Three-minute triumph

The Russian Empire kept meticulous records of births, deaths, and other health data, making it a treasure trove for Tamri Matiashvili’s research. One of her interests is the impact of women in medicine, looking at the years after the Russian Empire opened the first formal medical school for women in 1872.

Today most physicians in Eastern Europe are women, including Matiashvili’s grandmother, a hematologist in Tbilisi, Georgia—who’s still practicing at 86 years of age.

Spoiler alert: As Matiashvili describes in the video, her research shows that letting women become doctors transformed medicine and saved lives. Death rates decreased for both young men and women, smallpox vaccines rose, and more women sought care. 

“There were concerns in the Russian Empire about letting women take men’s jobs, and in the end it improved health outcomes for everyone,” Matiashvili says. “Many countries today still explicitly and implicitly limit women’s access to education and the labor force. This is harmful not just for the women who cannot pursue their goals and dreams, but for societies that are deprived of their extraordinary talent and potential.” 

Matiashvili considers academia the ideal place for this type of research, as it’s unencumbered by the demands of a for-profit company. She has secured grants at Stanford to digitize vast quantities of data and hire a research assistant.

“Academia allows you to follow the research that interests you and speak the truth,” she says. “I want to do research for the sake of finding real results, and I don’t see that happening elsewhere.”

Matiashvili’s advisor is Ran Abramitzky, senior associate dean of the social sciences, Stanford Federal Credit Union Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Favour Nerrise entered college at 16 planning to become a brain surgeon. Before turning 18, she was already part of a team building a transcranial magnetic stimulation device for people living with tremors. 

“I became obsessed,” she says. “Research and engineering took over my life.”

Torn between med school and doctoral studies as she approached graduation, she sought advice from renowned neuroengineering experts. One was Stanford’s Krishna Shenoy, an engineer and foremost authority on how the brain creates movement in the rest of the body. To her surprise, he wrote back.

“Professor Shenoy is a huge reason why I decided to come to Stanford,” she says. “He said to me, ‘If you come here and promise to learn what you need, I think you can do whatever you want in life.’ He was speaking words that no professor in my life has ever said to me, and here we were on Skype and I’m crying. It was such a unique bond.”

Shenoy died of pancreatic cancer during Nerrise’s first year at Stanford. It was a devastating loss, but it also pushed her to seek out other mentors. 

“It’s the people at Stanford that make this place so special,” she says. “There are so many people committed to me and invested in my well-being and success here.”

Today, Nerrise is using AI to discover digital biomarkers for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Her research has been supported by fellowships in various departments, including the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.

Nerrise’s advisor is Ehsan Adeli, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and, by courtesy, of computer science at Stanford. Shenoy was the Hong Seh and Vivian W. M. Lim Professor in the School of Engineering.

Growing up near the Great Lakes, Kristen Abels recalls summers when swimming and boating plans were derailed by toxic algal blooms. Multiple years of high bloom severity fueled her early concerns about the state of the planet.

As an undergraduate, she realized that chemical engineering offered tools she could use to fight climate change.

Now a Stanford PhD candidate in chemical engineering, Abels collaborates with researchers from materials science and engineering, chemistry, and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. As she describes in her 3MT presentation, her central quest is to develop greener membrane-based extraction processes for lithium recovery from brines and battery waste.

While working on membrane development for lithium resource recovery, Abels has also become involved in adjacent work on lithium battery separator design, using the same principles for membrane development to improve battery performance.

“I’m not a battery expert,” Abels says. “This was never on my radar when I started my PhD and outlined my dissertation projects. But these collaborations develop organically at Stanford, and being able to work with people who are experts at building and testing batteries has been great.”

Abels says PhD students have the opportunity to try novel or “very out-there” ideas—the kind often too risky for companies to fund. 

“Perhaps not everything will work out. There’s a lot of failure in research, but you have to go through those experiments, those tests to see if new ideas will work or if you’ll learn something new in the process,” she says. “That’s a really valuable contribution that PhD students make, and it’s how academia really pushes the boundaries of our understanding of science.”

Abels’ advisor is William Tarpeh, assistant professor of chemical engineering and center fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy.