About me

Dr. Shafer is currently Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford University, Adjunct Associate Professor of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences, UCSF, and Editor-in-Chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia. Dr. Shafer received his AB degree from Princeton University, his MD from Stanford University, and trained in medicine and anesthesiology at the University of Pennsylvania. He then returned to Stanford University for post-doctoral training in Clinical Pharmacology in the laboratory of Don Stanski. Dr. Shafer joined the Stanford faculty in 1988, and was promoted to full Professor in 2000. Dr. Shafer was recruited to Columbia University in 2007, and returned to Stanford in 2012. Dr. Shafer’s has extensively studied the clinical pharmacology of intravenous anesthetic drugs, including most of the opioids and hypnotics used in anesthetic practice (including propofol, fentanyl, remifentanil, thiopental, etomidate, alfentanil, sufentanil, diazepam, midazolam, lorazepam, dexmedetomidine). His work includes both clinical trials and the development of novel mathematical models to characterize drug behavior. These include conventional pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic models, inverse models (used to drive target controlled infusion systems), Bayesian models (used to handle model uncertainty), pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic models of drug interaction, models of receptor function that help elucidate mechanisms of drug action, and models that relate drug response to "in silico" pharmacogenetics.