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 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 LAC+USC and matriculated into the Stanford Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery Residency in 2013. While in residency, he pursued a fellowship in Health Systems Design at Stanford’s Clinical Excellence Research Center, which ignited his interest in health services and policy research. During residency, Dr. Sheckter investigated health systems outcomes in burn care and reconstructive surgery. He pursued additional training in Surgical Critical Care at the University of Washington with a focus on trauma and burn.

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:
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

General Surgery Former PD Resident: 

Dr. Kirbi Yelorda
Dr. Jeff Choi
Dr. Wilson Alobuia

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: 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: 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.