Category: physician stories

Behind the scenes with a co-director of The Pride Study

In our “Behind the Scenes” series, Stanford Medicine physicians, nurses, researchers and staff members share a glimpse of their daily lives.

For Stanford obstetrician/gynecologist Juno Obedin-Maliver, MD, MPH, there is no typical day. Part of what she loves about her job is that every day is different.

Obedin-Maliver practices the full spectrum of gynecology, including outpatient, inpatient, operative and emergency services. She also co-directs The PRIDE Study, which is a national prospective, longitudinal cohort of sexual and/or gender minority people — including but not limited to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.

I was excited to speak with her about how she fits all of this into her day — both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Pre-COVID morning routine

I get up between 5 a.m. and 6:15 a.m. I usually make some tea and have breakfast before getting my three-year-old son up, dressed and fed. Then, either my partner or I take him to school. Next, I head down to Stanford from San Francisco where I live.

Organizing the workweek

I see patients about 30% of the time, and the rest of the time I do research. Days that I don’t see patients are a mix of research writing and meetings — with overnight calls or surgery kind of sprinkled in here and there.

Part of my research team is at Stanford, part at the University of California San Francisco and part at our office in the Oakland City Center. So, I have meetings with folks all over the Bay, and also all over the country, because we have collaborators and stakeholders across the United States.

The PRIDE Study

The main focus of  The PRIDE Study is understanding the relationship between being a sexual and/or gender minority person and a person’s health. And we think about health broadly: physical health, mental health, social health and wellbeing. We want to understand in more detail the well-documented health disparities among sexual and gender minority people, but also their health resiliency. We’ve enrolled about 18,000 people in the study.

I’m also working to build an LGBTQ+ program at Stanford, which will include clinical care, research and education.

Juno Obedin-Maliver, MD, MPH, and Mitchell Lunn, MD, co-direct The PRIDE Study, a national prospective, longitudinal cohort of sexual and/or gender minority people.
Most productive time of the day

My most productive time is in the morning at home. I usually triage my email — deleting spam, putting actionable items on my to-do list and putting anything that requires significant time on my calendar. And if I get up at 5 am, I can get an hour of uninterrupted writing in before my son wakes up, which is awesome.

Evening ritual

I get home between 6 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., then I just hang out with my son and my partner. We give him dinner and a bath, read him books and get him to sleep. And then we have our own dinner. Sometimes we just hang out until bedtime. And sometimes, unfortunately, we get back on the computer to work.

In the evening, I like to meditate, if only for 10 minutes. I remember what I’m grateful for. And I generally read a novel before I go to bed. Right now, I’m reading a book called The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine. It’s pretty great. I try to get to sleep by 10 or 10:30 p.m.

My day during the pandemic

I still see patients one day a week, and it’s a mix of in-person and video visits in the clinic. I also work some shifts on labor and delivery.

In terms of research, my team is still rocking and rolling, despite the challenges of COVID-19 and systemic violence around the country. I’m very luck to work with an inspiring team dedicated to equity and justice.

Professionally, it’s been a productive time, and we’ve published a number of papers. We’ve also launched a survey about the impact of COVID-19 for LGBTQ+ people, and a related survey about respiratory symptoms, and have had a few thousand responses already. The pandemic seems to be exacerbating systems of inequality, and that’s certainly true for LGBTQ+ — and even more so for LGBTQ+ people of color and those who are economically disadvantaged. As we enter Pride Month, we are also about to launch our fourth annual questionnaire on June 8, and celebrate having over 18,000 participants.

Having a 3-year-old at home and splitting his care throughout the day with my partner has been a big challenge though. Our kiddo misses his friends and school, as we all do. In many ways, we’re closer than ever, and have had a lot of opportunities to do crafts and bake — and we’re growing food on our porch (tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, chard and strawberries!).

On the other hand, trying to still fit in a full work day is a struggle; it means working before he is up and long after he goes to sleep, and unfortunately more screen time for him than ever before. That being said, we’re so lucky to be healthy, have access to food and have jobs that allow us to work at least some of the time from home while still being of service.

Photos by Steve Fisch

This is a reposting of my Scope story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.

Defend or delay? Grad students must decide whether to present their thesis virtually

Graduate students who are trying to finish their degrees amid the COVID-19 pandemic are finding, after years of research and months of preparation, that the big day of defending their thesis has to be delayed or done remotely.

Faced with a new order to shelter at her off-campus home, Anjali Bisaria, a graduate student in chemical and systems biology at Stanford, decided to forge ahead. She works in the lab of Tobias Meyer, PhD,  where they study how human cells move and divide to build, maintain and repair tissues and organs.

On the scheduled date and time, Bisaria logged into a Zoom session and defended her research to a virtual audience of advisors, classmates, friends and family members. She then virtually met with just her faculty examinees. After being declared a doctor, she celebrated with her lab via yet another Zoom session.

“I know it was the right thing to do to keep the community safe,” she said in a Stanford news story. “But it was a little bit sad because this is likely my last quarter on campus. So to not be able to interact with my classmates and not be able to enjoy that honeymoon phase of grad school felt unceremonious.”

Soon, microbiology and immunology graduate student Kali Pruss will face the same decision. Her in-person PhD oral is currently scheduled for May 22 at Munzer Auditorium on Stanford campus.

“I haven’t yet decided whether I’ll proceed with my defense via Zoom or delay my defense to later in the summer, in hopes that I would be able to have an in-person defense,” Pruss told me. “I was planning on staying through the summer, taking a writing quarter anyway. Thankfully, this gives me some flexibility in terms of timing.”

As a member of the lab run by Justin Sonnenburg, PhD, Pruss studies how Clostridium difficile — a bacteria that commonly causes diarrhea and colitis — adapts to the inflammation that it generates, she said.

Pruss is currently writing a paper on her research, but the pandemic is impacting that too. She told me that she’s doing more data analysis and relying less on experiments than she normally would — and she’s a bit worried about how this approach will be received.

“I’m concerned with how this is going to affect the review process, and whether I’ll be able to successfully address reviewer comments asking for additional experiments for my papers,” she said.

She added, “Ultimately, though, I feel incredibly privileged and grateful to be able to continue working remotely towards my dissertation. The question of how my research is being impacted, and whether to postpone my defense, has been a minor concern in the scope of what is currently happening at Stanford and around the world.”

Given the extension of the Bay Area’s shelter-at-home order to last through at least May 3, Pruss’s hopes of defending in-person on May 22 may not be realized. So, her extended family — from Wisconsin, Indiana and Illinois — canceled their travel arrangements. They hope to come in late summer if she delays her defense and sheltering orders have been lifted.  

Regardless of how she defends her thesis, she plans to celebrate her upcoming educational milestone.

“This is the one time we, as PhD students, get to celebrate our time in grad school as an accomplishment,” she said.

After graduation, Pruss plans to join Jeffrey Gordon’s lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis as a postdoc. Ultimately, she plans to run her own academic lab.

Photo by Anjali Bisaria

This is a reposting of my Scope story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.