PERSONNEL
LAB PERSONNEL | COLLABORATORS | LAB ALUMNI
Sanjiv Narayan, MSc, MB, MD, FRCP
DIRECTOR
Dr. Narayan is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, a practicing cardiologist and translational scientist with graduate training in software engineering and neurophysiology. Dr. Narayan directs Electrophysiology Research at Stanford, and has built an independently funded “bedside-to-bench-to-bedside” translational research program focused on mechanisms for human AF and life-threatening ventricular arrhythmias. This work led to the development of novel mapping for fibrillation, the discovery of rotors in human AF, with ablation (Focal Impulse and Rotor Modulation, FIRM) as the basis for novel therapy at AF and VF rotors. The laboratory is grateful for funding of this work by the National Institutes of Health from 2001-2019 (K23 HL70529, R01 HL83359, K24 HL103800, R01 HL122384, SBIR), and also by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association. Dr. Narayan is Associate Editor of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC), and of JACC: Clinical Electrophysiology.
Dr. Narayan is active in mentorship, and has trained numerous graduate students in bioengineering, residents and fellows in training, medical and undergraduate students. In addition to presenting and publishing their work, many trainees have received extramural funding from AHA, ACC, HRS, BHF and other agencies, have won research and clinical prizes and over 80% remain in academic medicine. Dr. Narayan has won teaching prizes for his mentorship, and his mentored training program in patient-oriented research was just renewed by NIH for a second permissible funding period (NIH K24 HL103800). He serves as Vice-Chair of the Fellowship committee of the Heart Rhythm Society (2012-present).
Dr. Narayan was born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England, then his family moved to Birmingham where he trained in medicine then in software engineering (MSc, 1st prize), becoming a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London (FRCP). He then did his doctoral research in neuroscience at the University of California Los Angeles. His clinical training in Internal medicine was then continued at Harvard/Mount Auburn Hospital, then in Cardiology/EP at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Narayan is board-certified in Internal Medicine, Cardiology and Clinical Cardiac Electrophysiology, has been voted as a “Top Doctor”, and has an active clinical practice at Stanford. He is a devoted family man, and he and his wife have three children. Together, they enjoy swimming, biking, skateboarding (selected members of the family), music and travel.
Twitter: @S_NarayanMD
Tina Baykaner, MD
ELECTROPHYSIOLOGIST
Dr Baykaner is a clinical Electrophysiology fellow at Stanford University. She obtained her medical degree from Hacettepe Universitesi, Ankara, Turkey. During medical school, she spent 6 months in genetics and endocrine labs at the NIH/NICHD, followed by clinical cardiology rotations at the Cleveland Clinic and Baylor University which influenced her to pursue postgraduate training in the United States. After obtaining her MD, she spent a year at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA as a postdoctoral fellow researching determinants of ischemic stroke evolution. She then started her clinical training in Internal Medicine at AECOM/Jacobi Medical Center in New York and continued her training at University of California San Diego which included residency Internal Medicine, fellowships in Advanced Heart Failure and Clinical Cardiology. During her clinical training, she obtained an online MPH degree from University of Massachusetts to further her knowledge in statistics and outcomes research. Starting in early years of her clinical residency training, she started working with Sanjiv Narayan on mechanisms of atrial fibrillation. This research has yielded her multiple recognitions including University of California San Diego Schulman Early Career Research Award in Cardiology, American Heart Association Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship Grant, Heart Rhythm Society Research Fellowship Scholarship in Honor of Mark Josephson and Hein Wellens, Travel Scholarship from American College of Cardiology as well as multiple featured poster and oral presentations in national and international meetings. She will continues her ongoing research projects in AF mechanisms with Dr Sanjiv Narayan while pursuing a 2 year clinical electrophysiology training at Stanford University. When Tina is not in the lab, she can be found playing tennis, away for skiing, enjoying a beach run or discovering new restaurants.
Twitter: @TinaBaykaner
A.J. Rogers, MD, MBA
CLINICAL EP FELLOW
Dr. A.J. Rogers is a Electrophysiology Fellow at Stanford University. He has over 10 years of medical device experience ranging from basic and translational research to device development and entrepreneurship. His undergraduate coursework in Biomedical Engineering at Duke University focused on neurobiology, signal processing, and computer modeling while his research investigated piezoelectric arrays for intracardiac ultrasound and computer vision of 3D ultrasound images for automated surgical robot tasks (Stephen Smith Laboratory). He earned his medical degree from the University of North Carolina and graduated in the inaugural class for the combined MBA degree program from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC (focus in Healthcare Entrepreneurship). While working toward these degrees, A.J. participated in epidemiologic and translational research in the academic setting and worked as a clinical engineer for a start-up medical device company in the field of heart failure. He completed training in Internal Medicine and Cardiovascular Medicine at Stanford University. He joined Dr. Sanjiv Narayan’s Computational Arrhythmia Research Laboratory to explore mechanisms of cardiac fibrillation using techniques of signal processing, machine learning, and in silico modeling. Outside of his research and clinical pursuits, A.J. enjoys athletics of all kinds (especially sand volleyball), travelling, and live music events.
Twitter: @ajrogers_md
Prash Ganesan, PhD
POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW
Prash received his MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2015 and from Florida Atlantic University in 2019, respectively. He was previously a research fellow at the US National Institutes of Health, and has experience performing R&D in the medical device industry. His research interests are in studying atrial fibrillation substrate mechanisms using novel mapping approaches of signal processing and machine learning.
Twitter: @prash030
Kathleen Mills, B.A.
RESEARCH MANAGER
Kathleen Mills is Research Manager for the Arrhythmia Research Laboratory. With nearly 20 years of clinical research experience, and 15 years with Dr. Narayan, she serves as an integral part of the program as the point-person for clinical research operations, including regulatory compliance, fiscal oversight, quality management and personnel issues. Additionally, she works closely with Dr. Narayan and our collaborating investigators to identify funding opportunities for the program and coordinate then manage research grant proposals. Since working with Dr. Narayan, she has helped to secure and manage continuous funding of the program from the National Institutes of Health (2001-2019), American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Kathleen has also been instrumental in developing and refining Standard Operating Procedures for Dr. Narayan’s research program, first at the University of California, San Diego and now at Stanford University. Because of her efforts, regulatory and fiscal audits of our program over the years have shown 100% compliance. Kathleen enjoys spending time outdoors, hiking and biking with her husband Grant and their two children Sarah and Colin.
Mahmood Alhusseini
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
Mahmood has BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University and Stanford University, respectively. His main research interest is analyzing electrocardiogram signals for diagnosis and treatment of atrial fibrillation. Mahmood has industry experience working as a research engineer and project engineer in global energy companies. His long career goals are to improve healthcare through practice, research, and industry collaboration. Outside work, Mahmood enjoys playing tennis and hiking.
Miguel Rodrigo, PhD
POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW
Miguel Rodrigo holds a PhD in Health Technologies from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), a Master’s Degree in Biomedical Engineering (UPV and Universitat de Valencia) and a Degree on Telecommunication Engineering from the UPV. Dr. Rodrigo’s research interests are focused on improving the knowledge associated with the mechanisms of initiation and maintenance of cardiac arrhythmias, as well as on the development of instrumentation and signal and image processing techniques for diagnosis and treatment of these heart diseases. In this sense, the work of Dr. Rodrigo focuses on the analysis of both endocardial and noninvasive signals in order to identify and locate atrial regions that are responsible of atrial fibrillation. Dr. Rodrigo is currently working on the improvement of non-invasive mapping methods for atrial fibrillation, such as Body Surface Potential Mapping or Electrocardiographic Imaging. The research work of Dr. Rodrigo arises from the collaboration of several international teams: the Cardiovascular Department – Stanford University (USA), the Hospital Gregorio Marañón (Spain), the Institute ITACA – Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain), the Department of Computer Science – University of Oxford (UK) and the Center for Arrhythmia Research – University of Michigan (USA). Dr. Rodrigo has received a HealthStart award for innovative health projects, as well as being twice finalist for the Young Investigator Award at Computing in Cardiology conference.
Twitter: @MRodrigo_cardio
Brototo (Brodie) Deb, MD
POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW
Brodie obtained his medical degree from JIPMER, India during which he was awarded numerous accolades He was motivated to pursue further medical and research training in the US after his clinical rotation at the Cornell University, NYC. Following medical school he was a postdoctoral fellow at Mayo Clinic, Rochester and then joined Stanford in Dr. Narayan’s lab. He is interested in using machine-learning-based analytical approaches to gain novel, interpretable insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms of arrhythmias and translate that into clinical practice. In his leisure, he likes writing and reading poems, listening and (trying to) sing Indian classical music, apart from being an avid runner.
Twitter: @BrototoD
Ruibin Feng, PhD
POST-DOCTORAL RESEARCH FELLOW
Ruibin received his PhD from Hong-Kong University followed by post-doctoral fellowship at Arizona State University. At the lab, his research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, deep learning, medical imaging and bioinformatics, concentrating on computer-aided diagnosis and analysis for atrial fibrillation.
Samuel Ruiperez-Campillo, MSc, MEng
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE
Samuel Ruiperez-Campillo graduated form a BSc in Biomedical Engineering at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Georgia Institute of Technology with honours. His MSc focused on Bioelectronics and Machine Learning techniques for bio-signal processing at the Swiss Feredal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) as an Excellence Fellow of ‘Rafael del Pino’ Foundation, and his MEng in Computational Bioengineering at UC Berkeley as an Excellence Fellow of ‘La Caixa’ Foundation and an Excellence Scholarship holder from UC Berkeley’s Fung Institute. Samuel has worked at the Cellular and Molecular Biomechanics Laboratory at the Wallace H. Coulter Department of BME at Georgia Tech with Prof. C. Zhu (18’-19’); at the Bio-Fluid Mechanics Group at UC3M in Madrid with Prof. J. Rodriguez (19’-20’); at the Bio-ITACA research group at UPV Valencia with Prof. J. Millet (19’-); at the Neurotechnology Group at the Institute of Neuroinformatics at ETH Zurich with Prof. F. Yanik (20’-21’), among others. His main research focus is related to cardiac and brain signal processing using algorithms of ML and DL.