Chair's Welcome

I want to welcome you to the Stanford Department of Medicine’s website. Here is where you will learn about the Department and its activities, its faculty and staff, its goals and plans for the future. First let me give you a quick overview of the Department.

The Department of Medicine moved to the Stanford University campus from San Francisco in 1959. Once here it began to put together what is now a long history of outstanding science, outstanding commitment to education, and outstanding clinical care.

Today, the Department has more than 490 faculty and is growing. We are differently arranged from many departments of medicine. Like others, we are separated into divisions, each with a chief. We have 15 divisions, 12 of them traditional clinical divisions: Blood and Marrow Transplantation; Cardiovascular Medicine; Endocrinology, Gerontology, and Metabolism; Gastroenterology and Hepatology; Hematology; Hospital Medicine; Immunology and Rheumatology; Infectious Diseases; Nephrology; Oncology; Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.

The Department differs from traditional departments in that it also has a long history in computational science, quantitative science, health services research, informatics, and epidemiology. These topics are the focus of the other 3 divisions in the Department: Primary Care and Outcomes Research, with a heavy emphasis on health economics, decision analysis, and clinical decision modeling; the Stanford Prevention and Research Center, devoted to understanding the issues of wellness and disease prevention as well as interventions that might allow one to make an impact on health and disease; and Stanford Biomedical Informatics Research with a long history of technological development and the creation of new methods of bio-informatics.

As an academic medical center, we have a tripartite mission (research, education, patient care) and we believe in it, but we are importantly, first, a clinical department focused on human health. So everyone across the spectrum from bench scientists doing basic research, to educators training the next generation of physicians, to clinicians caring for patients in the hospital and the clinics strives to ask questions, to make inquiry at all levels that might translate into taking better care not only of individual patients but also of whole populations of patients.

With that overview, go explore the website and the Department.