Presented by: Lisa Knowlton, MD, MPH, FACS, FRCSC, Associate Professor of Surgery, General Surgery, Stanford University

BIo: Dr. Knowlton is an Associate Professor of Surgery and an Acute Care Surgeon whose practice encompasses trauma surgery, emergency general surgery and surgical critical care. She is an NIH and ARPA-H funded researcher whose focus is on improving access to innovative, high-quality surgical care. She obtained her medical degree at McGill University and completed her general surgery residency at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her desire to understand varied healthcare systems and develop policy solutions led her to obtain an M.P.H. at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and complete a research fellowship at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. After training as a Surgical Critical Care fellow at Stanford University Medical Center, she joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor of Surgery in early 2018. She was promoted to Associate Professor in the University Medical Line in 2023. Her institutional leadership roles include serving as the Unit Based Medical Director of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit, the Associate Vice Chair of Research for the Stanford Department of Surgery, the SHC Surgical AI Lead for Early Clinical Deterioration, and the Associate Program Director for the Surgical Critical Care fellowship.

Presented by: Christopher Stave, MLA, Information Services Librarian, School of Medicine, Lane Library

Bio: Christopher Stave, MLA, is librarian and member of Lane Library’s Research & Instruction team. Christopher serves as Lane’s Graduate/Clinical Education Librarian, and acts as the liaison between Lane and the Department of Graduate Medical Education. Christopher is also the designated librarian for the departments of Surgery, Emergency Medicine, and Pediatrics.

Presented by: Clifford Sheckter, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, Stanford University.

Bio: Dr. Cliff Sheckter is a California native, growing up in the rural Eastern Sierra. He graduated from UCLA with a BS in Anthropology and earned summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors. He attended USC (Keck) for medical school on an academic scholarship and graduated valedictorian with Alpha Omega Alpha honors. He fell in love with burn care while at USC/LA General Medical Center and completed his surgical training at Stanford. While in residency, he pursued a fellowship/postdoc in Health Systems Design at Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC). He earned an MS in Health Policy from Stanford, focusing on health economics. He received additional training in Surgical Critical Care and Burn Surgery at the University of Washington.

Presented by: Katherine Arnow, MS, Senior Biostatistician, S-SPIRE Center, Department of Surgery, Stanford University

Presented by: Elizabeth George, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Department of Surgery, Stanford University

Bio: Dr. George is a board-eligible vascular surgeon and health services researcher at Stanford. She earned her B.A., M.D., and M.S. in Health Policy from Stanford, where she also completed her residency. She specializes in complex vascular procedures and improving high-value surgical care for vulnerable, understudied patient populations.

Presented by: Stephanie Chao, MD, Assistant Professor of Surgery, Pediatric Surgery, Stanford University.

Bio: Dr. Stephanie Chao, MD is a general surgery specialist in Stanford, CA. She is affiliated with medical facilities Good Samaritan Hospital and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford.

Presented by: Marc Melcher, MD, Professor of Surgery, Abdominal Transplantation, Stanford University

Bio: I am committed to figuring out how more people can benefit from liver and kidney transplants. Patients are dying while waiting for these organs. Therefore, my clinical and research efforts are focused on increasing the number of patients whose lives can be saved with transplantation.

Presented by: Dr. David Spain & Dr. Arden Morris

Bio: Dr. David A. Spain is the David L. Gregg, MD Professor and Chief of Acute Care Surgery. His clinical areas of specialty are emergency and elective general surgery, trauma and critical care. His research focus is assessment of clinical care, systems of care and assessment of stress response and PTSD after trauma. He is the current President of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma. He is a Councilor of the American Board of Surgery and Director of the Surgical Critical Care board. He is the editor of the textbook Scientific American’s Critical Care of the Surgical Patient. Dr. Spain is also the General Surgery Residency Program Director at Stanford.

Bio: Arden M. Morris, MD, MPH is Vice-Chair for Clinical Research, the Robert L. and Mary Ellenburg Professor of Surgery, and by courtesy Professor of Health Policy at the Stanford School of Medicine. She is Director of the S-SPIRE Center, a health services research collaborative to study patient-centered care, clinical optimization, and health care economics. In her own work, Dr. Morris uses quantitative, qualitative, and mixed research methods to focus on quality of and equity in cancer care. To that end, she currently is funded by American Cancer Society and NIH to study access to care, clinical outcomes, and policy related to insurance design. Dr. Morris currently serves on the American Joint Commission on Cancer, the NIH Special Emphasis Panel “Topics in Health Services Research: Big Data, Health Information Technology, and Clinical Informatics,” and as Associate Editor for Surgery at JAMA Network Open..