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 Professor of Surgery and Vice-Chair for Research in the Stanford Department of Surgery. 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 and qualitative research methods to focus on quality of and equity in cancer care. She serves as vice-chair of the Commission on Cancer’s National Accreditation Program for Rectal Cancer Quality Committee, American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons’ representative to the American Joint Commission on Cancer, and Chair of the ACS Cancer Surgery Standards Program Implementation and Integration Committee.
Presented by:
Yewon Ashley Son, BS, Research Data Analyst, S-SPIRE Center
&
Heather Selby, PhD, Research Scientist, S-SPIRE Center, Surgery, Stanford University
Talk Title: TBD
Bio: Ashley Y Son, BS is a Research Data Analyst for the Stanford-Surgery Policy Improvement Research & Education Center (S-SPIRE). Ashley received her bachelor’s degree in Statistics and Data Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Bio: Heather Selby is a postdoctoral scholar at the S-SPIRE Center in the Stanford Department of Surgery. She is advised by Dr. Arden Morris, Dr. Todd Wagner, Dr. Sandy Napel, and Dr. Vipul Sheth. Her research focus is building MRI-based AI models to identify patients with locally advanced cancer patients who achieve a clinical complete response to neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy to spare them from surgery and its associated risks.
For inquiries, please contact Ana Mezynski.
Presented by: Alexa Pohl, MD, PhD, General Surgery Resident, Department of Surgery, Stanford University
Talk Title: TBD
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.
For inquiries, please contact Ana Mezynski <mezynski@stanford.edu>