School of Engineering
Showing 51-60 of 334 Results
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Hemamala Karunadasa
J.G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Chemistry and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and Professor, by courtesy, of Materials Science and Engineering
BioProfessor Hema Karunadasa works with colleagues in materials science, earth science, and applied physics to drive the discovery of new materials with applications in clean energy. Using the tools of synthetic chemistry, her group designs materials that couple the structural tunability of organic molecules with the diverse electronic and optical properties of extended inorganic solids. This research targets materials such as sorbents for capturing environmental pollutants, phosphors for solid-state lighting, and absorbers for solar cells.
Hemamala Karunadasa studied chemistry and materials science at Princeton University (A.B. with high honors 2003; Certificate in Materials Science and Engineering 2003), where her undergraduate thesis project with Professor Robert J. Cava examined geometric magnetic frustration in metal oxides. She moved from solid-state chemistry to solution-state chemistry for her doctoral studies in inorganic chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 2009) with Professor Jeffrey R. Long. Her thesis focused on heavy atom building units for magnetic molecules and molecular catalysts for generating hydrogen from water. She continued to study molecular electrocatalysts for water splitting during postdoctoral research with Berkeley Professors Christopher J. Chang and Jeffrey R. Long at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. She further explored molecular catalysts for hydrocarbon oxidation as a postdoc at the California Institute of Technology with Professor Harry B. Gray. She joined the Stanford Chemistry Department faculty in September 2012. Her research explores solution-state routes to new solid-state materials.
Professor Karunadasa’s lab at Stanford takes a molecular approach to extended solids. Lab members gain expertise in solution- and solid-state synthetic techniques and structure determination through powder- and single-crystal x-ray diffraction. Lab tools also include a host of spectroscopic and electrochemical probes, imaging methods, and film deposition techniques. Group members further characterize their materials under extreme environments and in operating devices to tune new materials for diverse applications in renewable energy.
Please visit the lab website for more details and recent news. -
Arvind Karunakaran
Assistant Professor of Management Science & Engineering and, by courtesy, of Sociology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAreas of Research:
Sociology of Work and Occupations/Professions
Organization Theory
Technological/Organizational change
Topics:
Authority in the Workplace
Accountability (Professional, Organizational, Algorithmic)
Phenomena:
Social/Algorithmic Evaluation (of Job applicants, Employees, Startups)
Human-AI augmentation and Reskilling
Social Media Scrutiny
Conflicts in Symmetrical vs. Asymmetrical Relations -
Mirna Kassem
Acting Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioMirna Kassem will join Stanford Civil & Environmental Engineering as an Assistant Professor in Summer 2027. Her research focuses on advancing the characterization, assessment, and mitigation of cascading natural hazards through data-informed computational frameworks that integrate physics-based modeling with state-of-the-art sensing and monitoring technologies.
Mirna's research group will investigate how cascading hazards, including wildfires, rainfall- and earthquake-induced landslides, debris flows, landslide damming, and subsequent flooding, interact across the natural and built environments. Her overarching goal is to develop scalable, performance-based approaches that quantify current and future climate-driven hazards, evaluate their impacts on communities, infrastructure, and critical lifelines, and support risk-informed mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Mirna is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of the NSF-funded Center for Land Surface Hazards (CLaSH). She is a recipient of the 2025 Jane Lewis Fellowship, the 2022 Harry Bolton Seed Award, the 2024 Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award, the 2021 Youssef M. Salam Civil Engineering Excellence Award, and the 2021 Mohamad Ali Safieddine Endowed Award for Academic Excellence.
Education:
PhD, University of California, Berkeley, GeoSystems Engineering (2026)
MS, University of California, Berkeley, GeoSystems Engineering (2022)
BE, American University of Beirut, Civil & Environmental Engineering (2021) -
Kian Katanforoosh
Adjunct Lecturer, Computer Science
BioKian Katanforoosh is a computer scientist and lecturer at Stanford University, where he teaches Deep Learning in the Computer Science department with Prof. Andrew Ng. He is a founding member of DeepLearning.AI, co-creator of the Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera, and founder of Workera (www.workera.ai), a self-assessment platform where people evaluate their job competencies with AI-powered assessments and find their career pathways. From 2014 to 2016, Kian co-founded and co-led Daskit, a French start-up developing in-classroom ed-tech solutions for universities.
Kian holds Master's degrees from Stanford University and Ecole CentraleSupelec (formerly Ecole Centrale Paris). At Stanford, he received both the Walter J. Gores award (Stanford’s highest teaching award) and the Centennial award for Excellence in teaching.
His family migrated from Iran to France, and he grew up next to Paris. -
Riitta Katila
W.M. Keck Professor and Professor of Management Science and Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe question that drives Prof. Katila's research is how technology-based firms with significant resources can stay innovative. Her work lies at the intersection of the fields of technology, innovation, and strategy and focuses on strategies that enable organizations to discover, develop and commercialize technologies. She combines theory with longitudinal large-sample data (e.g., robotics, biomedical, platform and multi-industry datasets), background fieldwork, and state-of-the-art quantitative methods. The ultimate objective is to understand what makes technology-based firms successful.
To answer this question, Prof. Katila conducts two interrelated streams of research. She studies (1) strategies that help firms leverage their existing resources (leverage stream), and (2) strategies through which firms can acquire new resources (acquisition stream) to create innovation. Her early contributions were firm centric while recent contributions focus on innovation in the context of competitive interaction and ecosystems.
Professor Katila's work has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Strategy Science, Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy and other outlets. In her work, supported by the National Science Foundation, Katila examines how firms create new products successfully. Focusing on the robotics and medical device industries, she investigates how different search approaches, such as the exploitation of existing knowledge and the exploration for new knowledge, influence the kinds of new products that technology-intensive firms introduce.
