September 5, 2023

The PACCM division is thrilled to announce four new PACCM faculty members: Drs. Ngoc Tran, Kirat Gill, Pranjal Patel, and Dr. Ana Pacheco-Navarro.

Dr. Ngoc Tran will be joining the PACCM division as Clinical Assistant Professor in the Allergy, Asthma, & Immunodeficiency Program and practicing at the Atherton clinic. Ngoc is a Bay Area native who completed her undergraduate degree in Human Biology at the University of California at San Diego. She then conducted basic science research and worked as a lab manager for a few years, before receiving her medical degree at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. Afterwards, she returned to the Bay Area to complete her Pediatrics residency training at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital of Oakland and her Allergy and Immunology fellowship at Stanford.  She is particularly interested in the relationship between race/ethnicity and health care disparities in the management of food allergies and other allergic diseases. She lives in the South Bay with her husband, Nathan, who is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford. We are thrilled to have recruited Ngoc to join our faculty group.

Dr. Kirat Gill joins PACCM from the division of sleep medicine, Department of Psychiatry, where she has been faculty since 2020. She was recently promoted to Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine and is boarded in internal medicine, pulmonary medicine, critical care and sleep medicine. She will be practicing pulmonary medicine at our Palo Alto and Emeryville sites and will be joining Dr. Michelle Cao in expanding the home assisted ventilation program. She will spend dedicated time to maintain our collaboration with Sleep Medicine and ENT-Sleep Surgery to continue to lead the INSPIRE clinic that manages patients undergoing neurostimulation. Furthermore, she will be a core ICU faculty at Tri-Valley, Pleasanton. She will also be attending the fellow's clinic and consult service in Palo Alto. Dr. Gill completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Missouri and obtained her medical degree from St. George's University School of Medicine. After her internal medicine residency at St Joseph's Hospital in Phoeniz, AZ as part of Creighton University school of medicine, she completed her PCCM training at University of California, San Francisco at Fresno and to Stanford in 2019 for Sleep Medicine training. She also obtained a Master of Public Health Degree at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Gill is very involved with the education and diversity missions at Stanford and collaborates with both CHEST and ATS.

Dr. Pranjal Patel will be joining the Interventional Pulmonology group as a Clinical Assistant Professor.  Pranjal is well-known to our division as he was our inaugural and stellar IP fellow.  He will be mainly based out of Palo Alto with responsibilities at South Bay Cancer Center and ValleyCare.  As an integral member of the Interventional Pulmonology group, Pranjal will be a rotating member of our core services including advanced & therapeutic bronchoscopy, robotic CBCT-guided lung biopsies, and pleural disease procedures.  As a fellow, Pranjal was well-known for his passionate teaching style, and we are proud to have him join the faculty to provide this asset to our current and future fellows.

Pranjal completed medical school from Saint George’s University in Grenada, Internal Medicine residency at Santa Clara Kaiser, and PCCM fellowship at Loma Linda University.  He completed his Interventional Pulmonology fellowship here at Stanford in 2023.  He is fluent in Spanish, Hindi, and Gujarati.

Dr. Ana Pacheco-Navarro is joining our faculty as a clinical scholar.  Ana is well known to our group as an outstanding recent graduate of our PCCM fellowship.  She graduated with a BA in Biology from Williams and then earned a master's in education while serving as a Teach for America science teacher in NYC.  She then completed her MD at Cornell and her IM residency at MGH before moving to Stanford for PCCM fellowship, where she also completed a second master's degree in epidemiology and clinical research at Stanford.  Ana's major research focus is on studying the effects of Auto-antibody formation in COVID-19 and critical illness on both short and long-term outcomes with her mentors Dr. Angela Rogers and PJ Utz (from rheumatology).  She is passionate about both ICU and pulmonary medicine.  Her clinical time will be spent at Valley Care ICU and as an attending in Stanford fellows' clinic and pulmonary consult services.  She is also a member of the critical care diversity council, where she has spearheaded several community engagement projects focused on mentoring youths from backgrounds under-represented in science in medicine.

Please welcome our new faculty when you see them!

August 30, 2023

A big congratulations to Dr. Edda Spiekerkoetter and her scientific colleagues for their recent awards! Edda was recently awarded a $2.8M NIH/NHBLI grant focused on the understanding and targeting molecular and cellular events responsible for pulmonary arteriovenous malformation development, growth and regression.   Co-Investigators are members of the interdisciplinary Stanford Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT) Center of Excellence that was founded in 2019 with Serena Tan, MD (Assistant Professor, Pathology), Joyce Teng, MD (Professor, Pediatric Dermatology), Jayakar Nayak, MD, PhD (Associate Professor Otolaryngology), Peter Hwang, MD (Professor and Chief of Rhinology and Endoscopic Skull Base Surgery). 

Additionally, Edda is serving as a Co-Investigator on a new R01 at the University of Colorado evaluating the triggers of right ventricular (RV) fiber re-orientation in response to RV pressure overload and the consequences on inter-ventricular decoupling, working with Dr. Vitaly Kheyfets as PI. Finally, after already being awarded the prestigious Parker B. Francis award earlier this year, Dr. Katharina Schimmel, an Instructor working under Edda, was awarded an American Heart Association (AHA) Career Development Award centered on elucidating the pathogenesis of arteriovenous malformations in HHT.

Congratulations to Edda and her talented team!

August 23, 2023

The PACCM division is pleased to announce that Jennifer Williams MD has accepted the position as Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley Transfer Center Medical Director, effective September 1, 2023. Dr. Williams is a fellowship-trained pulmonologist specializing in pulmonary critical care medicine. She has board certification in Pulmonary Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, and Internal Medicine. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Allergy & Critical Care Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. Dr. Williams has been an integral member of the SHC Tri-Valley medical staff and has been active in our ICU since 2021.

As the Transfer Center Medical Director, Dr. Williams will support the process for transfers into SHC-TV from outside institutions and to and from SHC Palo Alto. 

Dr. William’s work is exemplary of the growing leadership and commitment of the PACCM division at SHC-TriValley.  Please join us in congratulating Dr. Williams and supporting her in this important position.

August 10, 2023

Congratulations to Dr. Peter Kao who was recently honored with the Oscar Salvatierra Award for Exceptional Service to Stanford Medical Students and the School of Medicine. Dr. Salvatierra was a surgeon in the Division of Abdominal Transplantation and renowned for his work drafting the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. Peter is frequently the recipient of high praise from undergraduates, medical students, and other trainees for his clear and informed teaching style. He also gives of his time providing counsel for pre-med advising. Please congratulate Peter when you see him!

August 1, 2023

The PACCM Division and Colleagues would like to announce that Angela Rogers is the contact PI for a new multi-PI R01 called "Elucidating the immunology of autoantibody formation and function in COVID-19", a $3.6M 5-year grant from NIH/NIAID. This effort represents Stanford's Team Science approach, with PIs PJ Utz and Eric Meffre from rheumatology, and Taia Wang from the Institute of Immunity, Transplantation, and Infection and the division of ID.   Dr. Ana Pacheco-Navarro from PACCM will lead clinical outcomes studies for the grant.  This grant was made possible because of the samples collected from Stanford's outstanding COVID-19 Biobank, a Stanford-wide resource which banked plasma and cells from the earliest days of the pandemic, with leadership and investment from colleagues across the school of medicine, including Catherine Blish (ID), Andra Blomkalns and Sam Yang (ED), Ruth O'Hara, Dean Minor and many CRC's and CTRU staff.

August 1, 2023

Acknowledging - always - the capricious nature of ranking systems, let's keep celebrating when the system is working in our favor. We deserve it!

We have risen from our #11 position last year to #7 this year in USNWR Annual Hospital Rankings, just released today.

Our ongoing ascent up the national rankings is a reflection of the rising level of our service as well as our reputation. We are an amazing team! Congrats to Joe Shrager, Chief, Stanford Division of Thoracic Surgery for leading his outstanding group - we are honored to partner with his talented surgeons. For a breakdown of the score, please see https://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/area/ca/stanford-hospital-and-clinics-6932330/pulmonology

Here are the Pulmonology and Lung Surgery USNWR Rankings for 2023-24.
1. Mayo Clinic
2. Cedars-Sinai
3. NYU
4. UCLA
5. Penn
6. National Jewish-University of Colorado
7. Stanford
8. UCSF
9. UCSD
10. North Shore University
11. Johns Hopkins
12. Mt. Sinai
13. Cleveland Clinic
14. NY-Presbyterian Hospital-Columbia and Cornell
15. Houston-Methodist
16. UTSW
17. MGH
18. Northwestern (Chicago)
19. Michigan
20. Rush
21. Mayo Clinic-Phoenix
22. Lenox Hill
23. Barnes-Jewish (WashU)
24. Hackensack
25. Yale
26. Beaumont-Royal Oak
27. UC Davis
28. Duke
28. Long Island Jewish
30. University of Chicago
30. Kansas
32. Vanderbilt
33. Baylor
34. Mayo Clinic-Jacksonville
35. Pittsburgh
36. USC
37. Ohio State
38. Huntington Hospital
39. Advocate Christ
40. Jefferson
41. Brigham and Women's
42. Loma Linda
43. Florida (Gainesville)
44. Kaiser Anaheim
45. Morristown
46. Advocate Lutheran
47. John Muir (Walnut Creek)
48. St. Francis
49. Northwestern (Lake Forest)
50. Queen's (Honolulu)
 

July 28, 2023

Drs. David Cornfield, Mark Nicolls and Angela Rogers, directors of the National Institutes of Health funded Stanford Pulmonary Biology Training Program, are delighted to announce that Jeff Ni, M.D. and Ian Stancil, PhD will be joining the program. Dr. Ni, a fellow in Pediatric Pulmonology will be joining the training program and working under the guidance of Maya Kumar, PhD. Dr. Ni came to Stanford after an undergraduate degree at Washington University in St. Louis, a medical degree from Loyola University in Chicago and completing training in Pediatrics at the University of Chicago. Jeff chose to join us at Stanford for fellowship training. Ian Stancil, PhD is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine and working with Tushar Desai, M.D. Dr Stancil joined the Desai laboratory after receiving an undergraduate and doctoral degrees from North Carolina State University. We are excited to welcome Drs. Ni and Stancil into the Pulmonary Biology training program. 

The addition of Drs. Ni and Stancil further enhances and strengthens our community of invested, intellectually engaged, discovery-driven pulmonary physician-scientists.  The training grant, which to this point has provided funding and a training experience for 18 people over the past 8 years, has played a central role in fostering the growth and development of the community.

Finally, additional congratulations to Dr. Dongeon Kim who has formal immunology training and received his PhD from the Korea Advanced Institute Of Science and Technology. Dr. Kim joined the Nicolls' laboratory several years ago and was just awarded the Vascular T32 Fellowship housed in the Cardiovascular Institute (CVI),and he is similarly working on a pulmonary biology project.

We are delighted to welcome these new scholars and their mentors into the Stanford Pulmonary Biology Training community! 

July 27, 2023

The PACCM Division is backlogged with great announcements; among the most exciting are coming from Tushar Desai's group. First, Tushar was awarded a $2.7M NIH R01 grant to study mechanisms of repair in acute lung injury. Dr. Nicholas Juul has a first-author paper published in Nature last week entitled "Kras(G12D) drives lepidic adenocarcinoma through stem-cell reprogramming”. The work is a collaboration with Joe Shrager and his group in Thoracic Surgery and is expected to be highly impactful in the field. Nick also received a Stanford Cancer Institute grant (2023 Fellowship Award).  Dr. Matt McCarra received a grant from the Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation (2023 Pulmonary Fibrosis Scholars Program); Matt is also a Chan Zuckerberg (CZ) Biohub Physician-Scientist Fellow. 

July 12, 2023

2022 PACCM Teaching Award

Each year we ask our fellows to nominate an eligible faculty member they feel is most deserving of the Teaching Award for important contributions to their fellowship education. We are excited to announce that our 2022 PACCM Teaching Award Winner is Dr. William Auyeung! William will be awarded $5,000 and honored with other Divisional winners in the DOM. This is an impressive achievement, especially given that William is a newer faculty member in our division. Since his start in July of 2021, trainees have been praising his excellent teaching style and dedication on their rotations at the VA.

William completed his undergraduate degree here at Stanford University, before heading to UC San Diego for medical school. After finishing his residency in Internal Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, William returned to Stanford for his fellowships in Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine and Sleep Medicine. After his fellowship training, William became a physician at The Permanente Medical Group for two years before rejoining us as a member of the VA PCCM team.

The 2022 Award Ceremony, at Medical Grand Rounds, will take place at 8am on Wednesday, 8/16/23, in Berg Hall (Li Ka Shing Center). Our own Pedram Fatehi, MD will serve as Award Presenter. You can join either in-person or online in congratulating our department awardees on this well-deserved recognition!

May 2, 2023

The Stanford DOM recently announced Drs. Kristina Kudelko and Pedram Fatehi were given important new leadership roles. The PACCM division is so proud of them both for achieving the distinction of these roles. Here is the announcement from the DOM.

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"Kristina Kudelko, MD has accepted the position of Associate Chair – Academic Affairs/CE in the Department of Medicine effective May 1, 2023. As our clinician educator faculty line has grown in numbers and complexity, we believe it is important to dedicate resources and provide support to their growth, advancement, and promotion and we are excited to welcome Dr. Kudelko to this new leadership position. She will work closely with Sean Wu, MD, PhD, and Andy Hoffman, MD, and the team in Faculty Affairs.  Kudelko is a clinical professor of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine. She serves as an attending on the pulmonary hypertension (PH) service and in the PH clinic. She is also a well-regarded teacher and clinical researcher.

Since 2020, Kudelko has served as co-chair of the Clinical Educator Advisory Council in the Department of Medicine where she has guided several ideas to implementation, including a new onboarding web site, development of a standardized professional development allowance for CEs, and implementation of a pilot research grant program. She is looking forward to sharing her experiences moving through the ranks at Stanford and providing guidance and support to her faculty colleagues.

Kudelko earned her BS in biology from Yale, and her MD from the University of Pennsylvania. She completed her residency in internal medicine and her fellowship in pulmonary and critical care at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Cornell and completed a clinical fellowship in pulmonary vascular disease in the Wall Center at Stanford. She joined the faculty in 2011.

Pedram Fatehi, MD, MPH has accepted the position of Vice Chair – Education in the Department of Medicine, effective May 1, 2023. Fatehi is a clinical associate professor of nephrology and, by courtesy, of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine. He is board certified in both nephrology and critical care and has engaged in significant teaching across both specialties. As a faculty member at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) prior to joining Stanford, he lectured large group classes and led small group sessions for preclinical medical students in physiology, pharmacology, and clinical reasoning while participating in the Teach for UCSF Certificate Program. After moving to Stanford in 2014, Fatehi began lecturing for preclinical medical students and completed the E4C Associates Program workshop curriculum. Eight years later, he continues to lecture students in their first two years of medical school, in both the cardiovascular and renal blocks.

Fatehi has completed additional educational training via courses and workshops offered at the Faculty Development Center for Medical Teachers and on the undergraduate campus at the Course Design Institute and the Center for Teaching and Learning. As a prior fellowship program director, and as current director of education in nephrology, Fatehi has been integral in all aspects of teaching, mentoring, and leading nephrology trainees. A frequent winner of the Nephrology Teaching Award, he has also been deeply involved in teaching in the ICU through his joint appointment with pulmonary, where he has been supervising bedside education for clerks (MS4s), residents, and fellows from the departments of medicine, anesthesia, emergency medicine, and neurology. As vice chair, Fatehi will expand and create opportunities for teaching across our faculty. He is inspired to create more “team teaching” possibilities.

Fatehi earned his BA from the University of Texas at Austin, his MPH from the Yale School of Public Health, and his MD from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. He completed his internship, residency, and fellowship in nephrology at New York Presbyterian/Columbia. He completed his critical care medicine fellowship at UCSF, where he also served on the faculty for several years before joining Stanford."

April 12, 2023

Congratulations to Dr. Solmaz Ehteshami-Afshar, second year PCCM fellow, on receiving the 2023-2024 American Thoracic Society (ATS) Academic Sleep Pulmonary Integrated Research/Clinical Fellowship (ASPIRE).  

The ASPIRE fellowship is a prestigious training program designed to develop the next generation of pulmonary & sleep physician-scientists and leaders. The program includes a collaboration between ATS and several outstanding institutions that have strong Pulmonary/Critical Care/Sleep training programs (University of Pennsylvania, University of Pittsburgh, Harvard University, Case Western Reserve University, and UC San Diego Health System).  Solmaz will be conducting research on noninvasive ventilation variables and outcomes in patients with ALS.  She will be co-mentored by Dr. Mark Nicolls, Dr. Emmanuel Mignot (Division of Sleep Medicine), and Dr. Michelle Cao.  We greatly appreciate the leadership of Drs. Michelle Cao and Gaurav Singh - for their guidance and advocacy of sleep-oriented physicians within our division. Please congratulate Solmaz when you see her!

March 22, 2023

A worldwide team of medical scientists will convene April 13-14 on Stanford campus to apply lessons learned from the Aminorex epidemic during a two-day Drug-induced Pulmonary Hypertension Symposium. Featuring Roham Zamanian.

Drug-induced Pulmonary Hypertension Symposium

March 8, 2023

A big congratulations to Katharina Schimmel, PhD for being awarded a prestigious Parker B. Francis Fellowship for her application “Pulmonary Arteriovenous Malformations in Hereditary Hemorrhagic Telangiectasia (HHT).

Katharina is mentored by our own Edda Spiekerkoetter and will be studying the role of somatic mutations as well as second pathogenic rare germline variants of HHT and non-HHT genes that increase the risk of AVM development in the lung and brain. 

Katharina will be co-mentored by Mark Nicolls and Alokkumar Jha (Weill Cornell) and her collaborators are Evan Brittain (Vanderbilt), Karin Tran-Lundmark (Lund University, Sweden), and Gary Steinberg (Stanford).

January 11, 2023

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Alicia Mirza is joining PACCM this month as the Associate Program Director of Cystic Fibrosis. She is returning after two years away at Kaiser Permanente Oakland Medical Center as a PCCM attending. Many of you are familiar with Alicia's accomplishments and strengths during her PCCM fellowship, including her role as chief fellow year at Stanford. We look forward to benefitting from her leadership skills working with Dr. Paul Mohabir, Director of CF, and all the staff to advance the program missions.

Alicia is board-certified in both adult and pediatric medicine, completing her IM and Peds residency at UCLA in 2017. She joined Stanford PCCM fellowship and graduated in 2020. She was then recruited to Kaiser Permanente and served with distinction during the early and ongoing phases of the Pandemic. The PACCM leadership remained in close contact with Alicia during the past two years and are grateful to recruit her back to the Farm.  

Along with her leadership role in CF, she will also work with our pediatric pulmonary colleagues to improve the clinical management of pediatric patients transitioning to adulthood. Alicia also has particular interests to care for patients with cerebral palsy, among other conditions. Alicia will work collaboratively with the home ventilation program led by Dr. Michelle Cao.  She will spend her time in Palo Alto, as well as in the East Bay with the expansion of Emeryville Outpatient Center, and the expanding ValleyCare pulmonary and ICU group.

We also want to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Laveena Chhatwanni for her work and leadership as the APD of the CF over the years, as she will also be advancing to her roles in the lung transplant program working with Dr. Gundeep Dhillon and all the members of the team.   

January 11, 2023

January 11, 2023

Register today - Cone Beam CT in Advanced Bronchosopy