Alex Macario is a professor of anesthesiology and, by courtesy, of Health Research and Policy. He completed his undergraduate, medical school and business school training at the University of Rochester. He trained in anesthesiology at Stanford University and was chief resident. He then completed a fellowship in heath services research.

Dr. Macario has gained international recognition for his pioneering studies on operating room management, and the economics of surgery and anesthesia. He is particularly interested in the hospitalization costs for surgical patients, economic assessment of new drugs and devices for use in surgical care, and information technology to help physician leaders with clinical and administrative decision support in the surgery suite.

He is director of a Fellowship in the Management of Perioperative Services, based in the Department of Anesthesia. This postgraduate fellowship program trains several physicians per year in management science and applications to the delivery of surgical and anesthesia care.

Ross Shachter's research interests are in the modeling of uncertain processes and decision making. His main focus has been the communication and analysis of the relationships among uncertain quantities in a graphical representation called an influence diagram (closely related to a belief network). Professor Shachter's work in medical decision analysis has included management of bladder cancer follow-up and analysis of AIDS Policy therapies. During a leave of absence at Duke University's Center for Health Policy, he was able to bring his interests together to develop an influence diagram-based approach for medical technology assessment. He has been on the Stanford faculty since receiving his PhD in Operations Research from UC Berkeley in 1982.

Dr. Musen is Professor of Biomedical Informatics and of Biomedical Data Science, and Director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research.  Dr. Musen conducts research related to intelligent systems, reusable ontologies, metadata for publication of scientific data sets, and biomedical decision support.  His group developed Protégé, the world’s most widely used technology for building and managing terminologies and ontologies. He is principal investigator of the National Center for Biomedical Ontology, one of the original National Centers for Biomedical Computing created by the U.S. National Institutes of Heath (NIH).  He is principal investigator of the Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR).  CEDAR is a center of excellence supported by the NIH Big Data to Knowledge Initiative, with the goal of developing new technology to ease the authoring and management of biomedical experimental metadata.  Dr. Musen directs the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Classification, Terminology, and Standards at Stanford University, which has developed much of the information infrastructure for the authoring and management of the 11^th edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11). 

Mary K. Goldstein is a Professor of Health Policy and a core faculty member at the Department of Health Policy and the Center for Health Policy, and the Director of the Geriatrics Research Education and Clinical Center (GRECC) at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She directs the Primary Care Policy and Practice Advancement program at PCOR, the Stanford/VA Palo Alto Geriatric Medicine Fellowship Program, and the Special Fellowship Program in Advanced Geriatrics at VA Palo Alto. She also serves as associate director for the Physician Post-Residency Fellowship Program in Health Services Research and Development, and for the Postdoctoral Fellowship in Medical Informatics, both at VA Palo Alto Health Care System.

Goldstein studies innovative methods of implementing evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for quality improvement. She leads the ATHENA Decision Support System project that has developed and implemented an automated clinical decision support system for primary care clinicians, using hypertension as a model, and now extended into several other clinical domains.  Goldstein's research also explores older adults' health preferences (health utility) for application to cost-effectiveness analysis.

Goldstein is a fellow of the American Geriatrics Society, and an emerita of the Society's board of directors. Goldstein has received a number of honors and awards including an Advanced Career Development award from the Department of Veterans Affairs Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) program.  She received a BA in philosophy and an MD, both from Columbia University, and completed her residency in family medicine at Duke University Medical Center. At the Stanford School of Medicine she completed an AHRQ-funded fellowship and an MS in health services research.

Professor Efron is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, president of the American Statistical Association, recipient of the MacArthur Prize, and winner of the Wilks Medal of the American Statistical Association. Professor Efron is renowned internationally for his pioneering work in computationally intensive statistical methods that substitute computer power for mathematical formulas, particularly the bootstrap method. The goal of this research is to extend statistical methodology in ways that make analysis more realistic and applicable for complicated problems. He consults actively in the application of statistical analyses to a wide array of health care evaluations.