School of Engineering
Showing 251-300 of 373 Results
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Forest Olaf Peterson, Ph.D.
Staff, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Research Affiliate, ContingentBioDr. Forest Olaf Peterson is Co-Director of the Stanford Workforce VDC Lab, an initiative of the Stanford School of Engineering and Doerr School of Sustainability. Peterson teaches Construction Project Assessment and Budgeting (CEE 240), developed the foundational concept of the VDC-capable construction workforce, and runs an educator certification program placing faculty across Silicon Valley.
As founder of Palo Alto Data Group, Peterson leads development of eCPR, a data infrastructure platform for labor standards enforcement on public works. Peterson holds the California franchise for cadwork, a Swiss BIM platform and CIFE industry member, on building information modeling for heavy civil infrastructure, including highway and rail. Previously, as the founding employee at Rhumbix, a construction technology startup backed by Greylock Partners, Peterson made the Series A pitch.
Public service roles include Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commissioner, chair of the Flood Protection Bond Oversight Subcommittee at Valley Water, board director of the Santa Clara County Construction Careers Association, a nonprofit, and he is a subject matter expert contributor to California labor standards legislation.
Peterson holds M.S., Engineer, and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford. The doctoral work, completed under Terry Winograd, made a seminal contribution — 'change' as a formal primitive in AI agent ontologies applied to construction project monitoring. Peterson is a three-time named engineering fellow at Stanford — Brahtz, Oglesby, and Olsen. His research on teaching construction project management is one of the most cited papers for its influence on construction engineering education internationally.
Peterson brings both blue-collar and white-collar perspectives to the role of scholar of infrastructure. For seven years before Stanford, he was a concrete laborer on large infrastructure projects with the Laborers' International Union of North America. Those years taught social and environmental dimensions from the ground up. His fellow laborers wanted to work safely. However, though skilled, they often did not have the information to succeed without unnecessary hardship. Without it, on a large highway project, a two-ton barrier dropped and hit something that flipped it over where it came to rest just inches above Peterson's chest. They celebrated his chance survival. One cried in memory of a recent work fatality. They were told to get back to work. The futility of the situation has left a lasting impression.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/forest-peterson
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Forest-Peterson -
Ashton Pihl
Ph.D. Student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, admitted Summer 2025
BioI am a first-year PhD Student in the Baker Coastal Lab researching surf-zone circulation generated by short-crested breaking waves. I am interested in studying the along-crest variability in energy dissipation, the unsteady structure associated with injected vertical and horizontal vorticity, and the evolution of vertical vorticity structures linked to the shoreward propagation of bores using laboratory experimental methods and theoretical analysis.
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Ram Rajagopal
Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, of Electrical Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy
BioRam Rajagopal is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Sustainable Systems Lab (S3L), focused on large-scale monitoring, data analytics and stochastic control for infrastructure networks, in particular, power networks. His current research interests in power systems are in the integration of renewables, smart distribution systems, and demand-side data analytics.
He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and an M.A. in Statistics, both from the University of California Berkeley, Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Texas, Austin and Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Powell Foundation Fellowship, Berkeley Regents Fellowship and the Makhoul Conjecture Challenge award. He holds more than 30 patents and several best paper awards from his work and has advised or founded various companies in the fields of sensor networks, power systems, and data analytics. -
Martin Reinhard
Professor (Research) of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Emeritus
BioReinhard studies the fate of organic substances in the subsurface environment and develops technologies for the remediation of groundwater contaminated with chlorinated and non-chlorinated hydrocarbon compounds. His research is concerned with mechanistic aspects of chemical and biological transformation reactions in soils, natural waters, and treatment systems.
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Justin S. Rogers
Research Oceanographer, Contingent
Staff, Program-Fringer O.BioPh.D. Civil & Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, 2016
M.S. Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006
B.S. Civil Engineering (Minor in Chemistry), University of Arizona, 2004
Research interests:
-Coastal resilience, risk, sea level rise, extreme events, compound hazards
-Impact of climate change on human and natural systems in coastal and nearshore environments
-Core model development for coastal applications, storm surge, tropical cyclones, flood risk, bottom boundary layers, turbulence, and multiscale physics.
I leverage the power of cloud computing, HPC systems and modern code frameworks, and adapt multiple analysis methods including dynamical models, machine learning, statistical methods, and field observations. -
Nitish Ranjan Sarker
Postdoctoral Scholar, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioNitish Ranjan Sarker is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University, where he contributes to the design, execution, and evaluation of an Industrial, Agricultural, and Water FlexHub Demonstration Pilot Project. His current research focuses on developing data-driven decision-support tools for sustainable water and energy systems, integrating experimental and pilot-scale data with technoeconomic analysis (TEA) to guide system design, deployment strategies, and policy recommendations.
Nitish earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering from the University of Toronto, where his work combined laboratory-to-pilot experimentation, systems modeling, and field validation to advance resilient and affordable water technologies. Prior to that, he completed his M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta and his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). His research portfolio spans off-grid solar desalination, oil-water separation and spill response technologies, and distributed water quality monitoring tools for decentralized systems. Beyond research, Nitish has engaged in interdisciplinary training and global capacity-building initiatives in Canada, Mexico, Kenya, Bangladesh, India, and France, advancing the water‑energy‑health nexus and sustainable technology adoption from lab to field. He also co-founded FRODO, a venture translating foam-based oil-water separation research into deployable spill response and produced water treatment solutions, bridging lab innovation and early commercialization. -
Carine Sauquet
Administrative Associate, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioCarine provides administrative support to Prof.Jenna Davis & Prof. Alexandria Boehm & Prof. Meagan Mauter and their teams. Carine earned a Master’s in Computer Science Law and New Technologies, and Bachelor Degree in Business Law from University Paris XI in France. She has a background managing legal operational teams.
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Brian Sedar
Adjunct Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Bio35 years of experience in EPC work spanning project controls, procurement, project development, construction, project management and operations. Bechtel Partner and Project Director for three of Bechtel’s largest international transportation infrastructure projects (click on Projects under Research), High Speed 1 in the UK, Hamad International Airport in Qatar and Upgrades for three London Underground lines. Served as General Manager of Bechtel’s Telecoms & Industrial business, Global Procurement Manager and launched its Global Water business. Now one of Stanford's most experienced construction practitioner-instructors.
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Serdar Selamet
Adjunct Lecturer, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioAssoc. Professor with focus on Fire Engineering, Steel Structures and Numerical Modeling. Dr. Selamet specializes in fire protection engineering with focus on buildings and structures. His areas of expertise include heat transfer analysis, stability and critical temperature assessment of structural members, passive fire protection, building envelope (i.e. façade) fires, performance-based structural analysis under fire conditions and house fires in wildland urban interface. He specializes in providing origin and cause determinations for fires and explosions. Dr. Selamet has expertise in thermo-mechanical modeling and response using finite element software Abaqus and OpenSees Fire. In addition, he has gained experience using computer zone models such as OZone and Consolidated Model of Fire and Smoke Transport (CFAST) to simulate compartment fire dynamics.
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Meghan Marjorie Shea
Postdoctoral Scholar, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioMeghan is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, where she studies how to best use environmental DNA (eDNA)—little bits of DNA left behind by organisms in their ecosystems—for marine biodiversity monitoring. Her interdisciplinary approach blends science & technology studies and ocean sciences, drawing on her dual training as a social scientist and engineer. Working from the archives to the laboratory to the field, she advances eDNA tools while interrogating their social context and epistemic implications. Prior to her postdoc, she received a PhD in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment & Resources at Stanford, an MPhil in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and a BS in Environmental Systems Engineering from Stanford. When she's not thinking about environmental DNA, she loves cooking elaborate vegetarian meals, nurturing her house plants, and finding ways to spend as much time as possible on or near the ocean!
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Chungheon Shin
Research Engineer, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioChungheon Shin is the Research Director of the Codiga Resource Recovery Center at Stanford University. His research advances sustainable water and environmental technologies through process intensification, environmental biotechnology, and resource recovery. By integrating biological and physicochemical processes with mechanistic and data-driven computational models, he develops engineering solutions that recover clean water, energy, and valuable resources. His work spans multiple scales, from fundamental reaction kinetics to pilot- and demonstration-scale systems, with a strong emphasis on translating research into real-world applications.
His current research focuses on three complementary areas: process intensification, resource recovery, and digital optimization of water infrastructure. He has led the development of the Staged Anaerobic Fluidized-bed Membrane Bioreactor (SAF-MBR), an energy-positive wastewater treatment technology that has advanced to demonstration scale, and is developing pilot-scale methane-to-protein technologies that convert waste methane into sustainable protein through efficient gas transfer and environmental biotechnology. His research also integrates mechanistic understanding with data-driven modeling to optimize biological treatment processes and accelerate the deployment of next-generation water technologies.
Dr. Shin received his Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Inha University in South Korea, where he developed the SAF-MBR under the supervision of Professor Jaehoe Bae and Professor Perry L. McCarty. He subsequently joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University as a postdoctoral scholar under Professor Craig S. Criddle, where he expanded his research in environmental biotechnology, process intensification, and sustainable water infrastructure. -
Barbara G Simpson
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioOur research group is made up of a small team of talented students with a wide range of skills and experience. We explore advanced computational and experimental methods to characterize structural response. Our aim is to develop innovative structural systems that improve structural performance and reduce the effects of natural hazards on the built environment.
Research areas include resilient and sustainable design and retrofit of building structures and offshore renewable energy systems, performance-based earthquake engineering, and next-generation computational modeling, including real-time hybrid simulation for fluid-structure interaction.
