New physicians join staff at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara

Eight new physicians have joined the Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center staff, the newest of more than eighty doctors who’ve been hired in 2015.
“As Kaiser Permanente membership grows, we are so pleased to be growing our physician group to care for them. We want to make sure that our patients at Santa Clara get the right care at the right time by physicians and staff who put our patients at the center of everything we do,” said Dr. Susan Smarr, the Physician-in-Chief of the medical center.
Among the most recently hired are physicians specializing in pediatric surgery, hematology and oncology, family medicine, internal medicine, occupational medicine, and emergency medicine.
For one of the eight new hires, Dr. Tiffany K Tran, coming to work at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara as an Internal Medicine physician is a bit of a homecoming. Dr. Tran was born in Saratoga, California, but attended medical school at New York Medical College, where she excelled but missed the Bay Area.
Also joining internal medicine is Dr. Shaheen Jawahar, who graduated from medical school in India and did her residency at University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. She is a new mom, and, like Dr. Tran, believes in strong relationships between physicians and their patients.
Joining the Family Medicine department at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara is Dr. Saira H Khan. She graduated from medical school in Pakistan and completed her residency at the University of California San Francisco. Dr. Khan says she has two beautiful daughters and believes in treating her patients as she would her own family.
Dr. Grace Niksa comes to Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara’s pediatric surgery team with a background that includes medical school at the University of Connecticut, a year at the Sorbonne in France, a Master’s Degree in Public Health from Dartmouth College, and a surgical fellowship at Children’s Hospital of Michigan. Aside from performing procedures on tiny newborns, Dr. Niksa will also be doing research on surgical outcomes.
Joining the Ophthalmology Department at Santa Clara is Dr. Jennifer Hu. Dr. Hu graduated from the UC San Francisco Medical School and specializes in what’s called “medical retina”, diagnosing and treating conditions that affect the back of the eye.
Dr. Wendy Ho joins the Occupational Medicine team at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara. Dr. Ho graduated from Albany Medical College in New York, and looks forward to empowering her patients to engage in injury/disease prevention and whole-person care to promote overall health and longevity.
Joining two departments, Dr. Faisal Cheema will be in Internal Medicine as well as Hematology/Oncology. He is board certified for both disciplines, and will work with his patients to guide and care for them through certainly the most challenging event in their life, a diagnosis of cancer. He is a graduate of Dow Medical College and won fellowships in several prestigious advanced programs.
Joining the Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Emergency Department is Dr. Eric Goldlust, who has a joint MD and PhD degree in epidemiology. Dr. Goldlust was an assistant professor of Emergency Medicine at Brown University, and sees his role as both treating and guiding his emergency department patients through a trying time.
“These are all excellent physicians, dedicated to helping Kaiser Permanente members thrive,” said Dr. Smarr, who expects to bring on more physicians in the coming months.
And she notes Kaiser Permanente will have hired close to a thousand new physicians in 2015 for facilities all across Northern California to provide care for the growing membership.