People

Bob Owens, M.D.

I am a Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Physician-Scientist. Clinically, I attend in the medical intensive care unit and at the UCSD Peter C. Farrell Sleep Center of Excellence. I trained with Atul Malhotra, Andrew Wellman and David White in Boston, and most of my NIH funded work has been in the area of upper airway physiology and obstructive sleep apnea pathogenesis.
I am currently funded by NIH/NHLBI to examine the causes and consequences of obstructive sleep apnea in people with HIV. R01 HL142114-01.

Jeremy Orr, M.D.

The focus of my research is the pathogenesis of sleep disordered breathing, particularly amongst patients with chronic lung and heart disease. My primary aim is to make mechanistic connections between patient-level physiological traits endotypes and disease manifestations phenotypes which will facilitate a personalized approach to diagnosis and treatment.
I have growing expertise in physiological characterization of sleep disordered breathing. An important component of my research is mastering techniques to determine these traits and endotypes using traditional specialized physiological techniques, but also to develop more model-based methods which can use standard polysomnography or other clinically-accessible testing. My research is greatly informed by my experience in patient care, for which sleep disordered breathing is my primary clinical focus.
Since completing my clinical fellowship in 2015, my accomplishments include authorship of a number of articles including several first author original research publications and receiving both the NIH Loan Repayment Program in 2015 and a National Research Service Award (NRSA) F32 award in 2016.

Stuti Jaiswal, M.D., Ph.D.

I am an MD/PhD trained, academic hospitalist studying the role of inpatient sleep on patient-centric outcomes such as delirium. My clinical work as well as my interest in this area of research has led me to focus on hospital-based issues that regularly impact acutely ill, older patients.

I pursued a combined MD/PhD at the University of Arizona, where I received strong mentorship for my PhD training in neuroscience while working with Dr. Ralph Fregosi. My PhD training, in addition to learning and perfecting rigorous techniques like electrophysiology, immunohistochemistry, and Western blotting, helped focus my creativity to ask important questions. Despite enjoying and succeeding in basic science research, my increasing exposure to the hospital during medical school drew me from the bench to the bedside. I moved to San Diego, CA for residency in Internal Medicine on the KL2 Research Track at Scripps Clinic. This KL2 program has a strong track record of patient-centric research and translational medicine. The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), under the auspices of Dr. Eric Topol and Dr. Steven Steinhubl, is a leader in the field of Digital Medicine, which I feel has the ability to transform the way we take care of patients both outside and inside the hospital.

I am interested in understanding how sleep impacts the brain, leading to delirium when people are admitted to the hospital. I have carefully measured the hospital environment for sleep, and have conducted multiple clinical trials to try and improve sleep using drugs like melatonin.

Mazen Odish, M.D.

I am a post-doctoral fellow and junior faculty physician who completed my residency in internal medicine-pediatrics and fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine. My clinical and research interests include ARDS and ECMO. I am currently on an NIH T32 grant investigating ventilator strategies on ECMO. I also have interests in general pulmonary, medical education, septic shock, and cardiac arrest. I currently live in San Diego.

Amy Bellinghausen, M.D.

I am a post-doctoral fellow and pulmonary critical care physician at the University of California San Diego. I help run the ICU Recovery Clinic at UCSD, and am interested in ARDS, ICU outcomes and critical care provider burnout. My current T32 funded project is investigating long-term acute care hospitals as part of the ICU Recovery environment, with an eye toward future interventions to reduce post-ICU syndrome symptoms. I have also done work investigating the role of ICU Recovery Clinics in improving the ICU environment, for patients, providers and families. A recent project was on the modification of hip padding during prone positioning, to prevent meralgia paresthetica in ICU survivors. I live in San Diego with my wife and our two cats, Helix and Asimov.

Dae Kang, Ph.D.

I am a NHLBI T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine at UC San Diego, under the advisory and mentorship of Dr. Robert Owens. My research involves the development and implementation of novel physiological sensing, signals processing, and machine learning tools for the estimation and prediction of sleep-based health outcomes. Some of my current work is an extension of my formal training in bioengineering at UC San Diego (ranked #1 bioengineering institution by the National Research Council), where I focused on clinician-guided engineering of sensing and analytical tools for sleep medicine, specifically obstructive sleep apnea. As a postdoc, I have branched out into other clinical areas of interest such as delirium in the critical care setting, where I look to leverage my biomedical engineering expertise to create tools for prediction/early identification of delirium onset. I have a multidisciplinary publication record spanning the fields of materials science, electrical engineering, computer science, and medicine, and strive to work at the intersection of such fields. To this end, I continue to learn as an engineer while fostering research collaborations between engineers and members of the clinical community. In recognition of my academic and scientific achievements, I was most recently awarded the prestigious PhD Thesis Design Award in Biomedical Engineering at UC San Diego, for my PhD work completed as a graduate student in the lab of Dr. Todd Coleman.