Message from the Section Chief
Welcome to the Section of Geriatric Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine!
The section was created in 2015 under the leadership of Dr. Marina Martin. Dr. Martin oversaw the development of our outpatient Senior Care Clinic, inpatient geriatric consult service and Acute Care for Elders unit, Stanford presence in local skilled nursing facilities, a home-based primary care program, and a transitions of care program. Since that time, our clinical faculty has grown from a handful of practitioners to more than twenty.
One of our main missions at Stanford Geriatrics is to increase geriatric educational exposure. In 2021, Dr. Matt Mesias, Director of our Inpatient Services, and Dr. Julianna Marwell, developed an undergraduate geriatric medical curriculum for first year medical and physician assistant students that includes exposure to some of the basic principles of geriatric medicine. In 2022, I began co-directing a course on Longevity for the undergraduate students with Dr. Laura Carstenson, Director of the Stanford Longevity Center. In April 2022, the first Stanford geriatric medical student interest group was launched, and this year, two Stanford medical students will be presenting their work at the American Geriatrics Society meeting in May 2023. Our geriatric clinical fellowship led by Dr. Vinita Shastri again enjoyed a very successful recruitment season last year, and we are very excited to have Dr. Lindsey Haddock who recently joined as Associate Director of the Geriatric Fellowship Program.
In terms of research, more geriatrics faculty and trainees than ever before are leading or participating in ongoing aging related research that spans from the basic laboratory to clinical interventions. As an example of the breadth of expertise, Caroline Park, MD, PhD, our advanced geriatric research fellow, received a Department of Medicine 2022-2023 TRAM Pilot Award to understand skin aging through autophagy gene expression and lipid class analysis (Anne Chang, Deborah Kado, Mike Snyder, co-mentors) while also being selected for the “best publication award” from the Stanford Medicine Center of Improvement (SMCI) for her first authored paper in JAMA Surgery 2022 entitled, “Association Between Implementation of a Geriatric Trauma Clinical Pathway and Changes in Delirium in Older Adults with Traumatic Injury.” In geriatrics, we have embraced successful collaborations with colleagues in other fields that span computational biology, dermatology, emergency medicine, epidemiology, genetics, health services, industry, mechanical engineering, nephrology, neurology, physical therapy, psychiatry, surgery, surgical subspecialties, and stem cell research.
Thank you for taking the time to visit our website to learn more about our mission, people and programs. For those who may be interested in learning more about our clinical operations, please contact our Interim Clinical Section Chiefs Dr. Meera Sheffrin and Dr. Matt Mesias. For those interested in our clinical fellowship opportunities, please contact Dr. Vinita Shastri. For those who may be interested in educational opportunities, please contact Dr. Can Chen. For those interested in research, please feel free to contact me. We look forward to being in touch!
Deborah Kado, MD, MS, Geriatric Medicine Section Research Chief
