Presented by: Nolan Martin, Medical Student
Talk Title: “Universal EHR-based Child Injury Screening for Physical Abuse Detection”.
Bio: Nolan Martin is an MS3 at EVMS and a native of Menlo Park, CA. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Tufts and previously held roles as a software engineer (Epocrates/Athenahealth), a cooking instructor, and a pilot. He enjoys multidisciplinary research and technology-driven quality improvement projects.
Each week, S-SPIRE hosts a Work-In-Progress session (WIP) for faculty members and trainees to present their research and receive feedback on projects in every phase of development—from drafting specific aims pages, to parsing grant review committee comments, to abstracts/papers/methods in preparation.
Please refer inquiries to Ana Mezynski at mezynski@stanford.edu
Presented by: Prasanthi Govindarajan, MD, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine, Stanford University
Talk Title: “Prehospital stroke transport policies and Effects – Lessons Learned and Future Directions”
Bio: Dr. Govindarajan is a health services researcher with expertise in emergency medical services and healthcare systems. She completed her emergency medicine residency at Boston Medical Center, a fellowship in emergency medical services, and a master’s in clinical research at the University of California, San Diego. She started as a full-time faculty in 2007 at the University of California, San Francisco, and is currently an associate professor of emergency medicine at Stanford University Medical Center. She practices emergency medicine at Stanford Health Care, an academic emergency department in Northern California, and contributes to research training for residents, fellows, and early to mid-stage faculty.
Her research aims to improve access to specialized centers for acute stroke care through early detection of stroke and appropriate triage and transport in the prehospital setting. Her early work on stroke detection by emergency medical services and the effects of county-level ambulance transport policies on stroke treatment (K08 HS17965 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality) has led to a national mixed-methods study on the effectiveness of a stroke destination protocol for emergency medical service providers. This study is an ongoing collaboration with S-SPIRE. It is funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality (R01 HS026207).
Through funding from industry, foundations, and philanthropy, she has made valuable scientific contributions to the prehospital community – feasibility of prehospital telemedicine, effects of training and education on large vessel occlusion by paramedics, and effects of destination protocols on stroke. She is working with the data science team at S-SPIRE and the policy analysts at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (Division of Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention) to develop best practice guidelines and provide evidence on the effects of integrated systems of emergency care for stroke.
Each week, S-SPIRE hosts a Work-In-Progress session (WIP) for faculty members and trainees to present their research and receive feedback on projects in every phase of development—from drafting specific aims pages, to parsing grant review committee comments, to abstracts/papers/methods in preparation.
Please refer inquiries to Ana Mezynski at mezynski@stanford.edu
Presented by: Alexander Sox-Harris, PhD, Professor of Surgery, S-SPIRE Center, Stanford University
Talk Title: “Methods to Describe Disparities in Surgical Care: Review and Recommendations”
Bio: Alex Sox-Harris is a leader in several domains of health services research, including quality measurement, pragmatic rigorous evaluation, predictive modeling, and improvement science (implementation and de-implementation). As a VA Research Career Scientist and Professor in the Stanford Department of Surgery, he has published over 250 scientific papers, has over 15 years of continuous federal research funding, and has received numerous national awards for the innovation and impact of his research. In addition to his own work, Dr. Sox-Harris mentors and supports surgeons to produce publishable research and secure research funding.
Each week, S-SPIRE hosts a Work-In-Progress session (WIP) for faculty members and trainees to present their research and receive feedback on projects in every phase of development—from drafting specific aims pages, to parsing grant review committee comments, to abstracts/papers/methods in preparation.
Please refer inquiries to Ana Mezynski at mezynski@stanford.edu
Presented by: Anne Stey, MD, MSc, Department of Surgery, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Talk Title: “Improving Trauma Systems of Care”
Biography: Anne M. Stey, M.D., MSc received her medical degree from Mount Sinai School of Medicine of New York University. After witnessing inefficiencies and disparities in care in New York City, she studied International Health Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science where she developed an interest in economic analysis. She returned to New York to complete general surgery residency at the Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was then selected as one of the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars at the University of California Los Angeles where she developed interests in quality measurement, and quality improvement. She worked on identifying sources of variation in cost of surgical care and the relationship between cost and quality of care. Clinically she focused on surgical critical care and trauma surgery and completed clinical fellowship at the University of California San Francisco. Her ongoing research interests are focused on issues of quality and value measurement with an underlying goal of helping the US health care system become more efficient and equitable for all Americans. Dr. Stey holds a K-award from NHLBI on the timeliness of the management of trauma related hemorrhage and trauma related coagulopathy, and is the director of the coordinating center for the Illinois Surgical Quality Improvement Collaborative (ISQIC).
Each week, S-SPIRE hosts an in-person Work-In-Progress session (WIP) for faculty members and trainees to present their research and receive feedback on projects in every phase of development—from drafting specific aims pages, to parsing grant review committee comments, to abstracts/papers/methods in preparation.
Please refer inquiries to Ana Mezynski at mezynski@stanford.edu
Presented by: Maria Emilia de Oliveira Montez Rath, PhD, Senior Researh Engineer, Medicine, Nephrology, Stanford University.
Talk Title: “Dialysis Effectiveness versus Medical Management in a national cohort of older adults – A Target Trial Emulation Study”
Bio: Dr. Montez-Rath is the director of the Biostatistics Core in the Division of Nephrology. In this role, she leads the design and analysis of kidney-related clinical studies. Her work is data-driven in that she focus efforts on methodological gaps that arise in her collaborative work. At the same time, her collaborative work is steeped in addressing important clinical questions that will directly improve patient’s lives or providers care delivery.
Each week, S-SPIRE hosts a Work-In-Progress session (WIP) for faculty members and trainees to present their research and receive feedback on projects in every phase of development—from drafting specific aims pages, to parsing grant review committee comments, to abstracts/papers/methods in preparation.
Please refer inquiries to Ana Mezynski at mezynski@stanford.edu
Presented by:
Kristen Davis, MPH, CAPM
Research Project Manager
S-SPIRE Center, Dept. of Surgery
Title: “Updating Your NIH Biosketch and Other Support Forms”
Bio: Kristen Davis-Lopez, MPH, CAPM is the Research Project Manager at the S-SPIRE Center. She has a background in biology as well as public health. She supports multiple principal investigators with their current funded projects as project manager. Kristen also assists with the grant submission process within the Department of Surgery acting as a liaison with the Research Management Group.
For Zoom dial-in instructions, please contact Ana Mezynski at mezynski@stanford.edu
Presented by: Nathaniel Breg, BD-STEP postdoctoral fellow at the VA Palo Alto
Talk Title: “The Effects of Changing Capitated Payments on Health Care Staffing, Contracting, Utilization, and Quality: Evidence from a Natural Experiment in the Veterans Health Administration.”
Bio: Nathaniel Breg is a BD-STEP postdoctoral fellow at the VA Palo Alto, with a joint appointment with the Department of Health Policy at Stanford. His research focuses on health care provider decision-making. He completed his Ph.D. is in public policy and management with a concentration in applied economics at Carnegie Mellon University in 2022. He previously worked on projects for CMS as an analyst at RTI International.
Presented by: Kenneth Nieser, PhD, Postdoctoral Scholar, General Surgery, Department of Surgery, Stanford University.
Talk Title: “TBD”
Bio: Ken Nieser is a postdoctoral research fellow through the Big Data-Scientist Training Enhancement Program (BD-STEP) at the Palo Alto VA and in the Department of Surgery, Stanford School of Medicine. Ken received a BA in Physics and Mathematics from Swarthmore College and a PhD in Epidemiology with a minor in Statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During his PhD, Ken developed and applied statistical methods for improving algorithmic fairness of data analyses used to inform screening and treatment of mental illnesses. These projects included development of an approach for detecting sample subsets with differential psychological symptom patterns and a sample representation reweighting method for improving the precision of subgroup-specific treatment effect estimation.
Presented by: Alexa Pohl, Professional Development Resident, General Surgery, Stanford University.
Talk Title: “Colonoscopy-based cancer screening: transportation security and social support as social determinants of health”
Bio: Social context creates disparities in cancer care across broad domains: in screening, time to start of treatment, timely receipt of appropriate neoadjuvant, surgical, and adjuvant therapies, and in receipt of surveillance for survivors. Pragmatic, patient-centered research on the root causes of disparities – and rigorous evaluation of policies and programs to address these causes – is needed to reduce preventable cancer mortality. My longstanding interest in health-related disparities and patient-centered research arose while completing my PhD on sex-differential autism risk at the University of Cambridge. I grew uncomfortable with the fact that my research relied on the time and commitment of participants but would never improve their lives directly. As a result, I developed a community-based participatory research study on the experiences of autistic mothers, which received pilot funding from the UK’s National Institute of Healthcare Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Applied Health Research and Care East of England. For me, the natural next step was medical school, where I was surprised to find an intellectual home in surgery. The introspective and self-critiquing nature of the specialty resonated with my desire to ask pragmatic, outcome-focused questions as a researcher and my clinical desire to make a tangible improvement in patients’ lives. Ultimately, I aim to be a practicing surgeon with a productive research program on patient-centered outcomes and the effective and equitable delivery of high-quality oncologic surgical care.
Please refer inquiries to Ana Mezynski at mezynski@stanford.edu
The Weekly WIP has been canceled due to the ACS Clinical Congress.
Each week, S-SPIRE hosts an in-person Work-In-Progress session (WIP) for faculty members and trainees to present their research and receive feedback on projects in every phase of development—from drafting specific aims pages, to parsing grant review committee comments, to abstracts/papers/methods in preparation.
Please refer inquiries to Ana Mezynski at mezynski@stanford.edu