PRISM Mentors

-education of Youth of Color, particularly focusing on processes of pushout, criminalization, and resistance, and racial and/or disability justice;

-experience with qualitative research in the humanistic social science tradition;

-commitment to the academic mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students as well as students from other groups underrepresented in education research;

-interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work welcome including Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Disability Studies, Women and Gender Studies, law, criminology, sociology, and Queer Studies.

Mission: Our mission is to both use neuroscience as a tool for improving education, and use education as a tool for furthering our understanding of the brain. On the one hand, advances in non-invasive, quantitative brain imaging technologies are opening a new window into the mechanisms that underlie learning. For children with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, we hope to develop personalized intervention programs that are tailored to a child’s unique pattern of brain maturation. On the other hand, interventions provide a powerful tool for understanding how environmental factors shape brain development. Combining neuroimaging with educational interventions we hope to further our understanding of plasticity in the human brain.
The Lab: The Brain Development & Education Lab is located in the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University and represents a collaboration between the Division of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics within the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of Education and the Wu Tsai Neuroscience Institute (we recently moved from The University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences). The focus of the lab is understanding the interplay between brain maturation and cognitive development.  The lab is interdisciplinary, drawing on the fields of neuroscience, psychology, education, pediatrics and engineering to answer basic scientific and applied questions.  Current projects focus on understanding how the brain’s reading circuitry develops in response to education and how targeted behavioral interventions prompt changes in the brain’s of children with dyslexia. A major component of this work is the development of software to measure properties of human brain tissue, localize differences and quantify changes over development.

The research interests of the molecular imaging instrumentation lab are to create novel instrumentation and software algorithms for in vivo imaging of molecular signatures of disease in humans and small laboratory animals. These new cameras efficiently image radiation emissions in the form of positrons, annihilation photons, gamma rays, and/or light emitted from molecular contrast agents that were introduced into the body and distributed in the subject tissues. These contrast agents are designed to target molecular pathways of disease biology and enable imaging of these biological signatures in tissues residing deep within the body using measurements made from outside the body.

The goals of the instrumentation projects are to advance the sensitivity and spatial, spectral, and/or temporal resolutions, and to create new camera geometries for special biomedical applications. The computational modeling and algorithm goals are to understand the physical system comprising the subject tissues, radiation transport, and imaging system, and to provide the best available image quality and quantitative accuracy.

The work involves designing and building instrumentation, including arrays of position sensitive sensors, readout electronics, and data acquisition electronics, signal processing research, including creation of computer models, and image reconstruction, image processing, and data/image analysis algorithms, and incorporating these innovations into practical imaging devices.

The ultimate goal is to introduce these new imaging tools into studies of molecular mechanisms and treatments of disease within living subjects.

I am interested in how we could use electronics to treat diseases. I am particularly interested in diseases where currently, there is no drug to cure it (Alzheimer's disease), drug has side effects (obesity), and drug is too expensive (diabetes). For the obesity project, I have a hypothesis on the plasticity of white adipose tissue. I am looking for postdoc students to validate the hypothesis and then build the device making use of the hypothesis to treat obesity.

My research interests revolve around the following areas: - Novel systems and methods for x-ray and CT imaging - Applications of x-ray/CT to image-guided interventions and therapy and diagnostic imaging - Dual energy / spectral imaging, including photon counting detectors - Applications of artificial intelligence / machine learning / deep learning to medical imaging - Monte Carlo and Deterministic methods for x-ray imaging and radiation dose - Model-based image reconstruction

Prof. Wang directs the Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology and is a leading expert in biosensors, information storage and spintronics. His research and inventions span across a variety of areas including magnetic biochips, in vitro diagnostics, cancer biomarkers, magnetic nanoparticles, magnetic sensors, magnetoresistive random access memory, and magnetic integrated inductors. 

The gene encoding the p53 transcription factor is the most commonly mutated gene in human cancer, yet we lack a complete understanding of how its loss promotes cancer and how to target this pathway therapeutically. My lab studies p53 in the context of two very deadly and common cancer, pancreatic cancer and lung cancer, to understand how p53 loss promotes tumor initiation and progression. We are investigating not only how p53 mutation changes tumor cells themselves but also how these changes in tumor cells alter the cells of the tumor microenvironment to promote cancer development. We strive to understand p53 function using varied approaches, including mass spectrometry, CRISPR screening, ATAC-sequencing, spatial transcriptomics and in vivo mouse analyses. Using these combined approaches, we are gaining key new insights into the fundamental functions of p53 in vivo, which will ultimately inform us on how to target this critical pathway therapeutically.

The Engreitz Lab is mapping the regulatory wiring of the genome to understand the genetic basis of heart diseases.  This wiring includes millions of enhancers that tune gene expression in the thousands of cell types in the body. Yet, it has been unclear which enhancers regulate which genes — a massive and complex network that rewires in each cell type. To understand this network, we invent new genomics tools combining CRISPR and single-cell approaches; dissect molecular mechanisms of enhancer-gene communication; build computational models to map genome regulation; and apply these tools to connect human genetic variants to biological mechanisms of disease.

The central focus of our laboratory is to develop novel microfluidic technologies that for high-throughput and quantitative biophysics, biochemistry, and single-cell biology.

The Gifford lab is focused on defining the complex genetic and molecular mechanisms that are necessary for faithful cardiovascular development and how perturbation of these mechanisms can lead to disease. We use both stem cell and rodent experimental models to:

• characterize the cellular interactions involved in cardiovascular development
• define the oligogenic mechanisms underlying congenital heart diseases, such as hypoplastic left heart syndrome and left ventricular noncompaction
• explore the link between congenital heart disease and neurodevelopmental delay

We also collaborate closely with clinicians, for example on a project integrating cardiac imaging and genetic data to predict adverse cardiac outcomes. Ultimately, we hope to make personalized medicine a reality for those that suffer from CHD and associated comorbidities, such as autism.

We aim to understand the genetic basis of diabetes and related metabolic conditions and to use this to leverage a better understanding of what causes diabetes and how we can improve treatment options for patients. Our work is predominantly focused on understanding what causes pancreatic islets to release insufficient insulin to control blood glucose levels after a meal in patients with type 2 diabetes, but often extends to efforts to relate this to metabolic dysfunction in other relevant tissues such as fat and liver.

We are an inter-disciplinary team of basic and clinical scientists with shared interests in using molecular genetics as a tool to uncover novel biology. We use a variety of different approaches to address important challenges in the field, which range from studies that work genome wide to those which are focused on specific genes and even precise nucleotide changes to understand their impact on pancreatic islet biology.

We have developed a series of pipelines that use primary human islets and authentic beta-cell models which allow us to generate and then integrate complex genomic, transcriptomic and cellular datasets. We use state-of-the art genome engineering approaches combined with induced pluripotent stem-cells to study the impact of T2D-associated genetic variants on islet cell development and function. We are also funded to investigate the impact of T2D risk variants on pancreatic beta-cell function in vivo.

We are a highly collaborative team and work with multiple national and international consortia involved in efforts to understand the genetic basis of type 2 diabetes (eg DIAGRAM, NIDDK Funded Accelerated Medicines Partnership) and related glycaemic traits (MAGIC). We are also part of several Innovative Medicines Initiatives (IMIs) efforts including STEMBANCC and RHAPSODY and Horizon 2020 initiatives (eg T2DSYSTEMS), which are working to develop tools and frameworks to capitalize on genetic and genomic data.

We are also part of the NIDDK funded Human Islet Research Network (HIRN) where we play a role in two of their initiatives. The Human Pancreas Atlas Program- T2 (HPAP-T2D) and the Integrated Islet Phenotype Program (IIPP). Our role is to support the genetic and genomic characterization of islets which are distributed for research and to support the genomic characterization of the pancreas’ phenotyped within the HPAP-T2D program.

Our work extends to playing a role in the interpretation of genetic variants identified in genes with known roles in monogenic forms of diabetes. We are part of the Clin Gen Expert Review Panel for Monogenic Diabetes where are expertise contributes to interpretation of coding alleles in glucokinase (GCK) and Hepatocyte Nuclear Factor 1 alpha (HNF1A). We are a number of on-going projects which are supporting efforts to better understand how to use exome-sequencing data in a diagnostic setting.

Li Lab studies RNA editing mediated by ADAR enzymes. The laboratory currently focuses on two fascinating aspects of ADAR. One is the major biological function that is to evade MDA5-mediated dsRNA sensing to suppress autoimmunity. This has led to therapeutic applications in cancer, autoimmune diseases and viral infection. The other is to harness the endogenous ADAR enzyme for transcriptome engineering that holds great potential for RNA-based therapeutics. This approach overcomes challenges faced by CRISPR-based genome engineering technologies.

We are generally interested in the mechanisms that drive the proliferation of cells under physiological and pathological conditions. We work on a wide range on projects from fundamental cell cycle mechanisms related to the RB pathway to pre-clinical cancer studies. We leverage publicly-available cancer genomics data and generate our own set of genetic, epigenetic, and proteomic data sets to identify novel regulators of cancer growth. We also develop novel genetic approaches in mice to conclusively determine the function of these candidate genes and pathways in tumorigenesis in vivo. Finally, we team up with pharmaceutical companies and clinicians in academic centers to translate our discoveries into the clinic as rapidly as possible.

The Sherlock lab uses experimental approaches to understand the evolutionary process, specifically interested in i) what's the rate of beneficial mutation, ii) what is the distribution of fitness effects of beneficial mutations, iii) what are the identities of beneficial mutations (and are they gain or loss of function, are they recessive, dominant or overdominant, are the genic or regulatory?) and iv) how do each of these change as a function of genotype, ploidy and environment. We are also interested in how mutations that are beneficial in one environment fare in others, to explore the trade-offs that inevitably occur when fitness increases in a specific environment, and we are interested in exploring at what level experimental evolution can be deterministic, and at what level it is stochastic. We typically use short-term continuous (chemostat) and serial batch culture experiments in conjunction with lineage tracking and high throughput sequencing to understand the adaptive changes that occur in yeast in response to selective pressures as they evolve in vitro.

The Steinmetz group develops experimental approaches to read, edit and write entire genomes across scales. By applying these technologies, members of the lab aim at understanding the genetic basis of complex phenotypes, the mechanisms of transcription, and the molecular systems underpinning disease. One of the most daunting obstacles in biomedicine is the complex nature of most phenotypes (including cancer, diabetes, heart disease and several rare diseases) due to epistatic interactions between multiple genetic variants and environmental influences. Our aim is to transform the way we approach biomedical research, eventually by assigning a function to every nucleotide in the human genome. Along the way, we continually innovate and improve novel genomics technologies, enabling us to achieve our goals faster and more efficiently. For example, we will develop novel tools for precision genome editing, increase the scale and complexity of functional genomics screens, learn how to write genomes with unique traits from scratch, and apply long-read sequencing methods to understand disease mechanisms. Ultimately, we are working towards an era in which we can predict phenotypic traits from genetic and environmental information. Achieving this ambitious goal would have far-reaching implications, from facilitating precision medicine for everyone, and to predicting how natural populations will respond to changing environments.

The goal of our laboratory is to develop molecular technologies for mapping cells and functional circuits. At the sub-cellular scale, maps document the spatial organization of proteins, RNA, DNA, and metabolites with nanometer precision and temporal acuity on the order of seconds. Maps also chart the connectivity between these molecules, elucidating the circuits and signaling processes that give rise to function. Beyond the single cell, we also strive to map cellular ensembles, such as brain tissue. Can we create tools that contribute to the construction of cell and tissue atlases, and can we map the cellular circuits that give rise to function and behavior? To achieve these goals, our laboratory employs a wide variety of approaches, including directed evolution, protein engineering, organic synthesis, computational design, mass spec proteomics, and single-cell RNA seq. Our work lies at the interface between chemical biology, genetics, biophysics, cell biology, and neuroscience.

Evolution, extinction, Earth system history.

Our research aims to improve population health by creating high quality evidence about what health interventions work in whom and where, when, and how to implement them. Most of our research is focused on infectious diseases, including malaria, diarrhea, soil-transmitted helminths, and influenza. Our focus is on improving the health of vulnerable populations from low-resource settings, both domestically and internationally. We use a variety of epidemiologic, computational, and statistical methods, including causal inference and machine learning methods.

Our team is committed to finding ways to improve maternal and infant health outcomes and equity by leading research that identifies effective leverage points for change, from upstream 'macro' social and structural factors, to downstream 'micro' clinical factors through a collaborative research approach that integrates epidemiologic approaches with community engagement and systems thinking.

Disparities are prominent in maternal and infant health, so a lot of our work is centered on equity.  Focusing on highest-risk groups will improve health for everyone.

Much of our current research focuses on severe maternal morbidity (SMM). SMM encompasses adverse conditions that put pregnant people at risk of short and long-term consequences related to labor and delivery, including death.

We also study other important perinatal outcomes, including stillbirth, preterm birth, structural congenital malformations and other maternal morbidities.  We are interested in these outcomes individually, as well as in how they are connected to each other -- from a mechanistic standpoint (ie, do they share the same causes), and a lifecourse perspective (eg, how does an adverse newborn outcome affect the mom's postpartum health, and vice versa).

Dr. Carmichael's training is in perinatal and nutritional epidemiology.  She deeply appreciates her multi-disciplinary colleagues who make this work more meaningful by bringing their own varied perspectives and lived experiences, and their expertise in clinical care, qualitative and mixed methods, community engagement, and state-of-the-art epidemiologic approaches and biostatistical methods.

Our team’s research spans the fields of dermatology, technology and public health. One of our main projects is centered on developing innovative skin cancer prevention interventions using social media. Another project area is the use of shared decision-making, mobile app technology for monitoring and optimal care of low risk skin cancers. We collaborate closely with colleagues in bioinformatics and computer science on use of visual Artificial intelligence methods to skin image monitoring. Additionally, we advocate for diversity and gender equity in medicine by writing both original data articles and perspective pieces on these topics. We collaborate with epidemiologists, clinicians, biostatisticians, basic, computer and social scientists at Stanford University as well as other institutions.

I am an infectious diseases physician and epidemiologist    OUr lab is well know internationally in two major areas:  1.  The role of infections in chronic diseases and 2.  Physiologic changes in humans over time, specifically the decrease in human body temperature.  3. Novel surveillance projects, especially serosurveys done through the mail and  the use of wastewater to track infections.  Right now, projects that could integrate a post-doctoral fellow include:  In addition, my research group works on gun violence prevention.  

1.  Analysis of a California population-based serosurvey on SARS-COV2 infection, including information on human behaviors (mask wearing, social , vaccination) and demographics (age, race, education),  We could expand this study to look at other infectious diseases as well.

2.  Research assessing the association between high normal body temperature and longevity.

3.  Gun violence prevention.  Gun violence is a national tragedy.  We have two major projects in this area:

     a.  A project with Santa Clara County Department of Public health that combines the many data sources on gun violence across the county (Police, hospitals,EMT, schools, health departments), bring together stakeholders at community organizations across the county fighting gun violence and work with health care workers to identify strategies to educate patients on gun violence prevention.

     b.  Educational project development to teach physicians across the county how to talk to patients about gun violence

Stanford Solutions Science Lab.

The Stanford Solutions Science Lab designs solutions to improve health and well-being of children, families, and the planet.  Dr. Robinson originated the solution-oriented research paradigm. He is known for his pioneering obesity prevention and treatment research, including the concept of stealth interventions. His research applies social cognitive models of behavior change to behavioral, social, environmental and policy interventions for children and families in real world settings, making the results relevant for informing clinical and public health practice and policy. His research is largely experimental, conducting rigorous school-, family- and community-based randomized controlled trials. He studies obesity and disordered eating, nutrition, physical activity/inactivity and sedentary behavior, the effects of television and other screen time, adolescent smoking, aggressive behavior, consumerism, and behaviors to promote environmental sustainability. Rich longitudinal datasets of physical, physiological, psychological, behavioral, social, behavioral, and multi-omics measures are available from our many community-based obesity prevention and treatment trials in low-income and racial/ethnic minority populations of children and adolescents and their parents.

Stanford Screenomics Lab - Human Screenome Project.

People increasingly live their lives through smartphones. Our Stanford Screenomics app captures everything that people see and do on their smartphone screens – a record of digital life – by taking a screenshot every 5 seconds. The resulting sequence of screenshots, make up an individual’s screenome, an unique and dynamic sequence of exposures, thoughts, feelings, and actions. To date, we have collected more than 350 million screenshots from 6-12 months of phone use from national samples of about 500 hundred adults and adolescents and their parents. Opportunities available to study the screenome to understand digital media use and its impacts on health and behavior,  develop novel diagnostics and prognostics from the screenome, and deliver precision interventions to improve health and well being. An opportunity to help build this paradigm-disrupting new science.

Our group's research interests center around entrepreneurship. We are particularly interested in policy and the institutional environment, entrepreneurs in emerging economies and entrepreneurship among historically under-represented populations. We also do some work on technology platforms to facilitate startups and refugee entrepreneurship.