Faculty Mentors

Areas of Expertise

Precision Vascular Medicine

Themistocles "Tim" Assimes, MD, PhD

genetic epidemiology, genetic determinants of complex traits related to cardiovasular medicine

Dr. Assimes is an Associate Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular) and, by courtesy, of Health Research and Policy (Epidemiology). He designs, conducts, analyses, and interprets human molecular epidemiology studies of complex cardiovascular disease, including coronary atherosclerosis. He also uses contemporary genetic studies to gain insight on the causal and mechanistic nature of associations between purported risk factors and adverse cardiovascular related health outcomes.

Dr. Fukaya is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Vascular Surgery and Program Director of the Stanford Vascular Medicine Fellowship program. She is an internationally recognized expert in peripheral vascular disease and venous disease. In
addition to clinical trials of novel therapeutic agents, she leads a meta-analysis of GWAS for PVD.

Dr. Ingelsson is a Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) and, by courtesy, of Health Research and Policy (Epidemiology). He is an internationally recognized expert in identifying new genetic loci associated with cardiovascular and metabolic traits and has extensive experience from research on biomarkers and -omics methods, including development and application of prediction metrics and Mendelian randomization.

Philip Tsao, PhD

transcriptomics/proteomics of aneurysms

Dr. Tsao is a Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine). He focuses on the molecular underpinnings of vascular disease as well as assessing disease risk. His group uses a range of biochemical, molecular and physiological techniques to make primary observations in cell systems as well as preclinical models. Most recently, he is applying his knowledge of genomic data generation and analysis to the VA Million Veteran Program.

Joseph Wu, MD, PhD

regenerative medicine

Joseph C. Wu, MD, PhD is the Director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute and the Simon H. Stertzer, MD, Professor of Medicine and Radiology. Dr. Wu has published >400 manuscripts. His lab works on biological mechanisms of patient-specific and disease-specific induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).

Gender and Ethnicity Differences in Vascular Disease

Dr. Hlatky is a Professor of Health Research and Policy (Health Services Research) and of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine). Dr. Hlatky interests are in outcomes research, evidence-based medicine, and cost-effectiveness analysis. He introduced data collection about economic and quality of life endpoints in several randomized trials, principally trials of therapies for cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Palaniappan is an internist, clinical researcher and a Professor of Medicine (Primary Care and Population Health) and, by courtesy, of Health Research and Policy (Epidemiology) at Stanford. Her research has focused on the study of diverse populations, chronic disease and prevention, and she specifically seeks to address the gap in health knowledge in Asians and other understudied racial/ethnic minorities.

Marcia Stefanick, PhD

hormonal therapy for cardiovascular disease

Dr. Stefanick is a Professor of Medicine (Stanford Prevention Research Center), of Obstetrics and Gynecology and, by courtesy, of Health Research and Policy. She is a leading pioneer in women’s health research, and she has been at the forefront of the study of aging. Dr. Stefanick championed the creation of the Stanford Center for Health Research on Women and Sex Differences, of which she is the Co-Director.

Jennifer Tremmel, MD

gender differences in coronary artery disease

Dr. Tremmel is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine) at the Stanford University Medical Center. Dr. Tremmel studies sex differences in cardiovascular disease. Dr. Tremmel founded the Women’s Heart Health Clinic at Stanford, which sees over 700 new patients per year.

Vascular Bioengineering and Biodesign

Sarah Heilshorn, PhD

biomaterials for regenerative medicine

Dr. Heilshorn is Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Chemical Engineering (by courtesy), and Bioengineering (by courtesy). Her interests include biomaterials in regenerative medicine, engineered proteins with novel assembly properties, microfluidics and photolithography of proteins, and synthesis of materials to influence stem cell differentiation. Current projects include tissue engineering for blood vessel regeneration, injectable materials for stem cell therapies, and microfluidic devices to study directed cell migration.

Ngan Huang, PhD

mechanobiology and stem cell differentiation

Dr. Huang is an Assistant Professor of Cardiothoracic Surgery. She is the Vice Chair of Cardiac and Vascular Regeneration and Remodeling Thematic Working Interest Group, Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine-Americas. She aims to understand the chemical and mechanical interactions between extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins and pluripotent stem cells that regulate vascular and myogenic differentiation.

Alison Marsden, PhD

cardiovascular biomechanics computational models

Dr. Marsden is Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Cardiology) of Bioengineering and, by courtesy, of Mechanical Engineering. Her work focuses on development of numerical methods for cardiovascular blood flow simulation, medical device design, application of optimization to large-scale fluid mechanics simulations, and application of engineering tools to impact patient care in cardiovascular surgery and congenital heart disease.

Stanley Rockson, MD

mechanisms of lymphatic dysfunction

Dr. Rockson is interested in the biology of lymphatic function in health and disease. He has a specific interest in the lymphedema therapeutics and have created animal models to achieve high throughput screening. Dr. Rockson also conducts translational investigation in human lymphatic disorders.

Dr. Yock is the Martha Meier Weiland Professor in the School of Medicine, Professor of Bioengineering and, by courtesy, of Mechanical Engineering. He is the founder and director of the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign and is known internationally for his work inventing and testing new medical devices in the field of interventional cardiology.

Big Data and Bioinformatics in Vascular Disease

Elsie Gyang Ross, MD

peripheral artery disease, vascular surgery, big data, machine learning, clinical outcomes

Dr. Ross is an Assistant Professor of Vascular Surgery and of Medicine at Stanford. She uses bioinformatics, advanced data mining techniques, and big data approaches to predict outcomes in patients with peripheral vascular disease. She is also a graduate of this T32 program.

Nigam H. Shah, MBBS, PhD

using annotation analytics to understand the "gene lists" from analysis of high-throughput data concerning disease ontologies

Dr. Shah is an Associate Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) at Stanford, Assistant Director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, and a core member of the Biomedical Informatics Graduate Program. Dr. Shah's research focuses on combining machine learning and prior knowledge in medical ontologies to enable use cases of the learning health system.

Michael Snyder, PhD

genome sequencing, transcriptomics proteomics metabolomics, DNA methylation and microbiome assays to the analysis of human disease

Dr. Snyder is a Stanford W. Ascherman Professor and Chair, Department of Genetics and Director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. His group was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics.

Wing Wong, PhD

computational analysis of ESC transcriptome

Dr. Wong is a Stephen R. Pierce Family Goldman Sachs Professor in Science and Human Health, Professor of Biomedical Data Science. His current research interests are Bayesian Statistics, Computational Biology and Precision Medicine. His lab develops methods in multivariate analysis, machine learning, Monte Carlo, differential equations and high-performance computing, and apply them to problems in computational biology and personalized medicine.

Emerging Translational Targets in Vascular Medicine

Ronald Dalman, MD

AAA pathophysiology

Dr. Dalman is the Walter Clifford Chidester and Elsa Rooney Chidester Professor of Surgery. Dr. Dalman's research laboratory studies the pathophysiology of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) disease, a leading cause of death in developed and developing countries worldwide and is actively engaged in identifying and validating new treatment measures for AAA.

Dr. Jaiswal is an Assistant Professor of Pathology. His lab focuses on somatic mutations that are prevalent in the aging population that cause clonal hematopoiesis, a disorder that increases the risk of blood cancer, overall mortality, and cardiovascular disease. His research seeks to understand the biology of such mutations and how they contribute to age-related diseases.

Calvin Kuo, MD

soluble inhibitors of angiogenesis

Dr. Kuo is the Maureen Lyles D'Ambrogio Professor of Medicine (Hematology). Dr. Kuo's group's research focuses on growing normal organs as 3D “organoids” in a dish to discover new disease-causing genes and treatments; understanding how stem cells repopulate the intestine and harnessing these stem cells for disease treatments; and exploring the biology of blood vessels and developing new blood vessel based treatments for stroke and other diseases.

Nicholas Leeper, MD

genetics and vascular biology

Dr. Leeper is a Professor of Surgery, Vascular Medicine/Vascular Surgery Director, and Chief of Vascular Surgery
Research. Dr. Leeper performs translational research in vascular biology and aims to understand the genetic causes of atherosclerosis and aneurysmal disease and he focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to these conditions with an emphasis on risk factor management. He serves as an investigator for several early phase clinical trials for patients with PAD.

Kristy Red-Horse, PhD

coronary vessel development, cell fate and morphogenesis of the vasculature

Dr. Red-Horse is an Associate Professor of Biology. Her lab uses cardiovascular development as a model to study the signals that instruct cell fate and guide morphogenesis during organ formation. Their current focus is to fate-map the different cellular sources that give rise to the coronary arteries of the heart and to identify the molecules that direct their migration and differentiation.

Design and Execution of Trials Related to Atherothrombosis

Marlene Rabinovitch, MD

pulmonary vascular disease and BMP

Dr. Rabinovitch is the Dwight and Vera Dunlevie Professor in Pediatric Cardiology. She seeks to identify the cellular and molecular programs regulating vascular and lung development, through the use of cultured cells and tissues and rodent models. Her disease focus is pulmonary arterial hypertension and over the past decade her research has led to 4 novel compounds in clinical trial or being positioned for clinical trial.

Larry Leung, MD

molecular determinants of coagulation

Dr. Leung is the Maureen Lyles D'Ambrogio Professor in the School of Medicine and Senior Associate Dean, Veteran Affairs. His clinical interest is in bleeding and thrombotic disorders. His research is on blood clotting factors and their roles in thrombosis, inflammation and immunity, and personalized genomic medicine.

Ken Mahaffey, MD

clinical trials, acute coronary syndromes, atrial fibrillation, hyperlipidemia

Dr. Mahaffey is a Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular Medicine). His primary research interest is the design and conduct of multicenter clinical trials and analyses of important clinical cardiac issues using large patient databases. His research focuses on novel anticoagulation agents for the treatment of acute coronary syndromes and atrial fibrillation, the study of agents targeted to protect the myocardium during reperfusion therapy for acute myocardial infarction, and the evaluation of cardiovascular safety of diabetic therapies

Theory and Application of Vascular Outcomes Research

Dr. Arya is an Associate Professor of Surgery and section chief of vascular surgery at the VA Palo Alto Healthcare System. She studies the impact of frailty on quality of surgical care in Peripheral Arterial Disease. Her research suggests frailty is a versatile tool that can be utilized to guide surgical decision making, inform patient consent, and design quality improvement initiatives at the patient and hospital level.

Dr. Owens is the Henry J. Kaiser, Jr. Professor, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Management Science and Engineering and of Health Research and Policy (Health Services Research). He is the Associate Director of the Center for Innovation to Implementation, a health services research center of excellence, at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. His research focuses on technology assessment, cost-effectiveness analysis, evidence synthesis, and methods for clinical decision making and guideline development.

Paul Heidenreich, MD

cost efficacy and quality in CV therapies

Dr. Heidenreich is a Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular) and by courtesy, Health Research and Policy at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System. He also is the Vice-Chair for Clinical, Quality and Analytics in the Department of Medicine. He has an extensive background in outcomes and health services research in technology assessment including the cost-effectiveness of new CV technologies, interventions to improve the quality of care and use of echocardiography to predict prognosis in patients with heart disease.

Fatima Rodriguez, MD, MPG

health disparities, hispanic/latino, lipids, cardiovascular prevention, cardiovascular risk prediction

Dr. Rodriquez is an Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiovascular) and specializes in common cardiac conditions such as coronary artery disease, valvular heart disease, lipid disorders, and cardiovascular risk assessment in high-risk populations. She investigates topics relating to racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in cardiovascular disease prevention and developing novel interventions to address disparities.