About Presence

Presence champions the human experience in medicine. We believe that being present is integral to the art and the science of medicine and predicates the quality of medical care. The experience of suffering and the care of those who are suffering is the most poignant of human experiences; we believe both of these can be better addressed in society and in our health-care systems. Adverse effects created by the unintended intrusion of technology include missing obvious disease revealed by the body, dissatisfaction among patients and physicians, and the unplanned loss of social rituals, all of which negatively impact health outcomes.

In a world where we are hyper-linked by technology, we are increasingly separated by a lack of human connection. Even as technology is critical to quality and safety in the delivery of care, it inadvertently creates barriers between the patient and the health-care team.

Presence has unified the best talent to strengthen the human dimension in medicine and medical education, focusing on three areas: harnessing technology for the human experience in medicine; studying and advocating for the patient–physician relationship; and reducing medical errors. By engaging colleagues in every university discipline, from comparative literature to environmental engineering, our goal is to foster research, dialogue, and collaboration among seven Stanford schools to produce measurable and meaningful change.

Presence has benefitted from the living labs of our hospitals and clinics, partnering with our colleagues campus-wide to catalyze scholarship and interdisciplinary applied research via collaborations, a Fellows program, and education programs for medical students, residents, junior faculty, and others. We will also utilize design thinking strategies to propose solutions, apply best practices, and translate knowledge into the educational curriculum. Over time, we anticipate providing a variety of educational events to engage the local community.

Presence supports Stanford Medicine’s Precision Health efforts to define and develop the next generation of care that is proactive, predictive, and precise.

Presence was founded and is directed by Abraham Verghese, MD, whose life work has focused on the experience of suffering and illness and the unique, and sometimes lethal, stresses of being a physician. One constant—whether in his academic work or his novels—has been his love for medicine, his championing of the sanctity of the physician-patient relationship, and, above all, the shared experience we all have of being alive as embodied, mortal beings.

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Leadership

Abraham Verghese

An infectious disease physician, best-selling author, and popular speaker, Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University. He is known for his advocacy for the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship and for the value of the discerning bedside exam as a complement to and a way of more judiciously using expensive diagnostic technology.

Dr. Verghese began his medical training in his native Ethiopia, but when his education was interrupted during the civil unrest there, he moved to the United States with his family. He worked in the U.S. as an orderly for a year before completing his medical studies at Madras Medical College in Madras, India. He finished his infectious diseases fellowship at Boston University’s School of Medicine.

Dr. Verghese’s early years as an orderly, then as a physician caring for patients with AIDS at the dawn of that epidemic, were transformative and informed his approach to medicine and his writing of both fiction and non-fiction.

He served on the faculty of East Tennessee State University, the University of Iowa, Texas Tech University, and the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, before coming to Stanford in 2007. Verghese is the author of “My Own Country,” a 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and a Time Magazine Best Book of the Year that was also made into a movie directed by Mira Nair; “The Tennis Partner,” a New York Times Notable Book; and, most recently, the novel “Cutting for Stone,” which spent a year on the New York Times bestseller list and was picked as one of Amazon’s “A Hundred Books To Read in a Lifetime.”

He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, and in 2016, President Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal. A Master of Fine Arts graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Verghese’s essays and short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.

Sonoo Thadaney

Sonoo Thadaney-Israni is the co-founder and Executive Director of Presence, a Stanford Medicine Center. Faculty Founding Director Abraham Verghese originally engaged her as a thought partner to create and launch the center. She also serves as the co-chair of the Working Group of Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare for the National Academy of Medicine (NAM, formerly the Institute of Medicine) in Washington, DC, and co-shepherds the work of the NAM's Technology across the Lifecourse Group.

Before moving to Stanford University, Ms. Thadaney spent nearly three decades working in Silicon Valley. At Stanford, she has been an internal entrepreneur, working with faculty to launch the Stanford Presence Center; the new MSc in Community Health and Prevention Research; the Stanford Women and Sex Differences in Medicine (WSDM) Center; the Diversity and First-Gen Office (serving Stanford students who are first in their family to attend college); the Restorative Justice Pilot; and more. She teaches coursework in Leveraging Conflict for Constructive Change, Leadership Skills, and Mediation.

Ms. Thadaney’s formal education includes an MBA, a BA in psychology with minors in sociology and education, and a postbaccalaureate in mass communications. She is also a trained Mediator and Restorative Justice practitioner for the State of California, serving as the Co-Chair of the Commission on Juvenile Delinquency and Prevention for San Mateo County.

Core Faculty

Michelle Chiu

Michelle Chiu graduated medical school from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and completed internal medicine residency at Stanford University. She is currently a clinical assistant professor in the Division of Hospital Medicine at Stanford Hospital. Outside her clinical work, Dr. Chiu is involved in medical education at the graduate and post-graduate level. She teaches IM Bedside Clinical Reasoning and Physical Diagnosis Rounds, an elective for second-year PA and medical students that focuses on the bridging the gap between classroom physiology and bedside pathology. Additionally, she is involved in APP post-graduate education with current projects in hospital medicine onboarding, CME, and scholarship.

Linda Geng

Linda Geng received a B.S. in Biochemistry/Cell Biology and a B.A. in Psychology, graduating summa cum laude from Rice University in 2006. She then enrolled in the MSTP program at University of Washington, earning her Ph.D. in 2011 in Molecular/Cellular Biology and her M.D. in 2015. At Stanford, she has developed an interest in rare, undiagnosed, and inherited diseases, and she has worked with the Stanford Center for Undiagnosed Diseases since her arrival. She was the inaugural resident on a new rotation in Genomic Medicine, and demonstrated the full range of her skills during an outstanding Medicine Grand Rounds two months ago.

Linda was a winner of the peer-chosen Julian Wolfsohn Award, given to two residents per class each year who demonstrate outstanding performance in clinical judgment, leadership, teaching, and kindness. Linda plans to pursue a one-year NIH fellowship in the Undiagnosed Disease program and a complementing fellowship in Clinical Molecular Genetics.

Errol Ozdalga

Errol Ozdalga is a Clinical Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and the Vice Chair of Communications for the Department of Medicine. He serves as Director of Stanford Medicine 25, a nationally recognized program that emphasizes the importance of bedside clinical skills in modern medicine. As a hospitalist at Stanford Health Care for over 14 years, Dr. Ozdalga is committed to excellence in patient care, medical education, and the advancement of human-centered medicine. His work spans clinical leadership, strategic communications, and innovative efforts to elevate the visibility of Stanford’s medical faculty and programs.

Carla Pugh

Carla Pugh is Professor of Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is also the Director of the Technology Enabled Clinical Improvement (T.E.C.I.) Center. Her clinical area of expertise is Acute Care Surgery. Dr. Pugh obtained her undergraduate degree at U.C. Berkeley in Neurobiology and her medical degree at Howard University School of Medicine. Upon completion of her surgical training at Howard University Hospital, she went to Stanford University and obtained a PhD in Education. She is the first surgeon in the United States to obtain a PhD in Education. Her goal is to use technology to change the face of medical and surgical education.

Her research involves the use of simulation and advanced engineering technologies to develop new approaches for assessing and defining competency in clinical procedural skills. Dr. Pugh holds three patents on the use of sensor and data acquisition technology to measure and characterize hands-on clinical skills. Currently, over two hundred medical and nursing schools are using one of her sensor enabled training tools for their students and trainees. Her work has received numerous awards from medical and engineering organizations. In 2011 Dr. Pugh received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barak Obama at the White House. She is considered to be a lead, international expert on the use of sensors and motion tracking technology for performance measurement. In 2014 she was invited to give a TEDMED talk on the potential uses of technology to transform how we measure clinical skills in medicine. In April 2018, Dr. Pugh was inducted into the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Hannah Valantine

Hannah Valantine recently returned to Stanford as Professor of Medicine. She recently retired this fall from her position as the inaugural NIH Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity, and a Senior Investigator in the Intramural Research Program at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). Prior to starting this position in April 2014, Dr. Valantine was Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and the Senior Associate Dean for Diversity and Leadership at Stanford, a leadership position she held since November 2004. She is nationally recognized for her transformative approaches to diversity and is a recipient of the NIH Director’s Pathfinder Award for Diversity in the Scientific Workforce. Citing NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins’ statement about Dr. Valantine’s accomplisments at NIH, “her laser-like focus on expanding recruitment and retention of the brightest minds regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, and socioeconomic status has produced remarkable results over a few short years.” For example, she established the Distinguished Scholars Program, which has had a dramatic, positive impact on the diversity of tenure-track investigators at NIH. Hannah established the NIH Equity Committee to systematically track and evaluate diversity and inclusion metrics in each NIH Institute and Center’s intramural program. Under her leadership, there has been a significant increase in representation of women as tenure-track and tenured principal investigators (PI), and of African American/Black and Hispanic tenure-track PIs in the Intramural Program. There also has been a significant increase in representation of women in NIH leadership positions, such as Institute/Center Directors and Scientific Directors. she played a major role in taking on workplace harassment at NIH. One of her significant achievements was developing and implementing the first NIH Workplace Climate and Harassment Survey. The findings provided critical data that have informed NIH’s strategies to improve the workplace moving forward. The survey provides a tool (now published) for NIH-funded institutions across the country to assess and improve their workplace climates.

The impact of Dr. Valantine’s work has been felt well beyond the NIH campus. She has made several important inroads into improving diversity and equity among the extramural research community. For example, Hannah designed the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program that is being implemented by the NIH Common Fund to create cultures of inclusive excellence at NIH-funded institutions. She also guided the National Research Mentoring Network program on coaching and mentoring for grant writing toward successful applications and awards supporting scientists from diverse backgrounds, including those from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups. Since her arrival at NIH, there has been a significant increase in the number of R01 applications and awards that identify African American/Black and Hispanic scientists as the Program Director/Principal Investigator (PD/PI). And for early career scientists, she has focused on career development awards (K-series), the penultimate stage before R01 grants, increasing the number of applications and awards on which African American/Black and Hispanic scientists are identified as PD/PIs, essentially eliminating the racial gap in success rates for K-awards.

At NIH Dr. Valantine established a highly productive research program within the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). She created the Genomic Research Alliance for Transplantation (GRAfT), a consortium of five heart and lung transplant programs in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, which has enrolled and is actively following more than 500 patients, 40% of whom are African American/Black. She is using the technology that she co-invented with Steve Quake, professor bioengineering at Stanford — donor-derived cell-free DNA in blood — to monitor organ transplant rejection in the GRAfT cohort, and to understand the mechanisms that explain how and why African Americans/Blacks reject their organ transplants at higher rates than White recipients.

Dr. Valantine was elected to National Academy of Medicine, “for her national leadership in both scientific workforce diversity and cardiac transplantation research. Her data-driven approach in these two important areas has led to game-changing policies and new programs that enriched the nation’s biomedical talent pool and have generated paradigm-shifting innovations in patient care.”

Samantha Wang

Samantha Wang received a B.A. with distinction in Molecular/Cell Biology in 2010. She then enrolled in medical school at Yale University, earning both an M.D. and a Masters in Health Science in 2015. While at Yale, Samantha served as a leader for the Yale Women in Medicine Interest Group, and was named a Farr Scholar in Research Excellence. Given her leadership skills and her superb clinical performance, we were absolutely delighted when she matched at Stanford in 2015. As a resident, Samantha has thrived as a clinician and as a class leader. She helped create – and now leads – the Stanford Women in Internal Medicine interest group, and she serves on the Stanford GME Women in Internal Medicine Committee.

Samantha was also a recipient of the prestigious Julian Wolfsohn Award, and she was one of three members of Stanford’s 2016-2017 Medical Jeopardy team. Samantha’s current research focus is on the side-effects of new targeted therapies in lung cancer, and she plans a career as a clinician/clinical researcher in Hematology/Oncology.

Donna Zulman

Donna Zulman, MD, MS, is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Primary Care and Population Health at Stanford University and Associate Director at VA Palo Alto’s Center for Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i). Dr. Zulman received her MD from the University of California, Los Angeles. After completing her residency in Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan, she received a Masters in Health and Health Care Research through the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program at the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor VA.

Dr. Zulman received a VA Health Services Research & Development Career Development Award (2013-2018) to study health care delivery interventions for Veterans with complex medical needs. Currently, Dr. Zulman's research focuses on improving health care delivery for patients with multiple chronic conditions and complex medical and social needs and optimizing health-related technology to personalize care and improve outcomes for high-risk patients. She is one of the PIs of the national VA Virtual Care Consortium of Research, and directs the VA Quality Enhancement Research Initiative focused on implementing and evaluating virtual care for Veterans with access barriers. Dr. Zulman is also an Associate Editor for the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

In addition to research, Dr. Zulman is actively involved in teaching and mentoring students, residents, and fellows at Stanford and the VA. She directs a course at Stanford, entitled, Methods for Health Care Delivery Innovation, Implementation, and Evaluation. She was the recipient of the Stanford McCormick Award for the Advancement of Women in Academic Medicine in 2016 and an Exceptional Mentor Award from the American Medical Women’s Association in 2020.

Presence Fellows

Andrew Elder

Andrew Elder is a physician and educator from Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. Awarded a CASBS-Presence Fellowship at Stanford University in 2018-19, he worked on a book project outlining the challenges that we face in the provision of care for increasing numbers of older, frailer, multimorbid patients in our health systems and broader society. Appointed as a Presence Scholar in 2019 he continues to support the work of the Presence initiative, particularly with regard to the care of older people.

Kiki Lombarts

Kiki Lombarts, PhD MSc, is Professor in Professional Performance at the Amsterdam UMC, Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is the director of the Centre of Professional Performance & Compassionate Care within the Dep. of Medical Psychology, where she supervises a multidisciplinary team of PhD students. Kiki is a health care services researcher and for many years has been working in the field of physicians’ professional performance and medical education. Her broader research interests include professionalism, physicians’ well-being and compassionate care. Kiki was awarded the 2020-21 CASBS-Presence Fellowship at Stanford University during which she studied medicine becoming a female-majority profession. She continues to support the Presence Centre as a Presence Fellow, focussing on the meaning of gendered medicine for patient care.

John Gregory Markoff

John Markoff is an affiliate fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence. In March of 2022 he published Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin Press).

In 2017-18 he was a Berggruen Fellow at CASBS. In 2017 he joined the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., as a staff historian. Previously he was a reporter at the The New York Times, beginning in March 1988 as the paper’s national computer writer. He moved to Silicon Valley to write about technology in 1992. Prior to joining the Times, he worked for The San Francisco Examiner from 1985 to 1988. He reported for the New York Times Science Section from 2010 through 2015. He returned to the Business Section to cover Silicon Valley in 2016 and retired from the paper in December of 2016.

Markoff has written about technology and science since 1977. He reported on technology and the defense industry for The Pacific News Service in San Francisco from 1977 to 1981; he was a reporter at Infoworld from 1981 to 1983; he was the West Coast editor for Byte Magazine from 1984 to 1985 and wrote a column on personal computers for The San Jose Mercury from 1983 to 1985.

He has also been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism and an adjunct faculty member of the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism.

The Times nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize in 1995, 1998 and 2000. The San Francisco Examiner nominated him for a Pulitzer in 1987. In 2005, with a group of Times reporters, he received the Loeb Award for business journalism. In 2007 he shared the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Breaking News award. In 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting as part of a New York Times project on labor and automation.

In 2007 he became a member of the International Media Council at the World Economic Forum. Also in 2007, he was named a fellow of the Society of Professional Journalists, the organization’s highest honor.

In June of 2010 the New York Times presented him with the Nathaniel Nash Award, which is given annually for foreign and business reporting.

Born in Oakland, California on October 29, 1949, Markoff grew up in Palo Alto, California and graduated from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, in 1971. He attended graduate school at the University of Oregon and received a masters degree in sociology in 1976.

Markoff is the co-author of The High Cost of High Tech, published in 1985 by Harper & Row. He wrote Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier with Katie Hafner, which was published in 1991 by Simon & Schuster. In January of 1996 Hyperion published Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw, which he co-authored with Tsutomu Shimomura. What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture shaped the Personal Computer Industry, was published in 2005 by Viking Books. Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, was published in August of 2015 by HarperCollins Ecco.

He is married to Leslie Terzian Markoff and they live in Palo Alto, Calif.

John Norcini

John Norcini, PhD, is President Emeritus of the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research (FAIMER®) and Research Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Upstate Medical University. FAIMER has an active research program in international health professions education and physician migration, global fellowship programs for faculty from health professions schools, and databases of recognized medical schools around the world. Prior to FAIMER, Dr. Norcini held a number of positions at the American Board of Internal Medicine. He has more than 200 publications, lectured and taught in more than 45 countries, and is on the editorial boards of several peer-reviewed journals. He is an honorary Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners (UK) and the Academy of Medical Educators and has received numerous awards including the Karolinska Prize for Research in Medical Education.

Junaid Zaman

Junaid A. B. Zaman, MA, BMBCh, MRCP, PhD, is a clinical assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at University of Southern California. He also holds honorary appointments as a Consultant Cardiologist and Electrophysiologist at the Royal Brompton Hospital, London and as a Senior Clinical Lecturer at Imperial College London. Since graduation from the University of Oxford, he has consistently sought to promote bedside teaching and clinical skills throughout his postgraduate training and has received multiple awards for his teaching skills from his peers. As a clinical academic cardiac electrophysiologist, he undertook a PhD at Imperial College London before being awarded the inaugural British Heart Foundation Fulbright Scholarship as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, where he first met the group that would later form the core of the SBM in which he was a Founding Board Member and is the current Director of Research. Being fully clinically trained in both UK and USA systems, he is in a unique position to harness the strengths and skills of both, recognise their limitations and share the breadth of his international experience.

Participating Faculty

Maja Artandi, MD, Associate Professor Primary Care and Population Health

Steven Asch, MD, Professor, Primary Care and Population Health

Jonathan Chen, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor, Biomedical Informatics

Jeffrey Chi, MD, Associate Professor, Internal Medicine

Poonam Hosamani, MD, Assistant Professor, Internal Medicine

Lisa Shieh, MD, PhD, Professor, Internal Medicine

C. Jason Wang, MD, PhD, Associate Professor, General Pediatrics

Presence Team

Katie Kanagawa

Katie joined the Department of Medicine from two basic science departments in the School of Medicine, Biomedical Data Science and Epidemiology & Population Health, where she managed communications since they opened in 2015 and 2019 (respectively). During that time, Katie led multi-functional (faculty, trainee, staff) teams to build from the ground up, maintain, and optimize a range of communications channels, and she developed and implemented policies and procedures with the goal of engaging diverse internal and external community members. She enjoyed partnering with department diversity, equity, & inclusion (DEI) committees to tell stories, highlight community members, and tailor and distribute core messaging. In addition to her leadership role in these two departments, Katie also worked as a communications strategist in the Center for Population Health Sciences (PHS), collaborating with leadership and subject matter experts to promote their health equity research and increase their impact.

Before joining the Stanford community in 2014, Katie worked with the communications team at Bay Area non-profit organization, Breast Cancer Action, and she taught undergraduate courses on writing, broadcast communications, and media as an Adjunct Professor at UC Santa Cruz and San Francisco State. Katie holds a PhD in Literature and Mass Media and an MA in English from UCSC. She works remotely from her home in Washington state, where she enjoys Iyengar yoga, vocal training and performance, and exploring the Oregon coast with her family.

Clinton Louie

Clinton joined the Department of Medicine in late Spring of 2022 as a Communications Specialist. Clinton helps implement and develop different communication strategies to expand and promote the Department of Medicine with the aid of the Communications Team. He works alongside with the Katie Kanagawa, Ph.D. the department’s Communications Director.

Prior to joining Stanford, Clinton worked for several years at the University of California, San Francisco in the Radiology department as their Web and Media specialist. He was worked as the Staff Co-Chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee in his previous role, and has created and implemented different department communication policies and strategies, internally and externally, and has contributed to expand their social media presence through different platforms. He has also worked for KQED, a local PBS TV and Radio station located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Clinton has a BA in Communications from CSU East Bay, with a focus on Digital Media. Clinton is a native of San Francisco, and enjoys photography, time with his family and friends, travel, and experiencing new things.

Russelle Anne McDermott

Russelle Anne McDermott joined the Presence team in May 2022. She is a Program Administrator in the Department of Medicine and is in charge of the administrative tasks of Medicine Grand Rounds, Teaching Awards, Hewlett Awards, Stanford 25, and other programs of the department. She supports Dr. Abraham Verghese and Sonoo Thadaney Israni. She will be part of the core group of the Stanford-HBMC Summer Research Program in 2023.

She has a Bachelor's degree in Nursing and is currently working on her MS in Informatics with a Health Specialization at San Jose State University. One of her goals for a Master of Health Informatics degree is to use it as a tool to leverage data and information to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in the health care industry.

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