SJSU in Fall 2002 and has served as the Chair of the Computer Engineering Department from 2014 to 2020. Leading the largest department in the college, she has embraced the challenge of an explosive surge in student enrollment to grow her faculty team, develop new curricular areas, and enrich the department offerings to teach the state-of-the-art in the fast-evolving disciplines.
Dr. Su conducts research in broad areas of distributed systems, multimedia communications, network security, and machine learning. Dr. Su has been a principle or co-principle investigator in numerous grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, and the IT industry. She was a recipient of the NSF CAREER award.
Dr. Lu Tian received his Sc.D. in Biostatistics from Harvard University at 2002. Dr. Tian was Assistant Professor at Northwestern University before joining Stanford University at 2007. Dr. Tian is currently Professor at the Department of Biomedical Data Science. He has considerable experience in statistical methodological research, planning large epidemiological studies, designing randomized clinical trials, and conducting applied data analysis. His methodological research interest includes survival analysis, resampling method, precision medicine, meta analysis, and causal inference. Currently, Dr. Tian has served as the leader of data management and statistical core of Stanford Alzheimer Research Center. Dr. Tian has published more than 200 peer reviewed journal articles and served as the Associate Editor of Statistics in Medicine, Biometrics, and Chance.
Shripad Tuljapurkar is Professor of Biology and the Dean & Virginia Morrison Professor of Population Studies at Stanford University. His research areas include stochastic dynamics of human and natural populations; life history evolution, especially senescence; prehistoric societies; and probability forecasts including sex ratios, mortality, aging and fiscal balance.
Tuljapurkar directs Stanford’s Center for Population Research and the demography program at Stanford’s Center for the Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. He is a member of the Center for the Demography and Economics of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley. He has led a panel on aging for the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and served on the Technical Advisory Panel to the US Social Security Administration.
Mintu Turakhia is Associate Professor Of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) At The Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System. Mintu Turakhia is a cardiac electrophysiologist, outcomes researcher, and clinical trialist. Dr. Turakhia has an active, highly-funded multidisciplinary program in atrial fibrillation, where uses large datasets to examine quality, outcomes, and risk prediction for heart rhythm disorders. As the Executive Director of Stanford’s new Center for Digital Health, he is the principal investigator of several multi-center trials to test digital health tools and wearable devices to screen and manage heart rhythm disorders.
Tony Wyss-Coray is D. H. Chen Professor II, Neurology and Neurological Sciences. Dr. Wyss-Coray’s laboratory studies the role of immune and injury responses in neurodegeneration and Alzheimer’s disease. We seek to understand how immune responses and injury pathways may modulate neurodegeneration and age-related changes in the brain. We study these pathways in vivo and in cell culture using a number of genetic and proteomic tools. We have been particularly interested in the TGF-beta signaling pathway as a major regulator of biological processes and we are developing genetic and pharmacological agents to manipulate this pathway.
Jerry Yesavage, MD is Jared And Mae Tinklenberg Professor And Professor, by courtesy, of Neurology. Dr. Yesavage directs several programs designed to examine changes in mental function across the lifespan. In particular we are concerned with Alzheimer’s Disease (senile dementia), Age-Associated Cognitive Decline (normal changes in cognitive function seen in older adults) and cognitive training to reduce the loss, depression in aging, sleep disorders in aging and lifespan changes in complex tasks such as aircraft pilot performance. The Center is funded in part by the NIH, the Veteran’s Administration, and the State of California.
Maame Yaa A. B. Yiadom is an Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Stanford University and researcher with expertise in emergency care clinical operations and timely emergency care delivery. She was first trained in health care policy at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. She subsequently worked as a healthcare industry management consultant here in New York City for CSC Global Health Solutions Group, and was the Dean’s Office Chief of Staff at Drexel Medical School in Philadelphia. She completed her medical education at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, and a Masters in Public Health (MPH) at Harvard with additional health policy training from Johns Hopkins. She subsequently did a residency at Mass General and Brigham and Women’s Hospitals’ Harvard affiliated program, and completed a Masters of Science in Clinical Investigation (MSCI) at Vanderbilt University.
Dr. Yiadom is the Principal Investigator for the Stanford Emergency Care Health Services Research Data Coordinating Center (HSR-DCC). Her research focuses on applications of evidence-based medicine to optimize clinical operations to target patient pathophysiology for time-sensitive conditions
James Zou is an assistant professor of biomedical data science and, by courtesy, of CS and EE at Stanford University. Professor Zou develops novel machine and deep learning algorithms that have strong statistical guarantees; several of his methods are currently being used by biotech companies. He also works on questions important for the broader impacts of AI—e.g. interpretations, robustness, transparency—and on biotech and health applications. He has received several best paper awards, a Google Faculty Award, a Tencent AI award and is a Chan-Zuckerberg Investigator. He is also the faculty director of Stanford AI for Health program and is a member of the Stanford AI Lab.
