School of Engineering
Showing 301-364 of 364 Results
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Joel Swisher
Adjunct Professor, Atmosphere and Energy Operations
BioJoel N. Swisher, PhD, PE, is Consulting Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he teaches graduate-level courses on greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation (covering technical and business strategies to manage GHG risks) and electric utility planning methods (covering supply and demand-side resources, resource integration and expansion planning). His current research at Stanford addresses the integration of plug-in vehicles with the power grid and the barriers and synergies related to metering, tariffs, load management, customer incentives, and charging infrastructure.
Dr. Swisher is also an independent consultant with over 30 years experience in research and consulting on many aspects of clean energy technology. He is an expert in energy efficiency technology and policy, carbon offsets and climate change mitigation, and electric utility resource planning and economics. He has consulted with numerous utilities, manufacturers and technology companies on resource planning, energy efficiency, vehicle electrification and clean energy deployment strategies. He has also helped consumer-oriented firms design strategies to expand simple cost-saving energy investment programs into brand-building corporate sustainability campaigns.
Dr. Swisher is a thought leader in several areas of clean energy technology and business strategy. As Director of Technical Services and CTO for Camco International, Dr. Swisher helped develop carbon offset projects in reforestation, agriculture, renewable energy and building energy efficiency, and he has authored emission inventories, baseline studies and monitoring and verification plans for multilateral banks and private offset buyers. Starting in 1989, Dr. Swisher performed seminal research on carbon offset baselines and technical and economic analysis of carbon offsets in the energy and land-use sectors.
Dr. Swisher was managing director of research and consulting at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), where he led RMI’s consulting team in work for numerous high-profile clients, including electric utilities and producers of goods ranging from semiconductor chips to potato chips. At RMI, he created the concept of the Smart Garage, which explores the energy system synergies in which vehicle electrification helps enable zero-emission vehicles and a cleaner power grid. He led an RMI team that convened an industrial consortium (including Alcoa, Johnson Controls, Google, etc.) to develop a new, lightweight, plug-in hybrid vehicle platform for Class 2 truck fleet applications. Collaborating with the design firm IDEO to conduct interdisciplinary design workshops, the RMI team initiated a working design to attract funding and move toward production, which proceeded as a spin-off company, Bright Automotive in Indiana.
Dr. Swisher holds a Ph.D. in Energy and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. He is a registered Professional Engineer and speaks five languages. He is author of over 100 professional publications including The New Business Climate: A Guide to Lower Carbon Emissions and Better Business Performance and a bilingual (English and Portuguese) textbook on energy efficiency program design and evaluation and integrated energy resource planning. -
William Abraham Tarpeh
Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioReimagining liquid waste streams as resources can lead to recovery of valuable products and more efficient, less costly approaches to reducing harmful discharges to the environment. Pollutants in effluent streams can be captured and used as valuable inputs to other processes. For example, municipal wastewater contains resources like energy, water, nutrients, and metals. The Tarpeh Lab develops and evaluates novel approaches to resource recovery from “waste” waters at several synergistic scales: molecular mechanisms of chemical transport and transformation; novel unit processes that increase resource efficiency; and systems-level assessments that identify optimization opportunities. We employ understanding of electrochemistry, separations, thermodynamics, kinetics, and reactor design to preferentially recover resources from waste. We leverage these molecular-scale insights to increase the sustainability of engineered processes in terms of energy, environmental impact, and cost.
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Clyde Tatum
Obayashi Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus
BioTatum's teaching interests are construction engineering and technical construction. His research focuses on construction process knowledge and integration and innovation in construction.
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Kamran Tehranchi
Ph.D. Student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, admitted Autumn 2023
BioKamran Tehranchi is a Ph.D. Student in Civil & Environmental Engineering at Stanford University researching planning processes for decarbonized and reliable electricity systems. His work focuses on developing energy system optimization models to support policy analysis. He has previously worked in the public sector as a Shultz Energy Fellow at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), an analyst at a Community Choice Aggregator (CCA), and within city and county governments. He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Energy Systems research group, advised by Professor Ines Azevedo. He holds a M.S. in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University.
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Sebastien Tilmans
Student, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioSebastien is the Executive Director at the Codiga Resource Recovery Center at Stanford University, a test-bed facility dedicated to accelerating the scale-up of innovative resource recovery systems. Prior to joining Stanford, he worked in the Process Engineering group at Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Plant for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. He has also designed and implemented several decentralized anaerobic wastewater treatment systems in Panama, and a waterless sanitation service in Haiti. He holds a PhD in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.E. in Civil Engineering from Cooper Union. He was a Fulbright scholar, an NDSEG fellow, and an EPA STAR fellow.
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Simon Treillou
Postdoctoral Scholar, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioSimon Treillou (he/him) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Baker Coastal Lab at Stanford University, where he studies coastal transport and mixing processes with a focus on wave-driven circulation dynamics. He holds a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics from INSA Toulouse and recently completed his Ph.D. in Coastal Oceanography at the University of Toulouse (France) in the LEGOS lab under the supervision of Patrick Marchesiello. His research uses advanced 3D wave-resolving models to improve the understanding of tracer dispersal in nearshore environments, addressing critical environmental challenges such as contaminant mitigation and ecosystem resilience. Simon's work will integrate numerical modeling, remote sensing, and experimental methods to advance knowledge of coastal physics.
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Tiziana Vanorio
Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and, by courtesy, of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsRock Physics, Fossil Energy Exploration, Volcanic and Geothermal Environments and Microseismicity
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Jane Woodward
Adjunct Professor, Atmosphere and Energy
BioJane Woodward is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University where she has taught classes on energy and environment since 1991. She currently serves on the teaching teams for Understand Energy and Stanford Climate Ventures. Jane also serves on Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy Advisory Council and has founded and continues to fund multiple sustainable energy education initiatives at the university.
Jane is a Founder and Managing Partner of WovenEarth Ventures, a US early-stage climate venture fund of funds. Additionally, she is an investor in several early-stage sustainable energy companies and funds, as well as an advisor and director for some of them.
Jane is a Founding Partner at MAP Energy, an energy investment firm currently focused on oil and gas royalty interests. MAP began investing in natural gas mineral rights in 1987, wind energy in 2004, utility scale solar in 2015, and energy storage in 2017. In December 2020, MAP sold its renewable energy and energy storage assets under management to Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP). The company remains one of the longest-standing private energy investment fund management firms in the US.
In 2016, Jane created The Foster Museum, a 14,000-square-foot art venue in Palo Alto, to share artist-explorer Tony Foster’s powerful exhibitions of watercolor journeys with an intention to inspire connection to the natural world.
Prior to founding MAP in 1987, Jane worked as an exploration geologist with ARCO Exploration Company and later as a petroleum engineering consultant to Stanford University’s endowment. Jane has a BS in Geology from UC Santa Barbara, an MS in Engineering and Petroleum Geology, and an MBA, both from Stanford University. -
Katie Wu
Ph.D. Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Civil and Environmental EngineeringBioKatie's research explores how community-driven social interventions and infrastructure development impact community and climate resilience in informal settlements. Her work advances how we operationalize resilience to better inform community-based strategies, policy, and investments that support urban transformation for vulnerable populations. She incorporates participatory methods essential for driving community-led efforts, ensuring a community's deep participation in every step of the iterative analysis, planning, and decision-making processes, in collaboration with multi-sectoral partners and decision-makers. Katie integrates advanced data science techniques, including network science and graph neural networks (GNNs), with community-generated, ground-truthed data to redefine how resilience is measured and applied for more equitable, community-driven strategies for sustainable development. She uses unconventional data sources, such as satellite imagery and citizen-sourced data, to model the built and natural environment in areas with limited conventional data.
Prior to Stanford, Katie studied data science and AI for Product Innovation at Duke University, where she obtained a Master of Engineering Management (MEM). She was a Sustainability Graduate Intern at Lyft, Inc., where she completed and rebuilt their 2020 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventory and Report and designed an air quality model forecasting potential health benefits of EV adoption for underserved communities. She received an M.S. in Medical Science from the University of Colorado School of Medicine and a B.S. in Animal Science with Distinction in Research from Cornell University. Katie is a Dean's Graduate Scholar in the Doerr School of Sustainability, an Emerson Consequential Scholar with the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), a Graduate Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), and a Stanford Dalai Lama Fellow. -
Yaochun Yu
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioMy research focuses on functional environmental microbiology and environmental analytical chemistry to uncover and harness microorganisms for chemical biotransformation. We integrate high-resolution mass spectrometry, meta-omics sequencing, molecular microbiology and biochemistry, and computational modeling to identify the functional microbes, genes, and enzymes that drive these processes. Building on these mechanistic insights, we aim to develop environmentally benign chemicals and novel biosolutions for bioremediation and waste-to-resource recovery.
I am also interested in how anthropogenic perturbations (i.e., chemical exposure) reshape microbial biodiversity and ecosystem function across natural and engineered ecosystems. We aim to resolve these cause–effect relationships and, using standardized and synthetic microbial communities, run comparable, hypothesis-driven experiments that translate fundamental insights into predictive tools and practical interventions. The aim is to help keep human activities within the safe operating space of planetary boundaries while advancing environmental and public health. -
Emmett Zeifman
Lecturer, Architectural Design Program
BioEmmett Zeifman is a Canadian architect who teaches in the Sustainable Architecture and Engineering program at Stanford. He is principal of NOUNS, an architecture and design practice, with built projects completed or underway in Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, and elsewhere. His research focuses on the history of modern architecture and its relation to contemporary urbanism, housing and low-carbon approaches to construction. Prior to joining the faculty at Stanford, he taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2022-24), Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (2017-21), and SCI-Arc (2014-17), as well as the CCA and University of Pennsylvania. He received his M.Phil in Architecture by Research from the University of Cambridge, where he was the 2013-14 Yale Bass Scholar in Architecture, his M.Arch ('11) from the Yale University School of Architecture, and his B.A. ('06) in English literature from McGill University. He recently guest edited Log 64: Toward a Newer Brutalism, or the Undecorated Shed (2025) and curated the exhibition Towards a Newer Brutalism: Solar Pavilions, Appliance Houses and Other Topologies of Contemporary Life (2024) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Prior to founding NOUNS, he was founding principal of the design practice Medium Office in New York and Los Angeles, with Alfie Koetter, and was architectural designer on a number of super-tall and mixed-use projects in the United States and Southeast Asia at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates in New York. With Constance Vale, he led the design and construction of the "central hub," a temporary pavilion for the acclaimed opera production Hopscotch in downtown Los Angeles. He was co-founding editor of the independent publication Project: A Journal for Architecture (2011-18), and assistant editor of the Yale publication Rethinking Chongqing: Mixed-Use and Super-Dense (2015), which also featured his photography throughout. His design work and criticism have been widely exhibited and published, and his editorial efforts have been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. In addition to his teaching, he has served as critic and juror and participated in panels and public discussions at numerous institutions, including Barnard, Berkeley, CCA, Columbia, Cooper Union, CUNY, Harvard, MIT, Pratt, SCI-Arc, Storefront for Art and Architecture, UCLA, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, USC, Van Alen Institute, Washington University, and Yale. -
Haoqi (Nina) Zhao
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioNina will join Stanford CEE as an Assistant Professor in Summer 2026. Her research bridges computational metabolomics and exposomics to uncover unknown lifestyle chemicals and their impacts on health. Nina earned her B.S. from Peking University, her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and is currently a postdoctoral scientist at UC San Diego. She received the Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) from the National Institutes of Health in 2025.
The Zhao Lab at Stanford will operate at the interface of environmental chemistry, environmental health, and computational mass spectrometry. We aim to identify previously unrecognized chemical drivers that influence human and ecosystem health. We pursue this goal by developing innovative computational and analytical methods centered around untargeted mass spectrometry. Through these efforts, we aim to enable precision environmental health strategies, inform public health policies, and inspire sustainable chemical design.
Current research interests include (but are not limited to):
1.Leveraging mass spectrometry data repositories and advanced informatics tools to systematically map the chemical exposome.
2.Developing tools and resources for mass spectrometry data analysis to advance exposomics research.
3.Investigating host-microbiome-xenobiotic interactions and their impacts on human health.
4.Integrating toxicology with untargeted screening to accelerate the discovery and risk assessment of unknown molecules.
5.Pediatric environmental health: chemical exposures through breastfeeding and their implications for infant development.
6.Traffic-related chemical pollution: environmental fate, occurrence, and relevance to human exposures.
Education
Ph.D., University of Washington, Environmental Engineering (2021)
B.S., Peking University, Environmental Science (2016)
Publications
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xW9jBO0AAAAJ&hl=en
Email: hqzhao@stanford.edu -
Adam Zsarnoczay
Sr Research Engineer, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAdam's research focuses on disaster simulations that support multi-hazard risk assessment and management at a regional scale. His research interests include probabilistic natural hazard assessment, model development and calibration for structural response estimation and performance assessment, surrogate modeling and uncertainty quantification in large-scale, regional simulations, and using quantitative disaster simulations to support risk management and mitigation.
