The Stanford Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine is dedicated to serving its patients and the communities they live in. Our community outreach mission is to engage, educate, and empower our society beyond the patients we dearly care for.

To help build our future healthcare workforce we have partnered with the California Society of Anesthesiologists (CSA), the national nonprofit Project Lead the Way, and California Assemblymember Evan Low to bring a new biomedical sciences curriculum into three Silicon Valley high schools: Palo Alto High School, Willow Glen High School and Leland High School. 

This exciting project has brought together specially trained teachers, eager students, and physician residents from Stanford’s Anesthesiology Department to help bring rigorous, project-based biomedical sciences curriculum into the classroom and offer hands-on learning to encourage the next generation of health care providers.

On April 5^th the launch of the partnership was held at Willow Glen High School.  At the event remarks were made by Assemblyman Evan Low; CSA President Sam Wald; Shelly Fox from Project Lead the Way; Stanford Pediatric Anesthesiologist Felipe Perez, as well as participating teachers and students. Here is a link to the video highlighting the launch event.

The pilot program is based on the unique collaboration of its key partners: CSA provides overall program coordination and underwrites the cost of annual teacher training; PLTW provides the curriculum and offers comprehensive professional development during the summer; the Anesthesiology Department at Stanford coordinates classroom presentations by physician residents and hosts a field trip for each high school; and Assemblyman Low and his staff provide broad-based community and public support.

 “This is an incredible opportunity where we get to share our love for medicine with local high school students,” said Felipe Perez, MD, a resident anesthesiologist at Stanford and program director for the partnership with PLTW. “As resident physicians finishing our own medical training, we provide real world examples of what types of career paths these students could pursue.”

According to the Project Lead the Way website, the Project Lead the Way curriculum will help transform the classroom experience for students: “Whether discovering new cancer treatments or teaching healthy lifestyle choices to their communities, today’s biomedical science professionals are tackling big challenges to make the world a better place.  PLTW Biomedical Science students are taking on these same real-world challenges – and they’re doing it before they even graduate from high school. Working with the same tools used by professionals in hospitals and labs, students engage in compelling, hands-on activities and work together to find solutions to problems. Students take from the courses in-demand knowledge and skills they will use in high school and for the rest of their lives, on any career path they take.”  For more information, visit www.pltw.org/our-programs/pltw-biomedical-science.