Senior Vice Chair Updates

In the past year, the academic affairs team, working closely with the faculty affairs staff, has been actively pursuing numerous initiatives. One of the initiatives involves the reorganization of the Professoriate (UTL/UML) and Clinical Educator (CE) Line Appointment and Promotion (A & P) committee leadership structure to include two-year terms for committee chair and chair-elect roles. This change was introduced to ensure that the A & P meeting can run smoothly if the chair is absent and provide opportunities for new leadership roles on A & P committees. Along with the introduction of this new A & P committee leadership structure, the academic affairs team has continued to process more than 345 faculty actions during the FY 2025 year, including new appointments, promotions, reappointments, sabbaticals, and retirement requests.

As an ongoing effort to help educate junior faculty from all appointment lines in the department on the credentials needed to be successfully promoted, Dr. Kristina Kudelko and I have actively participated in MODEL group meetings during the year to introduce the expected criteria for successful promotion for UML and CE Line junior faculty. In addition, Dr. Kudelko has conducted several one-on-one mentoring sessions with CE line faculty interested in discussing their likelihood for successful promotion at their next faculty action.

As senior vice chair for clinical affairs, I work to ensure that our faculty play a strong and collaborative role in shaping hospital operations and that clinical workflows enable the best possible care for our patients.

I lead ongoing efforts to optimize hospital throughput, focusing on minimizing avoidable admissions and expediting timely discharges by working collaboratively with DoM and Emergency Medicine faculty and chief residents. In recent months, that has included instituting a triage hospital medicine attending to act as “air traffic control” for admission and discharge of medicine patients and creating a procedure service to help shorten hospital lengths of stay.

I have also been working on an exciting new initiative with Kristina Kudelko, vice chair of academic affairs, that fits in the category that our chair, Euan Ashley, calls “reimagining.” Our charge is to work with a group of other leaders in the DoM to creatively reexamine and recommend optimization opportunities for all faculty development programs (with special emphasis on clinical educators). This will include coaching, mentoring, and sponsoring programs, as well as research education and leadership programs.

This past year has been a banner year for education across the department. Our faculty continue to lead several foundational components of the preclinical curriculum for medical students, and the required internal medicine clerkships remain an indispensable experience in the development of early clinicians of any discipline. Among the graduating class of 2025, inspired by Department of Medicine faculty, more Stanford medical students chose an internal medicine (IM) residency than any other specialty. Our very own IM residency program matched a superb class of interns, including more Stanford medical school graduates in the 2025 cycle than in any year over the last decade. Among our graduate medical education trainees finishing IM residency at Stanford, those pursuing subspecialty training successfully matched at fellowships at top-tier institutions across the country. A sizable portion of them continued in fellowships in one of our own DoM clinical divisions, most notably Cardiology and Hematology/Oncology. 

For personal and professional development, we are strengthening our education community with regular lunch gatherings of leaders across the department, such as course directors and fellowship program directors. As with many aspects of medicine, artificial intelligence tools show immense potential in tailoring educational content for students. Innovative faculty from divisions across the department are incorporating AI into their curriculum while remaining rooted in the tradition of teaching at the patient bedside. In doing so, they are poised to help build the infrastructure of “Precision MedEd” for learners at Stanford and beyond.

As I approach my one-year anniversary in this role, I’ve taken time to reflect on my journey. My initial focus was on gaining a thorough understanding of the department, school, university, and health system, while also building strong relationships with faculty and staff leadership teams throughout Stanford Medicine. My goal is to foster a culture of collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement; enhance our research capabilities and infrastructure; and strategically allocate resources to support key departmental initiatives.

Despite the ever-changing landscape of academic medicine over the past year, we have remained strong in delivering services across all three missions and staying true to our culture. I have collaborated closely with our central finance and operational teams on a strategic initiative aimed at effectively reallocating budget resources in light of financial uncertainties, including potential revenue declines and rising expenses. This initiative is designed to ensure financial stability and sustainability, enabling us to maintain core operations and critical programs. While this may temporarily slow growth in certain program areas, our proactive approach is intended to bolster the department’s resilience and safeguard our ability to support our mission and strategic priorities moving forward.

In the Department of Medicine, we are on the brink of a transformation in health care, where cutting-edge science, advanced technologies, and compassionate care converge to redefine human health. Three strategic pillars anchor our research vision: addressing cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic disease, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and digital health, and advancing precision medicine.

This past year, our faculty pioneered research breakthroughs in cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, oncology, and much more. We also harnessed the power of AI, cell and gene therapies, and genomics to propel precision medicine forward.

In the realm of cell and gene therapy, we are expanding curative treatments to a wider array of conditions. We are also advancing genomic medicine at scale. Initiatives like SPIRA, our clinical pharmacogenomics expansion program, are accelerating this future, democratizing innovation, and ensuring that breakthroughs reach patients faster.

Looking forward, we are building systemwide platforms to integrate clinical, molecular, and imaging data into a next-generation AI ecosystem to create predictive models that anticipate disease before it emerges. This infrastructure powers digital twins — virtual representations of patients — that simulate disease trajectories and guide real-time, tailored interventions. This approach not only will reveal the molecular drivers of disease, but ultimately will empower clinicians to make data-driven decisions that optimize care.