My professional interests are data modeling, the clinical pharmacology of intravenous anesthetic drugs, publication policy and ethics, and (since March 2020) the epidemiology of COVID-19.

 

My work in pharmacology includes studies of many of the intravenous opioids and hypnotics used in anesthetic practice. My focus has been mathematical models that characterize drug behavior. These range from conventional pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic models, inverse models (used to drive target controlled infusion systems), Bayesian models (used to handle model uncertainty), models of drug interaction, neural networks as alternatives to engineering based models, and models of receptor function that help elucidate mechanisms of drug action.

 

Thirty years ago I placed the program STANPUMP ("STANford infusion PUMP") in the public domain. STANPUMP was an open source software platform for Target Controlled Infusions of anesthetic drugs, as well as the pharmacokinetic engine for most, and perhaps all, commercialized TCI systems worldwide. More recently I have developed stanpumpR, an R implementation of pharmacokinetic algorithms for many of the common perioperative drugs (see stanpumpR.io). The source code for stanpumpR is available at www.github.com/stevenlshafer/stanpumpr.

 

My work in publication policy and ethics follows my 10 years as Editor-in-Chief of Anesthesia & Analgesia. From 2006-2016 we uncovered two of the most prolific serial academic fraudsters in history: Joachim Boldt and Yoshitaka Fujii. I finished my term as EIC with the unenviable record of retracting more papers for research fraud than any previous editor of any journal, ever. I serve on the Board for Retraction Watch, and continue to develop statistical models to detect fraud.