Stanford Advocacy Track (StAT) Residents

The Pediatric Advocacy faculty work with residents individually to identify a community partner/organization with whom to work and establish a collaborative partnership. The project focus is designed to meet community partner needs and resident interests. Throughout the course of the project, residents will acquire a variety of advocacy skills that can be applied to future community and academic endeavors.

StAT Advocacy Track Program Page
StAT Alumni Page
StAT Residents & Alumni Spotlight

Current StAT Residents PGY3

Dora Alvarez

Previously: University of California San Francisco

Project Description: Dora partnered with Dr. Baraka Floyd in her project to elicit caregivers’ perspectives on positive childhood experiences and how providers can best communicate about these experiences. Her project focused on determining what one group of parents thinks about this topic, how it relates to their uptake of resources, and any suggestions they would make to providers in approaching these sensitive issues. Although this only reflects a specific clinic’s patient population, we hope it will be a starting point for further research.  

Alaina Butler

Previously: University of Washington

Project Description: Alaina partnered with Brighter Beginnings. The purpose of this project was to understand the short-term effects of screening for adverse childhood experiences at Brighter Beginnings, an organization with primary care clinics in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. The first goal of this project was to implement a screening program for adverse childhood experiences at Brighter Beginnings for each well child greater than three years of age, then employ surveys to better understand how ACEs screening is being conducted at Brighter Beginnings as well as patient/parent opinions of ACEs screening, perceived benefits or positive outcomes, and perceived drawbacks. The results of the surveys will be shared with Brighter Beginnings to improve internal processes and with a broader audience of other primary care clinics who are initiating ACEs screening.  

Aydin Zahedivash

Previously: University of Texas

Project Description: Aydin partnered with The Primary School. The goal of this project is to quantify the consequences of our fragmented screening and treatment system for children with social, emotional, and language support needs, and to help inform broader policy efforts to standardize support for families. Among the most potent motivators of policy change are the financial consequences of ineffective social systems, and we hope to use our modeling to highlight the costs of our current system and propose methods for financially sustainable, equitable early childhood interventions.

Chrysa Cheronis

Previously: Rosalind Franklin University

Project description: Chrysa partnered with members of the Asylum Latino Initiative (ALI) / Latinx Family Resource Program (LFRP) at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital. The goal of this project is to improve access to care for asylum seeking patients and their families presenting to LPCH and activating the Inpatient Asylum Protocol (IAP). This protocol has been active since 2019, and we now are able to perform a retrospective chart review of this patient population and to conduct a mixed methods analysis describing the patient demographics, their medical and social needs, as well as the interventions of the protocol.

Susanna Jain

Previously: Oakland University

Project description: Susanna partnered with The Primary School to educate general pediatricians about the negative effects on health and wellbeing associated with school exclusion in childhood. The goal of the project is to advance community health by offering practical solutions for general pediatricians and local education agencies to reduce exclusionary school discipline, which will reduce the negative effects of these practices on the health of preschool and school-aged children.  

Kleshie Baisie

Previously: University of California, Riverside

Project description: Kleshie partnered with San Mateo County WIC. The goal of the project is to explore the barriers to referral from Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH) to San Mateo County WIC, and to ensure that at least 50% of mothers who are eligible for WIC in the LPCH Well-Baby Nursery (WBN) and Packard Intermediate Care Nursery (PICN), are referred to San Mateo County WIC within a 6-month trial of the intervention.

Zara Quader

Previously: Rosalind Franklin University

Project description: Zara partnered with James Ranch, and Fresh Lifelines for Youth. The project objective was to create and introduce a peer health education pilot within the juvenile justice system based on health topics important to the youth in order to offer evidence-based, peer-to-peer education informed by an adolescent development framework, to promote health practices during and after detention and develop the leadership and public speaking skills of the youth who are peer educators. 

Laura Rose

Previously: University of California, Irvine

Program description: Laura partnered with Ronald McDonald House Charities Bay Area. The project obective was to assess the childcare needs for healthy siblings at RMHC, in order to assist RMHC in their effort to strengthen and expand current sibling support services.  

Meghan Schmitt

Previously: University of Illinois

Program description: Meghan partnered with the Ronald McDonald House Charities Meal Program. The purpose of this project is to assess the degree of food insecurity among families of hospitalized children in the bay area. The study had three main goals: 1) To assess the prevalence of food insecurity and the barriers to access among families of hospitalized children in the bay area. 2) To assess how the Ronald McDonald House Charities Meal Program is addressing food insecurity in this population, what barriers to access exist for this program, and what additional resources would be helpful to further address this issue. 3) To disseminate findings to our community partner and within our larger community in order to determine how Ronald McDonald House Charities resources should be prioritized in the future.

Current StAT Residents PGY2

Diana Peña

Community Partner: Stanford Pediatrics, Department of Endocrinology

Previously: Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV

Project Description: The goal of this project is to identify unique family-level barriers that Stanford patients with type 1 diabetes (T1D) and public health insurance face in getting insulin pump technology in order to understand what contributes to T1D disparities. After identifying the barriers, the goal is to create a pilot intervention informed by families with public insurance in order to increase insulin pump use.

Tiffany Lee

Community Partner: LPCH Government Relations

Previously: Oregon Health and Science University

Project Description: The goal of this project is to evaluate the effectiveness of physician advocacy on influencing state legislation by assessing the perceptions of physician advocacy amongst state legislators and their staffers. Additionally, this project will examine the difference in efficacy between individual physician advocacy versus organizational physician advocacy and pediatric advocacy versus advocacy by physicians of other specialties. The hope is to use the insight gathered from this project to ultimately identify ways to improve the efficacy of physician advocacy and increase influence on legislative outcomes.

Kylie Seeley

Community Partner: Stanford Pediatrics, Department of Endocrinology

Previously: Oregon Health & Science University

Project Description: The goal of this project is to improve glycemic outcomes and quality of life for Stanford pediatric patients with new diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes who are at risk of poor outcomes due to minoritized race/ethnicity and low socioeconomic status.

Cristal Suarez

Community Partner: Family Voices of California

Previously: UC Davis School of Medicine

Project description: The goal of this project is to partner with a statewide collaborative of parent-run centers for children and youth with special health care needs to enact a survey and interviews of caregivers in an advocacy training program. The project aims to evaluate the impact of this comprehensive curriculum on caregivers' perceptions of empowerment and advocacy ability, participation in leadership roles, and influence on health care policy and service improvements.

Bethel Mieso

Community Partner: The Primary School

Previously: Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine

Project description: This project has two goals. The first goal is to identify the system and market barriers to acquiring new or replacement eyeglasses for school-aged children with vision impairment on Medicaid. The second goal will be to raise attention to how the child health disparity of unmet vision needs impacts children's academic performance and to propose solutions to influence policy and improve access to eyeglasses for children.

Catherine Raney

Community Partner: Santa Clara Valley Medical Center

Previously: Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania

Project description: The goal of this project is to generate hypotheses regarding facilitators and barriers to youth starting treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD). This is critical, because <5% of youth with OUD access treatment, and there is a paucity of literature on why access is so poor and what can be done to improve it. My study will help fill this knowledge gap by interviewing youth about their experiences starting treatment in different settings including in the hospital, in the emergency department, and at home, with the ultimate goal of increasing access to life-saving medications through youth-centered interventions.

Yvonne Lee

Community Partner: Family Connections

Previously: Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine

Project description: The goal of Project Worried Well is to empower parents at Family Connections, a bilingual, family-based learning community for all SES levels, as their child’s first line care provider through health education on common pediatric illnesses. There is a gap in health education that has been demonstrated in the understanding of what common pediatric illnesses look like, how to confidently manage them at home, and when to seek higher levels of care for children, and this is most prevalent in families with parents of younger age, lower education level, and single household incomes. We aim to develop an effective educational tool on how to manage common pediatric illnesses for parents that is easy to understand, access, and disseminate in hopes of making a difference in parental knowledge, confidence, and intentions overall.

Natasha Abadilla

Community Partner: Project WeHOPE (East Palo Alto)

Previously: Stanford School of Medicine

Program description: The goal of this project is to work with families of children living in RV communities to reduce health disparities by assessing for unmet health needs and attainable interventions that we as physicians can provide or execute. We as pediatricians specifically have the unique privilege of seeing children at many touch points for well child checks and vaccinations, and we can leverage these opportunities to better care for children who are homeless or facing housing instability. This project's partners are Project WeHOPE in East Palo Alto and community members in their RV Safe Parking program, and results will contribute to the sustainability of the program, better inform local pediatrics clinics on how to best provide support to families and patients who are homeless, and empower community members to advocate for themselves at local government meetings.

Lauren Rivkin

Community Partner: SF Unified School District, Alameda County Office of Education, and Cardea Services

Previously: University of Illinois College of Medicine - Rockford

Program description: This project is intended to describe the quality and efficacy of current comprehensive sexual health education through parent and educator focus groups. We expect to identify the perceived assets and deficits in the current curriculum, as well as barriers and facilitators to effective implementation of a comprehensive sexual health education program.

Sasha Alcon

Community Partner: Child Advocacy Center of Santa Clara County

Previously: Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra

Program description: The purpose of this project is to evaluate the current mental health resources utilized by the Child Advocacy Center program in Santa Clara County. The Child Advocacy Center serves children and families who have experienced any form of abuse and neglect and offer comprehensive services to their patients including working with community based mental health specialists to provide trauma informed care. This project will be a program evaluation looking at the services, referral processes, availability and barriers to care seen by community based mental health providers. 

Tito Joe Thomas

Community Partner: Youth Alive!

Previously: Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine

Program description: The goal of this project is to understand how to best support violence prevention professionals and identify barriers in providing effective violence intervention efforts in the East Bay.

Hannah Michalko

Community Partner: Gardner Packard Children's Health Center

Previously: University of Rochester School of Medicine

Program description: The goal of the Integrative Medicine Community Outreach ProjEct (I-COPE) is to improve the mental health of adolescents by providing access to pediatric integrative medicine therapies. We will implement a bilingual 5-session pilot program (I-COPE) to provide hands-on integrative medicine education for adolescents enrolled in public health insurance. Before and after the program, we will assess measures of resiliency, self-perceptions of mental health, and parental perceptions to evaluate for program feasibility and efficacy.

Nicole Dominique-Branley

Community Partner: LPCH, Department of Hepatology with Dr. Noelle Ebel, Office of Child Health Equity

Previously: LSUHSC School of Medicine in New Orleans

Program description: The goal of this project is to improve access to living organ transplantation by understanding the experiences and financial hardships of caregivers who donated a section of their liver to their children. I plan to survey and interview caregivers to learn their experiences in order to improve our distribution of resources to families learning about the transplant process and to promote public policy in urging legislators to pass the Living Donor Protection Act of 2021.