Schedule

8:30 – 9:00: Registration

9:00 – 9:15: Welcome

9:15 – 9:30: Break

9:30 – 10:40: Session I

10:40 – 10:55: Break

10:55 – 12:05: Session II

12:05 – 12:50: Lunch

12:50 – 2:00: Session III

The Sessions

Paging Dr. Gadget
Instructor: Ken Wu, Bev Tang, Brandon Felkins, Fletcher Wilson, Ravi Pammani
Ever see a device or invention and think to yourself, “I could’ve thought of that,” or “I can make this better?” You’re not alone – Stanford’s Biodesign Program is full of future inventors who are constantly thinking of ways to re-invent technology to improve medicine and patient care. During this session, you’ll shadow a biodesign fellow and see what it takes to cultivate an idea from the ground up. You’ll identify clinical needs, brainstorm in small groups and deliver your best ideas during a presentation.

The brain whisperer: Using electrodes to find out what parts of the living human brain are really doing
Instructor: Josef Parvizi, MD, PhD
In order to learn what goes on inside the living brain, you have to listen in on it and follow its activity. But this isn’t always easy. The billions of nerve cells that sit in the brain resemble tangles of electrical wires that may bunch up in clusters (sort of like the tangle of wires coming out of the power strip behind your bed), carrying signals from one cluster to another. Because the brain is enclosed inside a thick skull, scientists have usually had to make do with brain-monitoring techniques that capture electrical or magnetic signals at a distance. In this session, learn how Dr. Parvizi and his colleagues use a technique called intercranial recording to record the electrical activity in specific regions of the brain. As a result, we know exactly, for example, which part of the brain recognizes other people’s faces, which part recognizes the numerals we use for everyday arithmetic, and which part is involved in our recall of what we ate for breakfast this morning.

Chasing the elusive sheep of sleep
Instructor: Rafael Pelayo, MD
Sleep. We all do it, but do we really understand it? This course will get you up to speed on what researchers know about this amazing – and necessary – function. You’ll explore what happens in your brain while you’re in the various stages of sleep and while you’re dreaming, and you’ll learn about sleep walking, insomnia and what happens when you’re deprived of sleep – like an estimated 47 million Americans. The class is taught by one of Stanford’s leading sleep docs, who happens to specialize in issues related to kids and teens.

A doctor without borders: Surgical volunteerism
Instructor: Sherry Wren, MD
We often take for granted the top-notch medical care available to us; for many across the globe, that kind of care is not even an option. This session will discuss the global need for surgical care throughout the developing world. Surgeon Sherry Wren will illustrate this through her personal experiences working with Doctors Without Borders in Africa. She’ll discuss the personal and ethical challenges she has encountered, and she’ll use specific medical cases to illuminate the care available in developing nations.

When the doctor becomes the patient: Cancer from both sides of the microscope
Instructor: Kimberly Allison, MD
What does cancer look like under the microscope? How has understanding the biology of a cancer revolutionized cancer treatment by creating new personalized treatment options? What is the pathologist’s role in cancer care? Dr. Kimberly Allison understands breast cancer from both sides of the microscope. As a breast cancer pathologist, she characterizes and studies the disease for both clinical treatment and research purposes. Shortly after the birth of her second child she also became a patient when she was diagnosed with stage-3 breast cancer – and faced looking at her own malignant cells under the microscope. During this session, Dr. Allison will discuss the role of the pathologist in medicine, share why she chose to pursue pathology as a career and share her personal experience as a cancer patient, which she chronicled in her book Red Sunshine.

Food allergies: Nothing to sneeze at
Instructor: Kari Nadeau, MD, PhD
Peanuts, bananas, milk - you probably know someone who is allergic to these or other kinds of foods. An estimated 6 million children in the United States suffer from food allergies, and nearly 40 percent have experienced a severe allergic reaction known as anaphylactic shock. During this session, Stanford scientist Kari Nadeau will discuss her efforts to desensitize children by having them eat daily doses of the foods they're allergic to.

So you wanna go to med school?
Instructor: Charles Prober, MD
Six thousands applicants, 86 spots. Getting into med school is almost like competing for a spot on “American Idol!” Becoming a doctor is a long, challenging – and rewarding – process, and there are many steps involved in preparing for, applying to, and making it through medical school. So what does getting into medical school take? What does becoming a doctor entail? During this session, you’ll find out from a senior associate dean what medical schools look for when selecting future physicians and what life is really like for a future doc.

The Revolutionary Optimists: Teens changing their communities
Instructor: Maren Grainger-Monsen, MD
How far would you go to change your world? A group of kids in the slums of Calcutta, India are leading the charge to improve their neighborhoods’ health and sanitation. During this session, you’ll watch the award-winning film "The Revolutionary Optimists," which tells the story of the kids who call themselves the Dakabuko – “the courage of a daredevil” – and their successful drive to decrease malaria and diarrhea, improve polio vaccination rates and turn a trash heap into a soccer field.

Breaking and entering, bacteria-style
Instructor: Manual Amieva, MD
Germs may only be one-celled creatures, but simple they’re not. In a never-ending competition, disease-causing bacteria have evolved ingenious ways of penetrating the barriers we erect to keep them out. It’s amazing how many tricks they’ve got up their sleeves! In this class, you’ll get treated to live-action movies that show how the ingenious microbes pick the locks that protect our guts - and how they can help teach us how our own bodies work.

Caller ID in the wild: How elephants can offer clues to hearing loss
Instructor: Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, PhD
Did you know that elephants have their own version of “caller ID”? Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell is an instructor in Stanford’s Department of Otolaryngology and a scientist who studies, among other things, how elephants hear. For the last 20 years, she has spent most of her summers hunkered down in a bunker or perched atop a tower in Namibia observing their behavior. During this session, you’ll find out how studying elephants could someday lead to advances in hearing aids for the hearing impaired, as well as her personal mission to encourage kids, particularly girls, to pursue the hard sciences.

Bad blood
Instructor: Ravi Majeti, MD
Leukemia – just the word conjures up scary thoughts. What is this disease and why is it so deadly? Learn about leukemia as a cancer of the bone marrow and current approaches to treatment including bone marrow transplantation. In this session, hematologist (that’s a blood doctor) and leukemia researcher Ravi Majeti will discuss this disease and ongoing research that will hopefully lead to new treatments.

Hard knocks: The growing concern over brain injuries
Instructor: Anand Veeravagu, MD
As chief neurosurgery resident at Palo Alto's Veterans Affairs Hospital, Anand Veeravagu has cared for many soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries. But American’s soldiers aren’t the only ones suffering from TBIs. Kids hit their heads – and they do so frequently. Whether it’s sports or just kids being kids, the rate of brain injury is on the rise. During this session, you’ll learn about brain injuries from both the battlefield and the playing field. Dr. Veeravagu also served as a former White House fellow/special assistant to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.

Mind control for better living
Instructor: Sean Mackey, MD, PhD
No, this class isn’t about achieving world domination. It’s about how patients can use their mind to control their pain. Using an imaging technique called MRI, patients can watch their own brain on a screen and see the activity in the areas of their brain that process pain, while the processing is actually happening. And by learning various mental strategies, patients can alter how those pain processing areas react – watching the changes in real time as their brain responds to their thoughts! A Stanford anesthesiologist has been studying patients in pain; in this course, he’ll fill you in on this intriguing area of research.

Sports lab: Medicine on the sidelines SESSION IS FULL
Instructor: Jason Dragoo, MD
You see it happen a lot – athletes getting banged up and leaving the game. So what happens off the field? This session is taught by a Stanford orthopaedic surgeon who’s cared for sports' most elite athletes – he has served as head physician of Stanford’s football program for the past six years, and he’s a team physician for the U.S. Olympic Committee and the U.S. Ski Team. Oh, and he’s also a former college football player (he played defensive safety). You’ll learn from him some of the most common sports-related injuries: torn ACLs, ankle sprains and dislocated shoulders. And you’ll get to take part in a casting lab where you’ll practice putting on arm and legs casts on each other.

Global aid: It’s a small world after all
Instructor: Ian Brown, MD, MS
Typhoon Haiyan, the most powerful storm in recorded history, struck the eastern and central islands of the Philippines on November 8, 2013. Almost every town had 1-14 residents die, and almost every person in town knew that person. Ten members of the Stanford Emergency Medicine Program for Emergency Response (SEMPER) deployed to the Philippines to provide medical aid to typhoon survivors in the hardest hit areas. In just the first four days, the group saw 2574 patients! During this session, you’ll get a first-hand account from one of the emergency docs who traveled to the Philippines and learn about the importance of assembling a team that can mobilize immediately in response to a global disaster.

Fit into your genes
Instructor: Michelle Whirl-Carillo and Ellen McDonagh
You probably already know that the color of your eyes and your blood type is influenced by genetics. But what else can we learn from knowing about our genes? There's still a lot we can find out about ourselves: whether certain prescription drugs will work and about some of the traits/disease risks we've inherited from our parents' and grandparents'. We can even pinpoint our ancestry on a world map! In this session, a graduate student will show you what we can learn from looking at our own genome.

Brain lab SESSION IS FULL
Instructor: Huong Ha, Yvette Fisher and Alexandra Scharr
The brain is by far the most complicated, but at the same time the most amazing organ in the body! How do memories form? How do optical illusions work? What in the world is a homonculus? How do math skills differ from musical skills? Come take this course to learn the answers to these and other burning questions. Still not fascinating enough? Then come to examine real human and animal brains. Touch ‘em, feel ‘em and see the differences among them! In this hands-on brain class, we’ll explore the mysteries of our nervous system.

What is a bone marrow transplant?
Instructor: Suparna Dutt, PhD
Patients with blood cancers like leukemia, lymphoma, sickle cell anemia and other life-threatening diseases, depend on a bone marrow transplant to save their life. Healthy bone marrow and blood cells are needed to live. When disease affects marrow so that it cannot function properly, a bone marrow transplant could be the best treatment option, and for some patients, offers the only potential cure. In bone marrow transplant, a patient receives donor’s healthy blood-forming cells, where they begin to grow and make healthy red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. In this session, the researcher will give an overview of bone marrow transplant – blood stem cell therapy, which has saved thousands of lives over the past 30 years.

Virtual anatomy: Slice and dice on a life-sized iPad SESSION IS FULL
Instructor: Sakti Srivastava, MD
This cool tool takes the “gross” right out of anatomy! During the session, you’ll get a chance to see how a life-sized iPad is giving medical students an innovative, high-tech approach to exploring and learning about the anatomy of the human body. Get up close and personal with the human body with a swipe of a finger –no scalpels or human cadavers needed!

To register for these courses, please visit the registration page. If you have questions, please contact mjgallardo@stanford.edu.

Please note: Med School 101 is an invitation-only event. Please register only if you have been instructed to do so by your teacher.