School of Engineering
Showing 81-90 of 159 Results
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Chelsea Finn
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical Engineering
BioChelsea Finn is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and the William George and Ida Mary Hoover Faculty Fellow. Professor Finn's research interests lie in the ability to enable robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction. Her work lies at the intersection of machine learning and robotic control, including topics such as end-to-end learning of visual perception and robotic manipulation skills, deep reinforcement learning of general skills from autonomously collected data, and meta-learning algorithms that can enable fast learning of new concepts and behaviors. Professor Finn received her Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and her PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Her research has been recognized through the ACM doctoral dissertation award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and the MIT Technology Review 35 under 35 list, and her work has been covered by various media outlets, including the New York Times, Wired, and Bloomberg. Throughout her career, she has sought to increase the representation of underrepresented minorities within CS and AI by developing an AI outreach camp at Berkeley for underprivileged high school students, a mentoring program for underrepresented undergraduates across three universities, and leading efforts within the WiML and Berkeley WiCSE communities of women researchers.
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Mark Fiore
Affiliate, Brown Institute for Media Innovation
BioCurrently a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford, Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Fiore is a visual journalist who turns complex issues into accessible cartoons, animation and biting satire. His work has appeared on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, Politico, Slate.com, CBSNews.com, NPR’s web site and many other online news, cable and broadcast outlets across the globe.
For over six years, Fiore was staff cartoonist at KQED, where he created daily topical single-panel cartoons and collaborated with reporters and editors on longer pieces of graphic journalism and animation.
Beginning his career drawing traditional editorial cartoons for newspapers like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, Fiore turned to animation in 2001, when he pioneered the new form of animated political cartoons.
Growing up in California, Fiore also spent a good portion of his life in the backwoods of Idaho. It was this combination that shaped him politically. Mark majored in political science at Colorado College, where, in a perfect send-off for a cartoonist, he received his diploma in 1991 as commencement speaker Dick Cheney smiled approvingly.
Mark Fiore was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 2010 and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2018. He won the Herblock Prize in 2016, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 2019 and 2004, and has twice received an Online Journalism Award for commentary from the Online News Association. Fiore has received two awards in new media from the National Cartoonists Society and has received The James Madison Freedom of Information Award from The Society of Professional Journalists. -
Michael Fischbach
Liu (Liao) Family Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe microbiome carries out extraordinary feats of biology: it produces hundreds of molecules, many of which impact host physiology; modulates immune function potently and specifically; self-organizes biogeographically; and exhibits profound stability in the face of perturbations. Our lab studies the mechanisms of microbiome-host interactions. Our approach is based on two technologies we recently developed: a complex (119-member) defined gut community that serves as an analytically manageable but biologically relevant system for experimentation, and new genetic systems for common species from the microbiome. Using these systems, we investigate mechanisms at the community level and the strain level.
1) Community-level mechanisms. A typical gut microbiome consists of 200-250 bacterial species that span >6 orders of magnitude in relative abundance. As a system, these bacteria carry out extraordinary feats of metabolite consumption and production, elicit a variety of specific immune cell populations, self-organize geographically and metabolically, and exhibit profound resilience against a wide range of perturbations. Yet remarkably little is known about how the community functions as a system. We are exploring this by asking two broad questions: How do groups of organisms work together to influence immune function? What are the mechanisms that govern metabolism and ecology at the 100+ strain scale? Our goal is to learn rules that will enable us to design communities that solve specific therapeutic problems.
2) Strain-level mechanisms. Even though gut and skin colonists live in communities, individual strains can have an extraordinary impact on host biology. We focus on two broad (and partially overlapping) categories:
Immune modulation: Can we redirect colonist-specific T cells against an antigen of interest by expressing it on the surface of a bacterium? How do skin colonists induce high levels of Staphylococcus-specific antibodies in mice and humans?
Abundant microbiome-derived molecules: By constructing single-strain/single-gene knockouts in a complex defined community, we will ask: What are the effects of bacterially produced molecules on host metabolism and immunology? Can the molecular output of low-abundance organisms impact host physiology?
3) Cell and gene therapy. We have begun two new efforts in mammalian cell and gene therapies. First, we are developing methods that enable cell-type specific delivery of genome editing payloads in vivo. We are especially interested in delivery vehicles that are customizable and easy to manufacture. Second, we have begun a comprehensive genome mining effort with an emphasis on understudied or entirely novel enzyme systems with utility in mammalian genome editing. -
Martin Fischer
Kumagai Professor in the School of Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy
BioProfessor Fischer's research goals are to improve the productivity of project teams involved in designing, building, and operating facilities and to enhance the sustainability of the built environment. His work develops the theoretical foundations and applications for virtual design and construction (VDC). VDC methods support the design of a facility and its delivery process and help reduce the costs and maximize the value over its lifecycle. His research has been used by many small and large industrial government organizations around the world.
