MCHRI Faculty Scholars

Lisa Chamberlain, MD, MPH
Arline and Pete Harman Faculty Scholar (2017 – 2020)
Associate Professor, Pediatrics (General Pediatrics)

Research Focus: Dr. Chamberlain has focused her career on the elimination of child health disparities. Her research is tightly policy-focused, examining the non-clinical factors contributing to disparate outcomes for low-income children with chronic illness. Poor education is a key social determinant of health and driver of intergenerational poverty. Nationally, 48% of low-income children are not ready for kindergarten, lagging behind children from high income families. Pediatricians represent the only part of the early childhood system that can reach all children before kindergarten. This provides an enormous opportunity to provide interventions to support child development. Traditionally, however, pediatricians have lacked scalable interventions to assure school readiness. Dr. Chamberlain’s research strives to improve literacy levels of young children who are not attending preschool by prescribing an evidence-based text messaging literacy program to those seen in a county pediatric clinic system.

Valerie Chock, MD, MS
Arline and Pete Harman Endowed Faculty Scholar (2020-2023)
Associate Professor, Pediatrics (Neonatal & Developmental Medicine)

Study Title: Targeted Cerebral Saturations in Extremely Preterm Infants (Brain Oxygenation or BOX Study)

Research Focus: Dr. Chock's research interests include the following: Neurological monitoring in critically ill infants; Altered hemodynamics in neonates, especially in relation to prematurity, congenital heart disease, and central nervous system injury; Determination of the hemodynamic significance and effects of a patent ductus arteriosus in the preterm infant; Utilizing NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy) and other technologies for improved monitoring in the NICU.

Anupama Narla, MD
Tashia and John Morgridge Faculty Scholar in Pediatric Translational Medicine (2017-2022)
Assistant Professor, Pediatrics (Hematology & Oncology)

Research Focus: Dr. Narla has studied the molecular mechanisms by which ribosomal dysfunction leads to bone marrow failure by further characterizing the signaling pathways that are triggered and the subsequent effects on hematopoiesis. She published work on ribosomal haploinsufficiency causing selective activation of p53 in human erythroid progenitor cells and on the effects of a microRNA cooperating in the pathogenesis of the 5q- syndrome. She will continue to focus on understanding the effects of specific drugs on these disorders which may uncover further clues about pathophysiology and as importantly, will directly benefit patients. She has published work on the effects of dexamethasone and lenalidomide, the first line therapies for DBA and 5q- MDS respectively, on erythropoiesis and am an author on a manuscript examining the effects of leucine, a stimulator of the mTOR pathway, in these disorders.

Manish Saggar, MD, PhD
Tashia and John Morgridge Endowed Faculty Scholar in Pediatric Translational Medicine (2020-2025)
Assistant Professor, Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences

Study Title: A Computational Neuropsychiatry Approach Towards Characterizing Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development

Research Focus: I am a computational neuroscientist and currently focus on understanding brain dynamics at rest as well as during learning. The overarching goal of my research is to develop reliable computational methods that will allow for characterizing and modeling temporal dynamics of brain activity, without averaging data in either space or time. I strongly believe that the spatiotemporal richness in brain activity might hold the key to finding the person- and disorder-centric biomarkers. Funded by a career development award (K99/R00; NIMH) and a young investigator award (NARSAD; Brain & Behavior Foundation), I am currently developing methods to model the temporal dynamics of brain activity in individuals with fragile X syndrome and healthy controls. The application of computational modeling to neuroscience and psychiatry is nascent in its development but holds significant promise to positively affect public health. I have a strong interdisciplinary background in (1) computational sciences, (2) neuroscience as well as (3) psychiatry. Integrating neuroscience, psychiatry, and mathematical modeling represents the new frontier in applications and analysis of large neuroimaging datasets and has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of dynamical brain organization in healthy controls and in individuals with psychiatric disorders.

Peter Santa Maria, MD, PhD
Tashia and John Morgridge Endowed Faculty Scholar in Pediatric Translational Medicine (2020-2025)
Assistant Professor, Otolaryngology (Otology & Neurotology)

Study Title: Sensory Hearing Loss in Chronic Suppurative Otitis Media

About: Dr. Peter Santa Maria is a surgeon scientist born and raised in Perth, Australia with a subspecialty interest in Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery. He attended medical school at The University of Western Australia before undertaking his residency in Otolaryngology, Head and Neck Surgery. He was the Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery fellow at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital (2012), Western Australia before undertaking a three year instructorship at Stanford University in Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery (2015). He joined Stanford faculty in 2017. 

Pervez Sultan, MD, MBChB
Arline and Pete Harman Endowed Faculty Scholar (2020-2023)
Associate Professor, Anesthesiology, Perioperative & Pain Medicine

Study Title: Development and Validation of a New Postpartum Quality of Recovery Patient-Reported Outcome Measure

About: Dr. Pervez Sultan is an Associate Professor of Obstetric Anesthesiology, at Stanford University School of Medicine and also holds an Honorary Faculty position as Associate Professor at University College London. His research interests include defining, characterizing and measuring postpartum recovery. Dr. Sultan currently serves on the Society for Obstetric Anesthesia and Perinatology (SOAP) Research Committee.

Suzanne Tharin, MD
Tashia and John Morgridge Endowed Faculty Scholar in Pediatric Translational Medicine (2020-2025)
Assistant Professor, Neurosurgery

Study Title: Microrna Control of Connectivity in the Developing Central Nervous System

Research Focus: Suzanne Tharin, MD, PhD, joined the faculty at Stanford University in 2012 as an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery. Following her undergraduate degree in Physiology and a Master’s degree in Anatomy and Cell Biology at the University of Toronto, Dr. Tharin completed a PhD in Genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and SUNY Stony Brook. She received her MD from Columbia University and then completed her neurosurgery residency at the Brigham and Women's Hospital/Children’s Hospital Boston/Harvard Medical School program. She subsequently completed a clinical fellowship in complex spine surgery at the Cleveland Clinic. Her research program encompasses the molecular controls over cortical neuronal development, spinal cord injury, and regenerative strategies for spinal cord repair, including stem cell-based strategies. As a practicing neurosurgeon at the Palo Alto VA and Stanford University Hospital, Dr. Tharin is dedicated to translating an understanding of neural development into regenerative strategies for the treatment of spinal cord injury.

Elif Seda Selamet Tierney, MD
Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute Faculty Scholar (2017-2020)
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Pediatric Cardiology/Non-Invasive Imaging)

Research Focus: Dr. Tierney is a pediatric cardiologist specialized in echocardiography. Her research focus has been on using echocardiography and telemedicine to improve patient outcomes as well as non-invasive assessment of vascular health in children, specifically investigating interventions to improve cardiovascular health of at-risk children and adolescents. Patient populations such as heart transplant recipients, children and adolescents with Marfan syndrome, and Kawasaki disease patients have all been included in Dr. Tierney’s research.

Jiangbin Ye, MD, PhD
The Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health Faculty Scholar (2020-2025)
Assistant Professor, Radiation Oncology (Radiation & Cancer Biology)

Study Title: Targeting Pediatric Cancer Epigenome with Metabolic Intervention

Research Focus: One hallmark of cancer is that malignant cells modulate metabolic pathways to promote cancer progression. My professional interest is to investigate the causes and consequences of the abnormal metabolic phenotypes of cancer cells in response to microenvironmental stresses such as hypoxia and nutrient deprivation, with the prospect that therapeutic approaches might be developed to target these metabolic pathways to improve cancer treatment.