Faculty and Academic Staff
RANDALL S. STAFFORD, MD, PhD, is the Director of the Program on Prevention Outcomes and Practices. Dr. Stafford received a Master's degree in Health Administration from Johns Hopkins University, a PhD in Epidemiology from UC Berkeley, his Medical degree from UC San Francisco, and completed a residency in primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and a post-doctoral fellowship in epidemiology at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Professor Stafford and his research team focus on investigating physician practices and patients behaviors in order to create effective healthcare models that emphasize prevention and wellness, rather than treatment of disease symptoms. His mission is to improve population health outcomes through research that facilitates the dissemination of evidence-based prevention strategies. In addition, Dr. Stafford trains future leaders in prevention research and population health perspective.
Dr. Stafford has been principal investigator on many research investigations that test strategies to diminish the burden of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease while reducing health disparities and decreasing health care costs. Dr. Stafford’s rigorous, high-quality research has led to more than 160 peer-reviewed articles, including many in such high impact journals as JAMA and NEJM. His accomplishments have been recognized by advancement to fellowship in the American College of Preventive Medicine and the American Heart Association.
Professor Stafford now leads the WELL-China initiative as part of Stanford’s Wellness Living Laboratory (WELL). WELL-China is a multidisciplinary, collaborative initiative between Dr. Stafford, the Health Bureau of city of Hangzhou, and leading researchers from Zhejiang University in China. The WELL-China project focuses on measuring well-being, human function, chronic disease risk factors, environmental indicators, and biomarkers in a sample of 10,000 citizen scientists recruited from the Xihu (Westlake) District of Hangzhou, which will also serve as a platform for comparative effectiveness clinical trials that test multiple strategies including physical activity, sleep and stress management, dietary changes, and other modalities of both Western medicine and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), to identify the most cost-effective and sustainable approaches to improving well-being in communities.