Empathy and Compassion Speaker Series 2026
Hosted by Sanford Institute's Research Center, the Speaker Series is an opportunity for our funded researchers to showcase their work and disseminate impactful findings to the public. Each session is one hour long, with dedicated time at the end for Q&A. All speaker series sessions take place on a Wednesday at 12PM PST.
Spring 2026 - Ryan Moran, Zhenggang Zhu, Olivia Jurkiewicz
Understanding EMR-Enabled Assessment of Non–Face-to-Face Workload in Primary Care: A Common Driver of Burnout
🧍 Ryan Moran, MD, MPH
📅 Thursday, March 19, from 12 p.m. - 1 p.m. (PST)
High levels of non–face-to-face work are a well-recognized contributor to clinician burnout, and reducing this burden has become a priority across health systems. Yet accurately assessing this time requires a nuanced understanding of real-world clinician workflows. This talk will present a pilot project designed to refine EMR-based measurement of non–face-to-face workload in academic internal medicine, with the goal of informing better strategies to quantify and ultimately mitigate this contributor to burnout.
The Dopamine Pedal for Feasting with Friends
🧍 Zhenggang Zhu, MD
📅 Thursday, April 16, from 12p.m. - 1 p.m. (PST)
Why is palatable food so irresistible? Dr. Zhu will describe a neural circuit mechanism in which palatability actively suppresses a hindbrain brake, releasing dopamine signaling that sustains consumption. This moment-by-moment competition between reward and satiety systems explains why highly palatable foods drive overconsumption and why many obesity treatments fail once eating begins. Dr. Zhu will then extend this framework to social contexts, showing how observing others eat recruits the dopamine circuit to trigger socially cued eating, revealing a previously underappreciated social control of eating.
Suppressing Negative Emotion Undermines Compassionate Responding During Conversations
🧍 Olivia Jurkiewicz, MA
📅 Thursday, May 14, from 12p.m. - 1 p.m. (PST)
Individuals often struggle to express compassion when faced with others’ needs or problems. In this work, Dr. Jurkiewicz examines how regulating one’s emotions through suppression can undermine compassionate responding via an attentional mechanism.