As a pediatric surgeon and Medical Director of Trauma, I see devastating results of failure of prevention. My perspective is informed by significant previous research focused on reducing the transmission of hepatitis B, ultimately reducing risk for liver cancer, which disproportionately affect the Asian American community. Twenty years ago, I helped launch the Jade Ribbon Campaign for hepatitis B awareness. I led the design, implementation, analysis, and interpretation of a CDC-funded study supporting our community-based hepatitis B and liver cancer awareness campaign and physicians’ education. The Jade Ribbon has now become an international emblem to unite health advocates in the fight against hepatitis B.

Since joining the Stanford Pediatric Surgery faculty in 2015, I have taken an active interest in injury prevention and reducing the impact of childhood injury. I am the Trauma Medical Director of Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH), a Level 1 Pediatric Trauma Center. In this role, I have found that despite the myriad of medical advancements over the past decade, child mortality from gun violence continues to rise exponentially. The intervention for preventing gun related mortality cannot begin at the hospital. It must begin in the community. My research on gun legislation has driven my desire to improve primary prevention efforts at the community level with children, leading to the creation of PLEDGE, a student-led, community-based organization to foster gun safety education. For this work I was recently selected as a Presidential Leadership Scholar by the foundations of four past US presidents.

As a busy pediatric general surgeon, I also seek to find ways to improve surgical outcomes for children while minimizing their anxiety and discomfort with surgery. This includes the use of virtual reality to reduce children’s exposure to anesthesia.

Other research interests include: pediatric hepatobiliary conditions, congenital diaphragmatic hernia outcomes, pediatric obesity, minimal access surgery, neonatal surgery, and general outcomes after pediatric surgery.

In an effort to eliminate health provider biases and improve early detection of child abuse, my lab also developed and is studying the implementation of a universal screening tool for the detection of non-accidental trauma in a pediatric emergency department (PED). The universal application of this screening tool to every child under the age of four years old is designed with the dual goal of catching otherwise undetected cases of potential non-accidental trauma and reducing bias in the suspicion of such cases. The simple design of the tool, which is based on a four-question survey completed during patient intake, has appeared to minimally impact PED resources. The tool is hosted within the Epic electronic health record (EHR) software, which means that any medical institution that utilizes Epic can rapidly implement this screening tool without the labor and financial expenses of creating their own tool. While the lab is first studying the implementation of the tool in a pediatric emergency department with specalized resources in pediatrics and non-accidental trauma, we see the biggest potential for the tool in local emergency rooms that do not have the same resources. 

Our work has also become the basis for the national EPIC Foundations child abuse screening tool build. I also serve as the president-elect of the Child Abuse Clinical Decision Support (CA-CDS) consortium, which is comprised of over 20 children’s hospitals across the US who seek to improve the process of child abuse detection.

This project received the "2025 Best Abstract Award" from the Council on Child Abuse and Neglect at the 2025 American Academy of Pediatrics conference. Citation below:

• Knowlton M, Hammond B, Cauley E, Lee M, Egge M, Harnish E, Chao S. Implementation of an Epic-Based Universal Screening Tool for Detecting Non-Accidental Trauma in Pediatric Patients. Abstract presented at: American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2025 National Conference & Exhibition; September 28, 2025; Denver, CO.

The CHARIOT team at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford knows that undergoing surgery, anesthesia and procedures can be especially stressful for children. The goal of the program is to implement new technologies in the hospital that are nontraditional yet familiar to children in an effort to engage and distract them during these times. The focus is on taking existing technologies and creating new ones to address the unique needs of individual patients.

The Stanford environment offers a unique opportunity to create a team of physicians, engineers, researchers and child life professionals. The team is currently piloting virtual reality experiences, new tablet-based apps and interactive bedside projector-based games.