As a non-Stanford person, I will say that Ioannidis is a reasonably big deal, and in my mind Robert Tibshirani is quite a big deal as well. The WHI was a watershed study, therefore Stefanick is relevant.

It strikes me that this author happened upon a bunch of interesting Stanford people doing relatively related work. Sure, the author was trying to write an article about Stanford, but it's not like these people are inappropriate to mention in the same breath.