SAMBA Leadership and Staff

Mary B. Leonard, MD, MSCE, is the Arline and Pete Harman Professor and Chair, Department of Pediatrics, Stanford School of Medicine; the Director of the Maternal and Child Health Research Institute, as well as the Adalyn Jay Physician in Chief at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford.  She is the founding Director of the Stanford Assessments of Muscle and Bone Across the ages laboratory (SAMBA). Throughout her career, she has devoted the majority of her effort to patient-oriented research and mentoring junior investigators. Her multidisciplinary research program is primarily focused on the impact of chronic diseases on bone metabolism and nutrition, with an emphasis on changes in body composition and skeletal density and structure during growth and aging, and in the context of inflammatory diseases, chronic kidney disease, glucocorticoid therapy, and bone marrow transplantation

Kyla Kent, BA, CBDT has been with Stanford University School of Medicine and the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care system since 1991 in the Stanford Prevention Research Center, the Musculo-Skeletal Research Lab and most recently the SAMBA laboratory.  Responsibilities include development and technical assessment of research protocols, clinical facility management, supervisor for clinical staff, performance of DXA, HRpQCT, Biodex and other measures related to research conducted in the areas of bone metabolism, structural assessment, body composition, exercise, sleep and healthy aging. Ms. Kent is a consultant in study design and instructor in bone density related imaging modalities for the Stanford Children’s Hospital, Palo Alto VA Hospital and Stanford Hospital/Stanford School of Medicine and internationally for bone mass measurement technique and analysis in growing skeletons.  She is currently acting in the position of Technical Director for the SAMBA laboratory.  Ms. Kent is an active member of the International Society for Clinical Densitometry (ISCD).  She also acts as the Director, clinical instructor and lecturer for the only State certified training program for DXA.

Jin Long, Ph.D. is a Research Director and joined SAMBA in December 2018. He received his PhD in Biostatistics from Texas A&M University in 2010. His PhD training was specialized on gene-environmental interaction in Congenital Heart Diseases using family-wise data. After graduation, he joined Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) as a Biostatistician first then Senior Biostatistician during the period of 2010 – 2015. His work at CHOP covered statistical learning and method developments on children’s behavior studies and both children and adult bone and body composition developments. He joined Stanford in July 2015 to continue his studies on bone and muscle units meanwhile extended his interests on Human-AI interaction at Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine & Imaging (AIMI). His current interests at SAMBA laboratory include taking the lead on study design and data analysis in clinical studies, creating and enforcing policies for effective data management, storage and transfer, and developing methods or programming on statistical modeling, machine learning and artificial intelligence using medicine and imaging data. 

Jessica Whalen, MS is the data manager for the SAMBA laboratory.  She previously served as the lead research coordinator for several studies under the SAMBA laboratory, including the Normative Data Project which enrolled over 300 controls.  She received a Bachelors in Mathematics and recently received her graduate degree, Masters in Business Analytics (MSBA), both from Santa Clara University.  In 2015, she joined the SAMBA team under the leadership of Dr. Mary Leonard, Department Chair of Pediatrics.  Jessica manages the database for the SAMBA Center, works closely with the biostatistician to prepare data for analysis, and serves as an IRB, REDCap, and recruitment resource for other Stanford investigators.  She is also involved in bringing PEDSnet, a multi-site pediatric learning health system network, to the Stanford Community.  Prior to joining the SAMBA laboratory, she previously worked on studies focused on childhood obesity and health interventions.