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

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.

Current StAT Residents PGY2

Rah-Sha Al-Hassan

Sophia Katz

Anna Le

Hanh Nguyen

Nina Shevzov-Zebrun

Lisa Umeh