About Our Research

Anesthesiology has been undergoing major changes globally, expanding roles beyond the operating room in offering high-quality personalized services in peri-operative health, pain management, critical care, and other medical disciplines. Research has been a major factor underlining these changes and will continue to be an essential force driving the evolution of the specialty.
 
Stanford Anesthesia research includes a wide spectrum of programs in basic, translational, clinical, health service, and medical education areas. Project fields range from subcellular mechanisms of anesthesia, pain, and opioid addiction, tissue/organ injury, novel anesthesia agents, techniques and devices, treatment effectiveness, epidemiology, patient safety, health economics, and other areas. Interdisciplinary collaborations are increasingly a feature. Our department has been among the top five NIH funded anesthesia departments since 2011, with current external research grants and contracts totaling $17 million annually.
 

Stanford Anesthesia pays special attention to research training for the next generation of anesthesiologists and has established a research-training continuum bridging between medical student and faculty stages. We place special emphasis on supporting the residency-fellowship-junior faculty period. A key part of this support is the Fellowship in Anesthesia Research and Medicine (FARM) program and our two NIH supported T32 training grants.

Research Programs

Basic Science

Visit our basic science page to learn more about our ongoing research. 

Clinical and Translational Science

Visit our clinical and translational science page to learn more about our ongoing research. 

Data Science

Visit our data science page to learn more about our ongoing research. 

Anesthesia T32 Research fellowship

Visit our research fellowship to learn more about our NIH funded opportunities for residents and postdoctoral fellows. 


News Spotlight

Dr. Anderson Awarded an R18 Proposal

December, 2023

This new R18 proposal funded by NIBIB will study focused ultrasound to treat acute pain by blocking peripheral nerves. The team will determine parameters for noninvasive focused ultrasound-induced peripheral nerve blockade and develop a focused ultrasound prototype device for use in humans.

Congratulations to Dr. Anderson!

Anesthesia Team, led by Dr. Simons, Receives NIH Funding to Validate a Signature of Pain Persistence or Recovery

November, 2023

The discovery of robust markers of the recovery vs. persistence of pain and disability is essential to develop more resourceful and patient-specific treatment strategies and to conceive novel approaches that benefit refractory patients. Given that chronic pain is a biopsychosocial process, the discovery, and validation of a prognostic and robust signature for pain recovery vs. persistence requires measurements across multiple dimensions in the same patient cohort in combination with a suitable ‘big data’ computational analysis pipeline for the extraction of reliable and cross-validated results from a multilayered and complex dataset. The SPRINT (Signature of Pain Recovery in Teens) brings together a team of scientists and clinicians from Stanford University (Nima Aghaeepour, Martin Angst, Brice Gaudilliere, Laura Simons), University of Toronto/Hospital for Sick Children, and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. With an initial signature derived in the discovery (R61) phase that implicated neuroimaging, immune, quantitative sensory, and psychological markers using machine learning approaches from our large and complex data set, we now launch into the R33/Validation Phase to validate the signature derived in the R61 study. This signature will be useful for a range of adolescent-based clinical trials in which identification of the highest risk individuals is necessary hopefully providing a clinically actionable intervention algorithm.

Dr. Aghaeepour Receives an R01 Award

November, 2023

Dr. Aghaeepour has received a Notice of Award (NOA) for their latest R01 project titled:

  • 'Multiomics and Artificial Intelligence for Predictive Models and Biomarker Discovery in Preterm Infants.'


This project is a collaborative effort, with Nima Aghaeepour serving as a key co-principal Investigator (MPI), alongside Mohan Pammi from Texas Children's as the Principal Investigator. 

Congratulations to Dr. Aghaeepour!

Researchers Boris Heifets, MD, PhD & Theresa Lii featured in Stanford Medicine News

October, 2023

In the Stanford Medicine article, they dive into a new study that discusses a clever workaround to hide the psychedelic — or dissociative — properties of the anesthetic first developed in 1962. They recruited 40 participants with moderate to severe depression who were also scheduled for routine surgery, and then administered a dose of ketamine or placebo when the participants were in surgery and under general anesthesia.

Dr. Martin Angst Receives Notice of Award from the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience

September, 2023

Martin Angst, principal investigator, and Igor Feinstein, project director, have just received the Notice of Award from the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience, which is governed by the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute. This is a significant milestone in their mission to explore the resilience of the human brain. The pioneering endeavor, titled "Biological Determinants of Brain Resilience in Cardiac Surgery," seeks to unravel the enigmatic biology that underpins our enduring strength and vulnerability when confronted with a typical health hazard.