Bio
I am a physician scientist who has dedicated my career to understanding and curing human rheumatic diseases; to building a physician scientist pipeline that extends from high school students all the way to scientists in academia, industry, and government; and to promoting team science and interdisciplinary research.
I direct a research lab in the Department of Medicine, Division of Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine. My lab actively collaborates with many investigators on the Stanford campus, and across the world, with a goal to disseminate and implement newly-invented technologies. We study vaccines and autoimmune diseases, including systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), scleroderma, rheumatoid arthritis (RA), myositis, primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), Sjögren's disease, type I diabetes (T1D), vasculitis, multiple sclerosis (MS), immunodeficiency disorders, COVID-19 related autoimmunity, mixed connective tissue disease (MCTD), and autoimmunity induced by infections. In addition to trying to better understand the pathogenic mechanisms involved in autoimmunity, we are interested in developing bench-to-bedside technologies, including multiplexed diagnostics and therapeutics, for human immune diseases. Our group made several breakthrough inventions, such as protein arrays, peptide arrays, HIT, lysate arrays, Intel arrays, and more recently EpiTOF.
In terms of leadership. I have extensive expertise in coordinating 12 different program project grants over the last 15 years, including PI of our Autoimmunity Center of Excellence, and Leadership Center PI for the $41M Accelerating Medicines Partnership in RA/SLE initiative, Co-PI of Stanford’s RECOVER program, and PI on biomarker studies for Pfizer’s STOP-PASC Paxlovid trial. I was selected as Vice Chair of RECOVER’s Immunology and Hematology Pathobiology Task Force Committee and currently serve on the RECOVER OCSC Steering Committee. In 2018, I was appointed Associate Dean of Medical Student Research, and I am the Director Emeritus of the Stanford MSTP. I have been a member of the MSTP Admissions Committee for 20 years, served as Associate Director and Co-Director from 2009-2013, and directed the MSTP until 2018. I am a leader in educational initiatives. I was the first Chair of Education for the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies. I founded and direct the Stanford Institutes of Medicine Research (SIMR) Program for high school students, which has hosted over 1,000 students in labs over 25 years. SIMR has been funded by educational grants from NIH, HHMI, CIRM, DDCF, Amgen Foundation, industry, and philanthropy. It serves as an important pipeline program for MSTP. I have served on the Immunology Program Predoctoral Committee and have won teaching and mentoring awards from the Immunology PhD Program and the Department of Medicine. In the last 25 years I have trained almost 70 scientists; served on 64 PhD thesis committees in 3 Schools on campus; successfully graduated 14 PhD students who trained in my lab; and have trained or are training many postdoctoral fellows. Of my graduate students, scholars, and fellows, 12 are currently employed in industry and 12 are Assistant or Associate Professors at academic institutions. Most recently, I have taken on directorship of Department of Medicine's Team Science program and have championed physician scientist careers as co-founder and secretary of the Physician Scientist Support Foundation (thepssf.org).
