Jonatas Teixeira Prates is a PhD student in Health Policy. Born in Curitiba, Brazil, Jonatas attended Georgia State University, where he graduated with a BS and an MA, both in Economics. His main research interests are in how the environment – as composed of natural and cultural factors – can affect health, health-related behaviors, and healthcare delivery.

Victoria Ngo was a postdoctoral fellow in Health Policy at Stanford and in Health Services Research at the VA Palo Alto site of the Elizabeth Dole Center of Excellence for Veteran and Caregiver Research. She is a health informaticist with an extensive background in healthcare administration. Her research focuses on health equity and the optimization of information technology to improve the delivery and coordination of care in the community. Currently, she is utilizing participatory research methods to design and implement mobile and social technology-enabled interventions to improve veteran caregiving in the home. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley, and a PhD in Nursing Science and Health-Care Leadership from UC Davis.

Anu Ramachandran is a Medical Informatics Fellow affiliated with the VA's Center for Innovation to Implementation. She completed her medical degree at Johns Hopkins University and pursued a Masters degree in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine as a Marshall Scholar. She recently completed her residency in Emergency Medicine at UC San Francisco/SF General Hospital. Her prior research has focused on the health needs of populations affected by humanitarian crisis. Broadly, she is interested in the intersection of informatics methodologies and health policy, with a focus on crisis preparedness and protecting medically vulnerable populations. She also hopes to use these tools to improve health system design and optimize the resiliency and equity of healthcare delivery in low-resource settings.

Robert Gallo is a medical informatics research fellow in the Department of Health Policy and the VA Palo Alto Health Care System’s Center for Innovation to Implementation. He obtained his medical degree at Washington University School of Medicine, and subsequently completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at Stanford. Dr. Gallo’s research focuses on inpatient health services delivery, particularly for diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He also has interest in the evaluation and implementation of prediction models.

Duncan is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Health Services Research and Development, with the VA Center for Innovation to Implementation (Ci2i) and the Stanford Department of Health Policy. Duncan uses methods from computer science and operations research for resource allocation and decision making in applied settings. To ensure that these systems meet appropriate standards of quality and safety, he is also developing processes for governing and monitoring deployed algorithms in healthcare settings. Duncan’s past projects have focused on blood donor recruitment (with Facebook), kidney exchange (with UNOS), and financial services (with FinRegLab). He holds a PhD in Applied Mathematics (AMSC) from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Matthew Dizon, MD, is a Physician Fellow in Health Services Research & Development at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. He received his B.S. in Physiological Sciences from the University of California, Los Angeles and his M.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. He then completed a residency in dermatology at Oregon Health & Science University. He is interested in healthcare utilization and value in dermatology.

Teresa Puente is the Program Manager for the Prevention Policy Modeling Lab, which conducts health and economic modeling to improve public health decision-making and inform U.S. health policy. Teresa coordinates with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and academic partners, overseeing operations and management for over 30 modeling projects.
 
Prior to joining Stanford, Teresa worked in health policy and communications at the CDC, supporting efforts to communicate the agency’s work in global infectious disease, outbreak response, and immunization. She received her master’s degree in public health from Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, with a focus on socio-contextual determinants of health.

Veena Manja is a post-doctoral fellow with the Department of Health Policy and with the Center for Innovation to Implementation, Health Services Research and Development fellowship program affiliated with the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. She pivoted to a research career after practicing as a cardiologist for several years with the goal of improving implementation of evidence based practices. She completed a PhD (2019) from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and joined the fellowship in 2021. During her graduate studies, she worked on improving research methods and on evidence synthesis teams for evidence based guideline development for national and international organizations. Her dissertation focused on understanding the factors influencing evidence-discordant clinical decisions in cardiology and neonatology. Her current work broadly focuses on improving cardiovascular outcomes in individuals with a mental health condition or a substance use disorder with a focus on methamphetamine associated cardiovascular outcomes. She is a graduate of Mysore Medical College (MBBS), India and completed her residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Cardiovascular Diseases at the State University of New York in Buffalo, NY.

Nathaniel Breg is a postdoctoral fellow at the Veterans Health Administration of Palo Alto in its Big Data Scientist Training Enhancement Program (BD-STEP) and a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Health Policy at Stanford. His research into health care provision intersects with questions in labor economics and industrial organization. His current work focuses on provider use of new medical technologies, and he is more broadly interested in provider incentives, medical labor markets, and the effects of the health care industry on local economies and local health. He has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in public policy and management with an applied economics concentration and a BA from Tufts University in economics and history. Before his graduate studies, he worked as an analyst at RTI International on health policy evaluation and implementation for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.