The PI
Roxana Daneshjou, MD, PhD
Assistant professor of Biomedical Data Science and Dermatology at Stanford School of Medicine
Contact: roxanad@stanford.edu
Dr. Daneshjou studied Bioengineering at Rice University before matriculating to Stanford School of Medicine where she completed her MD and a PhD in Genetics with Dr. Russ Altman as part of the medical scientist training program. She completed dermatology residency at Stanford as part of the research track and completed a postdoc in Biomedical Data Science with Dr. James Zou. She currently is the assistant director of the Center of Excellence for Precision Heath & Pharmacogenomics, director of informatics for the Stanford Skin Innovation and Interventional Research Group (SIIRG), a founding member of the Translational AI in Dermatology (TRAIND) group, and a faculty affiliate of Human-centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and the AI in Medicine and Imaging (AIMI) centers.
The Team
Vasiliki (Vicky) Bikia, PhD
Postdoc at Biomedical Data Science and Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford Computer Science
Contact: bikia@stanford.edu
Vasiliki (Vicky) Bikia, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Daneshjou Lab, affiliated with the Biomedical Data Science Department and the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford. She holds an Advanced Diploma (with honors) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Greece, and a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Her doctoral research addressed the clinical need for providing non-invasive tools for cardiovascular monitoring, utilizing supervised learning and physics-based numerical modeling. Specifically, she has developed and tested algorithms to estimate vital biomarkers including central blood pressure and flow, cardiac contractility and arterial stiffness. Currently, Vicky's work centers on developing efficient and trustworthy multimodal algorithms that that leverage enhanced clinical representations of textual and imaging data to enhance disease detection and patient outcomes predictions. Vicky is also committed to creating chatbots designed to help patients understand complex medical reports and discharge instructions. Her overarching goal is to make healthcare more accessible and effective for everyone.
Vicky is also an Emerson Consequential Scholar at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
Aaron Fanous, MD/MS
Postdoc at Biomedical Data Science
Contact: aron7628@stanford.edu
Aaron Fanous, MD, MS, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Daneshjou Lab at Stanford, in the Biomedical Data Science department, working at the intersection of AI and medicine. He holds an MD from UTHSCSA and a MS from UTSA in AI where his thesis centered around utilizing mixture of vector approaches to train models on low compute resources in chest xray report generation. His current research focuses on leveraging large language models (LLMs) and multimodal AI for precision pharmacogenomic annotation, automated patient reports, and dermatological misinformation detection.
During medical school, Aaron co-founded two companies where he designed an AI-driven billing and coding automation tool, a 3d surgical and cosmetic model for patient outcomes. He has won financial awards for his work multiple student competitions business.
Beyond research and startups, Aaron is committed to mentorship and education in AI for medicine. He co-founded CODE Blue, a program that teaches medical students programming and AI fundamentals, and has mentored students on AI applications in healthcare.
Outside of lab, Aaron loves to game, create electronic music, and weightlift.
Vivian Utti
MD candidate at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Researcher at Biomedical Data Science
Contact: vutti@stanford.edu
Vivian Utti is an MD candidate at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, with extensive interest in bio-inspired engineering for medical innovation and harnessing machine learning to transform healthcare operations. She graduated from Cornell University where she studied computational biology and computer information science. Prior to medical school, she worked in ML engineering in the Immunomics group at Microsoft Research, and across data integration, software engineering, and product deployment at Palantir. Whilst in medical school, she interned in the strategy and technology group at Schrödinger, across tech bio venture capital investing and ML product in health tech. Outside of class and work experiences, Vivian is passionate about mentorship and public service. She developed and scaled Excel Education Preparation, a college mentoring program aimed towards providing standardized test preparation to students in low resource communities. She currently mentors prospective underrepresented medical students from Cornell, tutors Harlem-area students in computer science and biology, and enjoys reformer pilates and painting.
Ryan Park
MD PhD candidate in Genetics at Stanford School of Medicine
Contact: rpark23@stanford.edu
Ryan Park, from Honolulu, Hawaii, is pursuing an MD and a PhD in Genetics at Stanford School of Medicine. He graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical computation and a master’s degree in computer science. Ryan aspires to improve the efficacy of cancer immunotherapy and create equitable access to these treatments. He worked with the University of Hawaii Cancer Center to expand clinical trial opportunities for Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders and founded a nonprofit to support pediatric cancer patients across the Pacific. At Stanford, Ryan served as the staffing manager at Arbor Free Clinic and co-chaired the national collegiate advisory board for eradicating hepatitis B and liver cancer. He also helped launch the Stanford Data Ocean to empower underrecognized students to learn biomedical data science and contribute to a more diverse academic community.
Ank Agarwal
MD PhD candidate at Stanford School of Medicine
Contact: anka@stanford.edu
Ank Agarwal, from New Haven, Connecticut, is pursuing an MD PhD at Stanford Stanford School of Medicine. In the Daneshjou Lab, Ank's interests lie at the intersection of linguistics, healthcare access and equity, and dermatology.
He graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a bachelor's degree in computational biology where he also worked full time in prisons and jails. In incarceration settings, Ank advanced reproductive healthcare rights for women behind bars, taught English to native Chinese and Spanish speakers, and created GED/college courses. Before and at Stanford, Ank founded and exited companies in both biotech and music tech. For the latter, Ank taught himself how to build guitars and later scaled to running a company creating custom instruments for professional musicians and other individuals with/without mobility challenges. Outside the lab, he still woodworks, plays guitar, volunteers in free clinics, and falls off skateboards.
Arnav Singhvi
Master student at Stanford Computer Science
Contact: arnavs11@stanford.edu
Arnav Singhvi is a Master’s student at Stanford studying computer science with a specialization in AI. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. Arnav is the 2nd author of the DSPy research project from Stanford NLP, which has become its most popular repository with over 22,000 GitHub stars (dspy.ai). He has contributed to multiple AI/ML research projects at the Stanford NLP Group, Databricks/Mosaic Research, UC Berkeley Sky Lab and UC Berkeley Hybrid Robotics lab, and is currently collaborating with the Stanford Biomedical Department to develop compound AI systems in the medical domain. His work is driven by a strong interest in building scalable LLM pipelines and advancing automated prompting systems as a fundamental approach to AI development.
Sonnet Xu
Undergrad at Stanford Computer Science
Contact: sonnet@stanford.edu
Sonnet Xu is an undergraduate at Stanford studying computer science. She is interested in the application of large language models and artificial intelligence to different impact areas in medicine. At the lab, she works on studying the impacts of prompting and in-context learning on disparities in AI as well as auditing and explaining the behaviors of foundation models.
Outside of this, Sonnet is a student research fellow at the Hoover institution working on U.S. China policy and an intercollegiate civil disagreement fellow with the McCoy Center for Ethics at Stanford, where she works to build a campus culture that allows students to hold difficult ideological discussions. She also serves as a managing editor at the Stanford Daily, where she leads the creative nonfiction section.
Anson Zhou
MD/MBA candidate at Stanford School of Medicine and Graduate School of Business
Contact: ansonz@stanford.edu
Anson is an MD/MBA candidate at Stanford School of Medicine and Graduate School of Business, pursuing a concentration in informatics and data-driven medicine. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in biomedical engineering. During that time, he worked on translational research for regenerative medicine and drug delivery, co-inventing and licensing out a suite of devices for peripheral nerve repair. He also worked on technology transfer through Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures and across various healthcare startups. After graduating, he worked on the pipeline strategy/new target discovery team at Schrödinger and later as a strategy consultant at Bain & Company.
Currently, Anson works as a venture fellow, investing in early-stage startups across healthcare/life sciences and is a co-producer of the 'Imagine A World' podcast. His interests include healthcare entrepreneurship, D2C digital health, and AI tools for chronic disease.
Shlok Natarajan
Master's in the Department of Biomedical Data Science
Contact: shlokna@stanford.edu
Shlok, from St. Louis, Missouri, is pursuing a Master's in the Department of Biomedical Data Science. Previously, he graduated with Bachelor's and Master's degrees in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), where he worked on research spanning wearable devices and time series forecasting. While in undergrad, he held internships at Salesforce's Health Cloud team, Amazon, and Medtronic. After college, he worked as an engineer and product manager at Salesforce, where he led product strategy in the retail health sector, developed backend infrastructure, and published conformal prediction/uncertainty quantification research.
At Stanford, Shlok has worked on compound language model research and is broadly interested in how advancements in these models can improve care delivery. Outside of school, Shlok likes to solder, read Architecture Digest, and sometimes moonlights as a barber.
Kiana Yekrang
Clinical Research Coordinator II in the Dermatology Department
Contact: kyekrang@stanford.edu
Kiana is a Clinical Research Coordinator II in the Dermatology Department, in which she has been a part of since September 2019. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of California, San Diego. Throughout her time in this department, Kiana has collaborated with eight different faculty members on clinical research studies spanning digital health, skin cancer, alopecia areata, atopic dermatitis, and epidermolysis bullosa. Her primary passion lies in leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance the detection and diagnosis of skin cancers. Kiana played a pivotal role in developing the first-ever DICOM integration of Intellistudio 2-D full body photographs into the EPIC EMR system.
Niki See
Clinical Research Coordinator Associate in the Dermatology Department
Contact: nikis@stanford.edu
Niki See is a Clinical Research Coordinator Associate in the Department of Dermatology. She has worked with multiple PIs to conduct research in medical dermatology, dermatology surgery, dermatology pathology, and pediatric dermatology. One of her main goals is to assist with investigating new technologies and methods for early detection of skin cancer.
Joanna Lin
MD candidate at the Stanford School of Medicine
Contact: jlin22@stanford.edu
Joanna Lin, from Los Angeles, California, is pursuing an MD at the Stanford School of Medicine. She graduated from Bowdoin College with a bachelor's degree in neuroscience. She is excited to advance health accessibility, digital health, and community health through technology. Joanna previously worked at UCSF investigating deep brain stimulation as a novel treatment for chronic pain. At Stanford, Joanna runs local vaccination efforts through Flu Crew, volunteers at the Cardinal Free Clinics, and plays lots of pickleball.
Sheharbano Jafry
MD candidate at the Stanford School of Medicine
Contact: sjafry@stanford.edu
Sheharbano is a second-year medical student who is passionate about AI, increasing access to medical care to underserved populations, and education. She graduated from the University of Washington with a double major in Biochemistry and English. Outside of school, she loves to travel, hike, write, read, and watch movies!
Junayd Lateef
Researcher at Biomedical Data Science Department
Contact: jlateef@stanford.edu
Junayd Lateef is a mentee and part-time researcher at the Daneshjou Lab. He earned his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University, where he was a member of the Barrett, The Honors College.
During his undergraduate years, he contributed to multiple collaborative research projects, including partnerships between Samsung SDS & Stanford Medicine and Arizona State University (ASU) & Dublin City University (DCU). At Samsung SDS, he worked closely with Stanford Medicine to develop machine learning models for detecting various skin characteristics, leveraging advanced AI techniques for medical applications. In his work with ASU & DCU, he collaborated with postdoctoral researchers to design and evaluate brain tumor detection models, exploring different attention mechanisms and computational techniques such as tensor decomposition and depthwise separable convolutions to enhance model performance.
Beyond research, he enjoys playing basketball and playing video games in his free time. He is passionate about working with underprivileged communities, volunteering to support those in need.
Alumni
Tofunmi Omiye, MD, MS
Postdoc
Jesutofunmi Omiye is a postdoc in Dermatology and Biomedical Data Science. His research interests border on the nexus of artificial intelligence and policy to improve dermatology, and healthcare more broadly. He received his MS in Health Policy at Stanford where he studied the utility of machine learning algorithms in clinical settings, computer vision models in surgery, and evaluated how macroeconomic policies influence mortality.
Tofunmi received his medical degree from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria where he was a Federal Government and Shell University Scholar. As a medical student, he served as the chair of a pan-African health conference where he worked with the WHO, and Gates Foundation. His work has been featured in top national and international news media including The Guardian.
Also, he is the co-founder of The Ganglion Initiative, a non-profit that has provided educational and career empowerment schemes to over 8,000 students in Nigeria. In his spare time, he enjoys traveling, soccer, tennis, studying the financial markets, and music.
Haiwen Gui
MD Candidate
Haiwen is a MD student at Stanford with an interest in the intersection of AI and dermatology. She graduated from Stanford in 2020 with a degree in computer science. She was a HAI graduate fellow where she worked to improve explainability of AI algorithms. Outside of medicine, she loves dancing, playing flute, and finding the best boba shops in town.
Peter Caroline
MS Candidate
Peter is a MS student in Stanford’s Translational Research and Applied Medicine Program. He graduated from Stanford in 2022 with a degree in biology. After graduation, he joined the Department of Dermatology as a clinical research coordinator. Peter can be found at Stanford’s radio station 90.1 KZSU or playing basketball and the electric bass.
Crystal Chang
MD Candidate
Crystal is an MD student in the inaugural class of the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine as well as a Master's student in the Clinical Informatics Management program at Stanford. She graduated from MIT in 2020, where she studied biology and languages and started Actlingual, an organization that decreases language barriers within healthcare by training student volunteers as professional medical interpreters. She also studied briefly at the Shanghai Theatre Academy and completed the Harvard Medical School Media and Medicine storytelling program. She is interested in the use of AI and digital health to decrease disparities within dermatology, such as the potential of telemedicine, mobile apps, and ML to decrease wait times and provide real-world improvements in quality of care for patients. More generally, Crystal is interested in finding ways to bridge the gap between clinicians and AI developers, and in policy and research to ensure equitable inclusion and development of effective AI. Outside of medicine, she enjoys singing, hip-hop, and writing scripts that (maybe!) will one day make it to the big screen.
Hanan Rimawi
MD Candidate
Hanan is an MD candidate at Stanford pursuing a concentration in bioethics and the medical humanities. Previously, she earned degrees in neuroscience and public health and taught middle and high school English. One of her research interests lies in the ethics of AI, specifically in the medical setting. In her spare time, Hanan likes to hula hoop, sing, and spend time with her family.
Shawheen Rezaei, MPhil
MD Candidate
Shawheen Rezaei, from Massachusetts, is pursuing an MD at Stanford School of Medicine as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. He graduated from Harvard with a bachelor's in economics and master's in Middle Eastern studies. He also received an MPhil in international development from Cambridge as a Harvard-UK Scholar. Shawheen's research interests include dermatology, global health, and the use of technology to alleviate healthcare disparities.