Senior Vice Chair Updates

As senior vice chair of Academic Affairs, I introduced a new DoM-wide physician-scientist and scientist faculty search process, designed to shorten the time between application submission and first hiring decision and improve search efficiency across the department. I also facilitated the searches for three new division chiefs — Paul Bollyky in Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine, Joo Ha Hwang in Gastroenterology and Hepatology, and Jason Hom in Hospital Medicine — each of whom brings a strong international reputation to Stanford in his respective area of specialty and a proven record in research and clinical leadership.

A second major area of focus has been reimagining how we recruit Clinician Educator (CE) faculty. After engaging with division leadership and reviewing our existing process, we launched a new CE faculty search registration system to track data on all new DoM CE hires. We’ve piloted the program in two divisions — Hospital Medicine and Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine — with three goals in mind: to document and better understand hiring trends; to strengthen our commitment to diversity, inclusivity, and transparency; and to improve the experience of faculty recruits.

In the year ahead, we will continue to build on this foundation. Plans include rolling out CV parsing software with additional output formats and enabling faculty to update their own records directly; completing the CE search registration rollout to all divisions; and deepening our partnership with the Office of Faculty Development on recruitment and promotion initiatives.

As senior vice chair for clinical affairs, I have focused my work this past year on strengthening the partnership between our faculty and health system operations, and on building the structures that help our faculty thrive.

On the clinical side, I led the development and implementation of an Open Encounters Policy to ensure timely documentation and billing for ambulatory encounters. Working with Jack Zeng and colleagues in Stanford Health Care compliance and the Epic team, we helped providers identify and close encounters they didn’t even realize were still open, improving the accuracy of our clinical documentation and delivering meaningful financial benefit to the department. I also continued my work with Kerry Makielski to visit all of the DoM’s ambulatory clinics, meeting faculty and staff across Palo Alto, the South Bay, the East Bay, and Redwood City. These visits have been a valuable reminder of just how much outstanding and innovative work is happening throughout our clinical enterprise.

In faculty development, the “Reimagine” initiative I co-chaired with Kristina Kudelko has moved from planning into action. Working with a task force of DoM leaders, we developed a multiyear Faculty Development plan, and the first phase is now underway with the appointment of Stephanie Harman and Paul Yang as co-directors of the new Office of Faculty Development. Over the next 12 to 18 months, the focus will be on building mentorship programming for faculty across all lines and ranks and developing flexible Career Pathways resources to support successful, satisfying academic careers. We have also reimagined the Clinician Educators Advisory Council, expanding its membership to include representation from every division and establishing a formal charter with goals for strengthening bidirectional communication between CE faculty and DoM leadership.

As I transition the senior vice chair role to Marisa Holubar, I do so with great confidence in what lies ahead. The work of the past year has set a strong foundation — in clinical operations, in faculty development, and in the relationships built across our ambulatory enterprise — and I cannot think of a better and more capable leader to carry it forward. It has been a privilege to serve in this role, and I look forward to watching the department continue to flourish under Marisa’s leadership.

In 2026, the Stanford School of Medicine joined the AAMC VSLO Program, and the impact was immediate: Applications from outside medical students seeking DoM clerkship rotations increased sharply. Working with the Registrar, our team developed a dynamic, centralized applicant tracking system to allow for efficient, transparent review across the department and its divisions. Our faculty also continue to lead more than half of the preclinical MD curriculum and serve in key leadership roles across the MSTP and MSPA programs. This year, several DoM faculty received teaching awards recognizing their work as preclinical instructors, clerkship preceptors, and student mentors, and a number of our residency and fellowship program directors were honored by Stanford Health Care trainees for outstanding contributions to graduate medical education.

The 2026 residency match season was among the strongest in recent memory. Twenty-one Stanford MD graduates matched into internal medicine residencies across the country, the highest number in a decade. Our own IM residency program welcomed an exceptional class of 41 categorical residents, including a record 16 matriculants into our Translational Investigator Program (TIP), along with 19 preliminary interns headed to SHC neurology and anesthesia residencies. We also expanded participation of our fellowship programs in cross-division evaluations, generating candid, actionable feedback from subspecialty fellows to adjacent program directors and developing a framework for sharing best practices across divisions.

In the year ahead, our education team will focus on deepening connections between the students in the Internal Medicine Interest Group and our residents, fellows, and faculty across divisions. We are also working to better align incentives for subspecialty faculty to participate in ambulatory clinical experiences for medical students, an investment in both broader student training and meaningful faculty development.

This past year, my focus has shifted from building foundational understanding to executing meaningful change across all operational areas of the department. In Finance, we closed a critical data gap by bringing a comprehensive leadership roles registry live in DomComp, now updated quarterly by division directors, giving department and division leaders clear visibility into leadership commitments, expense impact, and equity implications for the first time. On the research administration side, we completed two significant structural consolidations: the transition of SCCR to the Clinical Research Hub and the integration of our two central research administration teams under unified leadership, streamlining support for faculty-driven work while creating a more efficient structure. Our HR and Faculty Affairs team also completed a major systems undertaking this year with the department’s transition from PeopleSoft to Oracle, modernizing how we manage workforce operations across the department.

Across our education and communications portfolios, this has also been a year of meaningful milestones. Our Translational Investigator Program welcomed a record incoming class of 16 new members, 37% of whom are MD/PhD candidates, reflecting the growing strength of our early-investigator pipeline. Two recently accredited ACGME training programs, Hepatology and Interventional Pulmonology, completed their continued accreditation visits, and we received approval for a new ACGME-accredited program in Transplant Nephrology. We also launched The Future of Medicine, a podcast hosted by Chair Euan Ashley, which included 31 season one episodes in both video and audio formats, alongside a complete overhaul of the department website.

Looking ahead, I’m energized by several initiatives taking shape across the department. In July, we convened a new AI task force, led by IT Director Jack Zeng, focused on identifying opportunities to strengthen administrative efficiency through artificial intelligence, with recommendations currently in development. We are also assessing our physical spaces as we plan for a broader return to the office for hybrid staff and faculty, creating more opportunities for the in-person collaboration that strengthens our teams and advances our shared mission.

This past year, we launched the Clinical Research Hub (CRH), a centralized resource designed to streamline study start-up, strengthen research navigation, and expand support for observational, quality improvement and data science studies aligned with School of Medicine priorities. Notable CRH-supported projects include the Samsung-Stanford Smartwatch Study, led by Robson Capasso, developing algorithms to detect obstructive sleep apnea, and the REACT-AF trial, an NIH-sponsored randomized study led by Clinical Coordinating Center Director Marco Perez, testing a smartwatch-guided anticoagulation strategy for atrial fibrillation. We are also building a DoM Software Development Engineering Core to support clinical study applications, including mobile tools, e-consent platforms, and integration of machine learning and agentic technologies.

We have made equally meaningful investments in our physician-scientist community. Under Paul Cheng’s leadership, the department hosted two well-attended networking events in October 2025 and March 2026, bringing together fellows and faculty across divisions and career stages; a larger summer gathering is already being planned. We also launched a coordinated, DoM-wide physician-scientist faculty search, co-led by Glenn Chertow and Ami Bhatt, using a shared committee across UML and UTL tracks. The search generated more than 400 applications for UTL positions and 20 for UML positions, advancing top candidates to divisional interviews and significantly strengthening our ability to recruit exceptional physician-scientist faculty at scale.

Looking ahead, delivering on our precision medicine mission requires infrastructure equal to our ambitions. In partnership with Pathology, we are developing a road map for in-house tumor–normal genome and transcriptome sequencing, with a targeted launch in 2027. Oncology will serve as the initial prototype for a broader platform integrating clinical, molecular, and imaging data into a next-generation AI ecosystem, with the goal of building predictive models and digital twins that simulate individual disease trajectories and guide personalized care. We are also championing strategic opportunities across the department in precision health, AI/ML, and new approach methodologies through our Big Ideas in Medicine initiative, areas of growing federal investment where Stanford is exceptionally well positioned to lead.