Research

YING QING CHEN, PhD is Professor of Medicine at Stanford, and Director of the Cooperative Studies Program Coordinating Center, Veteran Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto. He has dedicated himself over two decades to novel statistical methods development, design, management and analysis for clinical trials and epidemiologic studies in clinical research, with a focus on population-based diseases prevention. He has been involved in the design and analysis of many high-impact clinical trials.

SHOA L. CLARKE, MD, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Medicine and of Pediatrics. He is a preventive cardiologist who cares for adults, children, and families. He earned his bachelor's degree from Cornell University and his MD and PhD from Stanford University. He completed clinical training at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Stanford Hospital. His research integrates genomics, data science, and epidemiology in order to develop strategies for precision medicine.

CHRISTOPHER GARDNER, PhD is passionate about two central questions that keep him up at night and get him to jump out of bed most mornings. The first of these is: What can people eat and drink (or avoid/limit) to optimize their health? Most of his past 30+ years of research and teaching have been dedicated to finding solutions to current controversies about such topics as garlic, soy, antioxidants, omega-3 fats from fish or flax, vegetarian diets, and artificial sweeteners. His recent studies have shifted more toward dietary “patterns” that have included Low-fat, Low-carb, Ketogenic, Mediterranean, Vegan and Omnivore. A special emphasis of his current research involves the connections between diet, the microbiome, and immune function. His rigorously designed and conducted human nutrition trials and publications on these topics have made him a nationally recognized leader in nutrition science. He is the past chair of the Nutrition Committee of the American Heart Association, and a member of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

Dr. Gardner is also interested in food systems research, and stealth nutrition. These topics address the forces and factors that can successfully motivate people to improve their food and beverage choice behaviors.  This research involves collaborations with scholars and researchers from across all seven of Stanford’s undergraduate and graduate schools – Medicine, Business, Law, Earth Sciences, Humanities and Sciences, Education, and Engineering. The work draws on the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative, involving more than 70 universities across the US, for which he was a founding member along with Stanford’s Residential and Dining Enterprises and the Culinary Institute of America. A major theme of this collaboration is to elevate the unapologetic deliciousness of food. Two of the undergraduate classes he teaches address his interests in the intersection of Taste, Health, and the Environment: Food and Society, and Healthy and Sustainable Food Systems. He has been teaching Human Nutrition through the program in Human Biology for 20 years. Recently one of his most widely publicized studies – The Effect of Vegan vs. Omnivorous Diets on Cardiometabolic Risk Factors in Identical Twins – has been featured in a Top 10 Netflix docuseries, You Are What You Eat, released in January 2024.

CATHERINE A. HEANEY, PhD, MPH, is an associate professor (teaching) in the Stanford Prevention Research Center, the Department of Psychology, and the interdisciplinary Program in Human Biology. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard University and her MPH and PhD in health behavior and health education from the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Dr. Heaney’s primary research focus is work and health. As a social scientist, her research activities have been directed at broadening the scope of occupational safety and health research to address not only physical and chemical hazards, but also psychological and social stressors experienced at work. Toward this aim, she has served on the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health Board of Scientific Counselors and contributed to the National Occupational Research Agenda.

Dr. Heaney has studied the social, psychological and physiological mechanisms through which psychosocial stress at work influences an employee’s health in various industries and occupational sectors including health and human services, manufacturing, and agriculture. She works collaboratively with worksites and communities to develop and evaluate intervention strategies for restructuring physical, organizational and social aspects of work to reduce sources of stress, build social support, enhance perceived control of work tasks, strengthen employee coping skills, improve employee health behaviors, and thereby promote workers’ health.

At Stanford, Dr. Heaney has introduced hundreds of students to the joys and challenges of community-based public health research and the benefits of preventive intervention.

ANN HSING, PhD, MPH, is an internationally recognized epidemiologist with more than 37 years of experience in cancer epidemiology, genetic and molecular epidemiology, population sciences, and international studies. She has extensive expertise in the epidemiology and etiology of prostate and hepatobiliary cancers, hormonal carcinogenesis, and circadian rhythm. Recently, she has focused on the science of well-being and on cancer early detection and prevention.

Dr. Hsing is a professor of medicine and of epidemiology and population health in the Stanford University School of Medicine. She is a faculty fellow in the Center for Population Health Sciences and the Center for Innovation in Global Health and chairs the Pacific Rim Alliances for Population Health (PRAPH). Dr. Hsing is principal investigator (PI) for the Stanford Well for Life (WELL) study, a longitudinal cohort of more than 32,000 participants across five countries that studies cross-cultural patterns and determinants of well-being. At Stanford, she leads MOSAAIC@Stanford, the Stanford site of the Multi-ethnic Observational Study of American Asian and Pacific Islander Communities (MOSAAIC), which focuses on health and prevention research in Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Dr. Hsing also leads the International Consortium on Cancer Biomarkers for Early Detection and Prevention (INTERCEPT), an international collaboration to identify biomarkers for early cancer detection and prevention. Prior to joining Stanford, Dr. Hsing worked for 22 years at the National Cancer Institute, where she was a tenured senior investigator, and, from 2012 to 2015, she served as the chief scientific officer of the Cancer Prevention Institute of California, an affiliated partner of the Stanford Cancer Institute. Dr. Hsing has conducted population-based epidemiological studies on four continents, including North and South America, Asia, and Africa. She has served on numerous committees, editorial boards, and advisory boards and is an elected fellow of the American Epidemiological Society and the American College of Epidemiology. At Stanford, she is the founding course director of CHPR242 (The Science of Well-being) and CHPR288 (Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention in Asian Americans). She has published more than 350 peer-reviewed papers and mentored more than 87 postdoctoral fellows and junior investigators. She is passionate about research, music, gardening, and helping young people succeed.

Please click here to learn more about Dr. Hsing’s lab.

JOHN P.A. IOANNIDIS, MD, DSc is professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health and (by courtesy) of Biomedical Data Science. He has launched and runs the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) since 2013 and he is widely known for his work on evidence-based medicine and meta-research. He is a recipient of multiple awards and honorary doctorates and has been inducted in many academies and honorific societies. His work is currently cited approximately 6,000 times each month in the scientific literature making him one of the most cited researchers in the world across science.

DAVID MARON, MD, is the C.F. Rehnborg Professor of Medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine and Chief of the Stanford Prevention Research Center. He received his undergraduate degree from Stanford and his medical degree from the University of Southern California. He trained in internal medicine at UCLA, then returned to Stanford where he was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar under the tutelage of Hal Holman and preventive cardiology fellow at the Stanford Prevention Research Center under the mentorship of Jack Farquhar and Bill Haskell. He remained at Stanford to complete a cardiology fellowship. After a brief stint in private practice in Santa Monica, he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1993 as Director of Preventive Cardiology and rose through the ranks to Professor. He returned to Stanford in 2014 as Director of Preventive Cardiology.

Dr. Maron’s research is focused on the primary and secondary prevention of coronary artery disease. As a fellow at SPRC, he was introduced to clinical research as a coinvestigator in the Stanford Coronary Risk Intervention Project. He then helped design the landmark COURAGE trial, for which he served as the chairman of the Optimal Medical Therapy committee. He went on to be principal investigator and co-chair of the ISCHEMIA trial, an NIH-funded study comparing the effectiveness of invasive and conservative management of stable coronary artery disease. COURAGE and ISCHEMIA have had a major impact on the management of coronary disease globally, with both trials emphasizing the importance of lifestyle and appropriate medications to control risk factors and prevent heart attacks and death. He is currently co-chair of TRANSFORM, a clinical trial comparing risk factor-based primary prevention with primary prevention guided by atherosclerosis burden determined by coronary CT angiography.

In collaboration with colleagues in Radiology and Computer Science at Stanford, his team developed an artificial intelligence algorithm to identify and quantitate the amount of coronary artery calcified plaque present on a routine chest CT scan. His ultimate goal is to use an algorithm like this to detect incidental coronary calcification in people undergoing chest CT imaging for any reason, and then notify treating physicians and patients about the presence of coronary calcium so that appropriate preventive interventions can be initiated.

Dr. Maron is president-elect of the American Society for Preventive Cardiology and sees patients in the Preventive Cardiology Clinic founded by his mentor, Dr. Jack Farquhar.

JUDITH (JODI) PROCHASKA, PhD, MPH, is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, a member of the Stanford Cancer Institute, and a licensed clinical psychologist with addiction medicine privileges at Stanford Hospital and Clinics. Dr. Prochaska is Deputy Director of SPRC, co-Director of SPRC’s T32 postdoctoral training program in cardiovascular disease prevention, and the Faculty Director for Stanford’s Master of Science Program in Community Health and Prevention Research. Dr. Prochaska received her bachelor's degree from Duke University and completed doctoral training in the Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University, where she also completed a master's degree in public health.

Dr. Prochaska's work centers on identifying health solutions that address leading risk behaviors in neglected and disenfranchised individuals and populations. Her research spans community-based epidemiologic studies randomized controlled treatment trials, and policy analysis. With attention to health equity, communities of interest include Alaska Native men and women, people with mental illness or alcohol and drug problems, the unemployed, the uninsured, and the unhoused. Dr. Prochaska has over 250 publications, serves on the editorial board for JAMA Internal Medicine, and was a contributing author to the 2020 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking Cessation. She is a fellow and past president of the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco (SRNT), the international scientific society aimed at stimulating the generation and dissemination of new knowledge concerning nicotine and tobacco from bench to bedside, through to health policy.

ALEX SANDHU, MD, MS, is a cardiologist with a special interest in the care of patients with advanced heart failure. He graduated from the seven-year combined BA-MD program at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. He completed an internal medicine residency at Stanford University, spending 16 weeks at Makerere Hospital in Uganda as part of the Global Health track. He subsequently obtained completed a master’s in health services research at Stanford while acting as a fellow in health services research at the Palo Alto VA and Stanford's Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research. Next, he completed fellowships in cardiology and advanced heart failure and transplant at Stanford before joining the faculty.

RANDALL S. STAFFORD, MD, PhD, is the Director of SPRC's Program on Prevention Outcomes and Practices.  His research agenda has evolved from measuring the quality of healthcare practices to working directly to improve practices and outcomes. Dr. Stafford's career seeks healthcare transformation through new information technology and the re-engineering of primary care services. 

Dr. Stafford received a master’s degree in health administration from Johns Hopkins University, a PhD in Epidemiology from UC Berkeley, and his medical degree from the Joint Medical Program at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley. He completed a residency in primary care internal medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a post-doctoral fellowship in epidemiology at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. He is also trained in wilderness medicine.

Professor Stafford focuses on investigating physician practices and patient behaviors in order to create effective healthcare models that emphasize prevention, wellness, and self-care, 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, empowers and improves communication with patients, and helps reduce health disparities. He has applied these strategies both locally at Stanford and globally through collaborators in Saudi Arabia, Nepal, Bangladesh, and China. Professor Stafford was founding director of Stanford's WELL-China 10,000 citizen initiative, a multidisciplinary initiative between SPRC, the City of Hangzhou, and Zhejiang University in China.

In addition, Dr. Stafford trains future leaders in prevention research and population health strategies. He is committed to advancing the careers of health professionals from under-represented communities. 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 220 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.

MARCIA STEFANICK, PhD, is a professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center and professor of obstetrics and gynecology. She received a BA in biology from the University of Pennsylvania and obtained her PhD in Physiology at Stanford University. Dr. Stefanick is a leading pioneer in women s health research and she has been at the forefront of the study of aging in both women and men, including the role of diet and nutritional supplements, physical activity, and body composition on chronic diseases.

Dr. Stefanick is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Western Regional Center of the large Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) for which she played a key leadership role in the dissemination of the landmark WHI Hormone Trials, which changed national recommendations regarding menopausal hormone use in older women. She was also the Stanford PI of the WHI Calcium & Vitamin D and Diet Modification trials, the largest diet intervention trials conducted to date, as well as the Women’s Healthy Eating and Living trial for early-stage breast cancer survivors, all of which have influenced national guidelines regarding chronic disease prevention in women. In addition, she is the PI of the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures in Men (MrOS) and MrOS Sleep Study, which have been following men for more than a decade to understand musculoskeletal aging.

Dr. Stefanick championed the creation of the Stanford Center for Health Research on Women and Sex Differences in Medicine (WSDM), for which she is the Co-Director. Her nearly 200 peer-reviewed publications, leadership roles within Stanford’s Prevention Research Center, Cardiovascular and Cancer Institutes, and School of Medicine are a testament to her expertise and steadfast commitments to advancing a national research agenda on chronic disease prevention, aging well, women’s health, and the role of sex and gender differences in physiology, and population health across the life course.

YETSA TUAKLI-WORSORNU, MD, MPH is an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the Stanford Center for Sports Equity.

Dr. Tuakli-Wosornu, a renowned sports and exercise medicine physician, brings a wealth of experience and a deep commitment to equity. With an illustrious career that spans clinical practice, research, and advocacy, Dr. Tuakli-Wosornu is well-positioned to lead the center in its mission to foster more successful sports environments through innovative athlete-centered research. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Tuakli-Wosornu completed her residency in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Maryland and fellowship in interventional spine and sports medicine at the Hospital for Special Surgery. Her research focuses on the intersection of sports and social justice, aiming to create safer, more accessible, and ultimately more meaningful opportunities for all who participate in sports.

Dr. Tuakli-Wosornu is not only a distinguished academic but also an accomplished athlete. She represented Ghana in international track and field competitions, bringing a unique perspective to her work that bridges the gap between athlete experiences and academic research. Her dual identity as a clinician and athlete fuels her passion and purpose.

At the Stanford Center for Sports Equity, Dr. Tuakli-Wosornu will spearhead cutting-edge research and educational programs, collaborating with local, national, and international organizations to advocate for systemic changes in sports policies, practices, and products, and integrate equity with excellence. Sports equity initiatives connect the natural sciences, social sciences, and sports industry to continuously improve sports.

Ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Stanford community eagerly anticipates the impact of this work. In her new role, Dr. Tuakli-Wosornu’s leadership is expected to inspire meaningful advancements in sports equity and new conversations about performance at all levels. With her expertise and vision, the Stanford Center for Sports Equity is poised to become a leading voice in a global conversation on sports, justice, and society.