Oliver Aalami, MD

Clinical Associate Professor, Surgery - Vascular Surgery

Dr. Aalami is a Clinical Associate Professor of Vascular & Endovascular Surgery at the Palo Alto VA and Stanford University. His research focuses on leveraging mobile health technologies to enable precision health. VascTrac is validating the use of mobile devices to passively monitor the functional capacity to provide personalized surveillance and to predict treatment failure in patients with cardiovascular disease. Project Theia, a post-operative surgical wound surveillance program implementing computer vision to identify wound infections. Dr. Aalami attended Boston University School of Medicine, UCSF-East Bay Surgical Residency Program, was a post-doc at Stanford’s Cardiovascular Institute with Dr. Randall Morris studying Transplantation Immunology and completed his Vascular Surgery Fellowship at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Zhenan Bao, PhD

K. K. Lee Professor in the School of Engineering, Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and Professor, by courtesy, of Materials Science and Engineering and of Chemistry

Zhenan Bao is a K.K. Lee Professor of Chemical Engineering, and by courtesy, a Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Material Science and Engineering and a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University. She founded the Stanford Wearable Electronics Initiate (eWEAR) and serves as the faculty director. Prior to joining Stanford in 2004, she was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies from 1995-2004. She has over 400 refereed publications and over 60 US patents with a Google Scholar H-Index >120. She pioneered a number of design concepts for organic electronic materials. Her work has enabled flexible electronic circuits and displays. In her recent work, she has developed skin-inspired organic electronic materials, which resulted in unprecedented performance or functions in medical devices, energy storage and environmental applications.

Bao is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Inventors. She is a Fellow of MRS, ACS, AAAS, SPIE, ACS PMSE and ACS POLY.  She served on the Board of Directors for MRS in 2003-2005 and as an Executive Committee Member for the Polymer Materials Science and Engineering division of the American Chemical Society. 

Bao was selected as Nature’s Ten people who mattered in 2015 as a “Master of Materials” for her work on artificial electronic skin. She was awarded ACS Award on Applied Polymer Science 2017, The L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Award in the Physical Sciences 2017, the AICHE Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering in 2014, ACS Carl Marvel Creative Polymer Chemistry Award in 2013, ACS Cope Scholar Award in 2011, she was the recipient of the Royal Society of Chemistry Beilby Medal and Prize in 2009, the IUPAC Creativity in Applied Polymer Science Prize in 2008, American Chemical Society Team Innovation Award 2001, R&D 100 Award and R&D Magazine’s Editors Choice of the “Best of the Best” new technology for 2001. She has been selected in 2002 by the American Chemical Society Women Chemists Committee as one of the twelve “Outstanding Young Woman Scientist who is expected to make a substantial impact in chemistry during this century”. She was also selected by MIT Technology Review magazine in 2003 as one of the top 100 young innovators for this century.

Bao is a co-founder and on the Board of Directors for C3 Nano and PyrAmes, both are silicon-valley venture funded start-ups. She serves as an advising Partner for NewGen Venture Capital.

Akshay Chaudhari, PhD

Assistant Professor in the Integrative Biomedical Imaging Informatics at Stanford (IBIIS) at the Department of Radiology, Assistant Professor, by courtesy, at the Department of Biomedical Data Science

Dr. Chaudhari is an Assistant Professor of research in the Integrative Biomedical Imaging Informatics at Stanford (IBIIS) section in the Department of Radiology. His primary research interests lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence and medical imaging. Dr. Chaudhari graduated from UCSD with a B.S. in Bioengineering in 2012. He completed his Ph.D. from Stanford University’s Department of Bioengineering in 2017, focusing on novel MRI methods for musculoskeletal imaging; supported through the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Whitaker Fellowship, and the Siebel Fellowship. Dr. Chaudhari trained as a postdoctoral fellow in Radiology at Stanford University, where he combined machine learning with medical imaging acquisition and analysis. Dr. Chaudhari has won many awards, including the W.S. Moore Young Investigator Award, the Junior Fellow Award, and an Outstanding Teacher Award from the ISMRM. He has 6 additional young investigator awards for his work on advanced medical imaging acquisition and analysis techniques. Dr. Chaudhari is the Associate Director of Research and Education at the Stanford AIMI Center. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and medical imaging.

Ian H. Gotlib, PhD

David Starr Jordan Professor and Director of the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology Laboratory

Ian H. Gotlib is the David Starr Jordan Professor and Director of the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology Laboratory at Stanford University. From 2005-2010, Dr. Gotlib served as Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences, and he has been Chair of the Psychology Department at Stanford since 2012.

In his research, Dr. Gotlib examines psychobiological factors that place individuals at increased risk for developing depression and engaging in suicidal behaviors, as well as processes that are protective in this context. More specifically, Dr. Gotlib examines neural, cognitive, social, endocrinological, and genetic factors in depressed individuals and applies findings from these investigations to the study of predictors of depression in children at risk for this disorder. In related projects, Dr. Gotlib is also examining the differential effects of early life stress on the trajectories of neurodevelopment in boys and girls through puberty in an effort to explain the increased prevalence of depression and suicidal behaviors in girls in adolescence. Finally, Dr. Gotlib is extending this work to the study of brain function and structure, endocrine function, and behaviors in neonates and infants being raised in suboptimal environments.

Dr. Gotlib’s research is supported largely by grants from the National Institutes of Health. He has also been funded by the National Health Research Development Program and the Medical Research Council of Canada, and leads an interdisciplinary team funded by PHIND. Dr. Gotlib has received the Distinguished Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders, the Joseph Zubin Award for lifetime research contributions to the understanding of psychopathology, the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution, and the APS Distinguished Scientist Award. He has published over 500 scientific articles and has written or edited several books in the areas of depression and stress, including the Handbook of Depression with Constance Hammen, now in its 3rd edition. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Psychopathological Association, and is Past President of the Society for Research in Psychopathology.

Michael Snyder, PhD

Stanford W. Ascherman Professor and Chair, Department of Genetics
Director, Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine

Dr. Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project.

His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These including the development of proteome chips, high resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), paired end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes, de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high throughput technologies and RNA-Seq. These technologies have been used for characterizing genomes, proteomes and regulatory networks.

Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated, and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species.

He has also combined different state-of-the-art "omics" technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of person and used this to assess disease risk and monitor disease states for personalized medicine. He is a cofounder of several biotechnology companies, including Protometrix (now part of Life Tehcnologies), Affomix (now part of Illumina), Excelix, and Personalis, and he presently serves on the board of a number of companies.