School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 601-700 of 1,438 Results

  • Doug James

    Doug James

    Professor of Computer Science and, by courtesy, of Music

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsComputer graphics & animation, physics-based sound synthesis, computational physics, haptics, reduced-order modeling

  • Rachel Jean-Baptiste

    Rachel Jean-Baptiste

    Michelle Mercer and Bruce Golden Family Professor of Feminist and Gender Studies, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies

    BioPh.D., Stanford University
    M.A., Stanford University
    A.B., Bryn Mawr College

    Rachel Jean-Baptiste is a historian of 20th and 21st century French-speaking Central and West Africa and the Atlantic world. Her research interests include the histories of: marriage and family law; gender and sexuality; racial thought and multiracial identities; urban history; citizenship. Jean-Baptiste is currently researching the history of women, slavery, and urban history in Haiti and the French-speaking Atlantic world.

  • Hakeem Jefferson

    Hakeem Jefferson

    Assistant Professor of Political Science

    BioI am an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University where I am also a faculty affiliate with the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. I received my PhD in political science from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and African American Studies from the University of South Carolina.

    My research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. I am especially interested in understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. In other research projects, I examine the psychological and social roots of the racial divide in Americans’ reactions to officer-involved shootings and work to evaluate the meaningfulness of key political concepts, like ideological identification, among Black Americans.

    My dissertation, "Policing Norms: Punishment and the Politics of Respectability Among Black Americans," was a co-winner of the 2020 Best Dissertation Award from the Political Psychology Section of the American Political Science Association.

  • Nicholas Jenkins

    Nicholas Jenkins

    Associate Professor of English

    Current Research and Scholarly Interests20th-century culture and literature, especially poetry; digital humanities; art

  • Saumitra Jha

    Saumitra Jha

    Associate Professor of Political Economy at the GSB, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research & Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and of Economics
    On Leave from 01/01/2025 To 03/31/2025

    BioSaumitra Jha is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab.

    Saumitra holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to joining the GSB, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a Center Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, as well as of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He was voted Teacher of the Year by the students of the Stanford GSB Sloan Fellow Class of 2020. He received the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 for his research on ethnic tolerance and his co-authored work on Heroes was awarded the 2020 Oliver Williamson Best Paper Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics.

  • Tomás R. Jiménez

    Tomás R. Jiménez

    Professor of Sociology

    BioTomás Jiménez is a Professor of Sociology and Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the founding co-director of Stanford's Institute for Advancing Just Societies. His research and writing focus on immigration, policy, assimilation, social mobility, and ethnic and racial identity. His latest book, States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion (Russell Sage Foundation Press) (with Deborah Schildkraut, Yuen Ho, and John Dovidio) uses survey data (with an embedded experiment) and in-depth interviews to understand how state-level immigration policies shape belonging among Latino immigrants, US-born Latinos, and US-born whites in Arizona and New Mexico. The American Sociological Association’s Population Section selected the book for its Otis Dudley Duncan Distinguished Book Award. His second book, The Other Side of Assimilation: How Immigrants are Changing American Life (University of California Press, 2017), uses interviews from a race and class spectrum of Silicon Valley residents to show how a relational form of assimilation changes both newcomers (immigrants and their children) and established individuals (people born in the US to US-born parents). His first book, Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity(University of California Press, 2010), draws on interviews and participant observation to understand how uninterrupted Mexican immigration influences the ethnic identity of later-generation Mexican Americans. Professor Jiménez has also published his research in Science, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Social Problems, International Migration Review, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Quarterly, DuBois Review, Social Currents, Qualitative Sociology, and the Annual Review of Sociology.

    Professor Jiménez also conducts research with Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, including projects examining naturalization, refugee resettlement, and health and language access.

    In other lines of research, Professor Jiménez and Sofia Avila (Princeton sociology) examine how immigration becomes part of American national identity by studying a sample of high school US history textbooks from 1930-2007. This research employs hand-coding and computer-assisted text analysis of the textbook sample.

    Professor Jiménez has taught at the University of California, San Diego. He was the Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2017-19). He has also been an Irvine Fellow at the New America Foundation and a Sage Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (CASBS). He was the American Sociological Association Congressional Fellow in the office of US Rep. Michael Honda, where he served as a legislative aide for immigration, veterans’ affairs, housing, and election reform. His writing on policy has appeared in reports for the Immigration Policy Center and the Migration Policy Institute. He has written editorials on immigration in several major news outlets, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. He has also offered commentary for media outlets, including NBC News, National Public Radio, and Univision.

  • Adam Johnson

    Adam Johnson

    Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing

    BioAdam Johnson is a Professor of English with emphasis in creative writing at Stanford University. Winner of a Whiting Award and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, he is the author of several books, including Fortune Smiles, which won the National Book Award, and the novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His stories have appeared in Esquire, GQ, Playboy, Harper's Magazine, Granta, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and have been recognized with the Story Prize, The Sunday Times Short Story Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His work has been translated into more than three-dozen languages. He was born in South Dakota and is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. His teaching and research interests include the development of the novel, indigeneity, the oral tradition, counter narrative, trauma theory and speculative fiction.

  • Iain Johnstone

    Iain Johnstone

    Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor of Quantitative Science and Professor of Statistics and of Biomedical Data Sciences
    On Partial Leave from 01/01/2025 To 06/30/2025

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEmpirical bias/shrinkage estimation; non-parametric, smoothing; statistical inverse problems.

  • Gavin Jones

    Gavin Jones

    Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities

    BioGavin Jones is the author of Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (U of California, 1999), American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty in U.S. Literature, 1840-1945 (Princeton, 2007), Failure and the American Writer: A Literary History (Cambridge, 2014), and Reclaiming John Steinbeck: Writing for the Future of Humanity (Cambridge 2021). He has published articles on writers such as George W. Cable, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. DuBois, Sylvester Judd, Paule Marshall, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Zora Neale Hurston, in journals including American Literary History, New England Quarterly, African American Review, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Jones has edited a new version of a neglected classic of American literature, Sylvester Judd's "transcendental novel," Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom (1845), and is the coeditor (with Michael J. Collins) of The Cambridge Companion to the American Short Story (2023). He is currently working on two book projects: Zora Neale Hurston and the Art of Controversy and The Storytellers: The Work of Short Fiction in American Culture.

  • Patricia Jones

    Patricia Jones

    The Dr. Nancy Chang Professor, Emerita

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDr. Jones' research focused on genetic, molecular, and cellular mechanisms that regulate immune responses. She hHer most recent work was centered on the regulation of innate immune responses that are triggered by conserved microbial components. As these responses can be harmful they are highly regulated in their occurrence, magnitude, and duration. Her lab discovered a novel mechanism that negatively regulates innate responses, mediated by the phosphatase calcineurin.

  • Martin Jonikas

    Martin Jonikas

    Assistant Professor, Biology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPhotosynthesis provides energy for nearly all life on Earth. Our lab aims to dramatically accelerate our understanding of photosynthetic organisms by developing and applying novel functional genomics strategies in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. In the long run, we dream of engineering photosynthetic organisms to address the challenges that our civilization faces in agriculture, health and energy.

  • Shamit Kachru

    Shamit Kachru

    Professor of Physics and Director, Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current research is focused in three directions:

    — Mathematical aspects of string theory (with a focus on BPS state counts, black holes, and moonshine)

    — Quantum field theory approaches to condensed matter physics (with a focus on physics of non-Fermi liquids)

    — Theoretical biology, with a focus on evolution and ecology

  • Michael Kahan

    Michael Kahan

    Senior Lecturer of Sociology

    Current Research and Scholarly Interests19th and 20th Century Urban and Social History; Street Life; Urban Space

  • Colin Kahl

    Colin Kahl

    Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science

    BioColin H. Kahl is co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the inaugural Steven C. Házy Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a Professor, by courtesy, in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. He is also a Strategic Consultant to the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.

    From October 2014 to January 2017, he was Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President. In that position, he served as a senior advisor to President Obama and Vice President Biden on all matters related to U.S. foreign policy and national security affairs, and represented the Office of the Vice President as a standing member of the National Security Council Deputies’ Committee. From February 2009 to December 2011, Dr. Kahl was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East at the Pentagon. In this capacity, he served as the senior policy advisor to the Secretary of Defense for Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, and six other countries in the Levant and Persian Gulf region. In June 2011, he was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service by Secretary Robert Gates.

    From 2007 to 2017 (when not serving in the U.S. government), Dr. Kahl was an assistant and associate professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. From 2007 to 2009 and 2012 to 2014, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a nonpartisan Washington, DC-based think tank. From 2000 to 2007, he was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. In 2005-2006, Dr. Kahl took leave from the University of Minnesota to serve as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he worked on issues related to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and responses to failed states. In 1997-1998, he was a National Security Fellow at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University.

    Current research includes an assessment of American grand strategy in the Middle East in the post-9/11 era. A second research project focuses on the implications of emerging technologies on nuclear strategic stability.

    He has published numerous articles on international security and U.S. foreign and defense policy in Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, International Security, the Los Angeles Times, Middle East Policy, the National Interest, the New Republic, the New York Times, Politico, the Washington Post, and the Washington Quarterly, as well as several reports for CNAS.

    His previous research analyzed the causes and consequences of violent civil and ethnic conflict in developing countries, focusing particular attention on the demographic and natural resource dimensions of these conflicts. His book on the subject, States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World, was published by Princeton University Press in 2006, and related articles and chapters have appeared in International Security, the Journal of International Affairs, and various edited volumes.

    Dr. Kahl received his B.A. in political science from the University of Michigan (1993) and his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University (2000).

  • Renata Kallosh

    Renata Kallosh

    Stanford W. Ascherman, MD Professor, Emerita

    BioWhat is the mathematical structure of supergravity/string theory and its relation to cosmology?

    Professor Kallosh works on the general structure of supergravity and string theory and their applications to cosmology. Her main interests are related to the models early universe inflation and dark energy in string theory. She develops string theory models explaining the origin of the universe and its current acceleration. With her collaborators, she has recently constructed de Sitter supergravity, which is most suitable for studies of inflation and dark energy and spontaneously broken supersymmetry.

    She is analyzing possible consequences of the expected new data from current and future cosmological observations, including LiteBIRD satellite CMB data. These results may affect the relationship between superstring theory and supergravity, and the real world. Professor Kallosh works, in particular, on future tests of string theory by CMB data and effective supergravity models with flexible amplitude of gravitational waves produced during inflation.

  • Matthew Kanan

    Matthew Kanan

    Professor of Chemistry and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy

    BioAssociate Professor of Chemistry Matthew Kanan develops new catalysts and chemical reactions for applications in renewable energy conversion and CO2 utilization. His group at Stanford University has recently developed a novel method to create plastic from carbon dioxide and inedible plant material rather than petroleum products, and pioneered the study of “defect-rich” heterogeneous electro-catalysts for converting carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide to liquid fuel.

    Matthew Kanan completed undergraduate study in chemistry at Rice University (B.A. 2000 Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa). During doctoral research in organic chemistry at Harvard University (Ph.D. 2005), he developed a novel method for using DNA to discover new chemical reactions. He then moved into inorganic chemistry for his postdoctoral studies as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he discovered a water oxidation catalyst that operates in neutral water. He joined the Stanford Chemistry Department faculty in 2009 to continue research into energy-related catalysis and reactions. His research and teaching have already been recognized in selection as one of Chemistry & Engineering News’ first annual Talented 12, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Eli Lilly New Faculty Award, and recognition as a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Environmental Mentor, among other honors.

    The Kanan Lab addresses fundamental challenges in catalysis and synthesis with an emphasis on enabling new technologies for scalable CO2 utilization. The interdisciplinary effort spans organic synthesis, materials chemistry and electrochemistry.

    One of the greatest challenges of the 21st century is to transition to an energy economy with ultra-low greenhouse gas emissions without compromising quality of life for a growing population. The Kanan Lab aims to help enable this transition by developing catalysts and chemical reactions that recycle CO2 into fuels and commodity chemicals using renewable energy sources. To be implemented on a substantial scale, these methods must ultimately be competitive with fossil fuels and petrochemicals. With this requirement in mind, the group focuses on the fundamental chemical challenge of making carbon–carbon (C–C) bonds because multi-carbon compounds have higher energy density, greater value, and more diverse applications that one-carbon compounds. Both electrochemical and chemical methods are being pursued. For electrochemical conversion, the group studies how defects known as grain boundaries can be exploited to improve CO2/CO electro-reduction catalysis. Recent work has unveiled quantitative correlations between grain boundaries and catalytic activity, establishing a new design principle for electrocatalysis, and developed grain boundary-rich copper catalysts with unparalleled activity for converting carbon monoxide to liquid fuel. For chemical CO2 conversion, the group is developing C–H carboxylation and CO2 hydrogenation reactions that are promoted by simple carbonate salts. These reactions provide a way to make C–C bonds between un-activated substrates and CO2 without resorting to energy-intensive and hazardous reagents. Among numerous applications, carbonate-promoted carboxylation enables the synthesis of a monomer used to make polyester plastic from CO2 and a feedstock derived from agricultural waste.

    In addition to CO2 chemistry, the Kanan group is pursuing new strategies to control selectivity in molecular catalysis for fine chemical synthesis. Of particular interest in the use of electrostatic interactions to discriminate between competing reaction pathways based on their charge distributions. This effort uses ion pairing or interfaces to control the local electrostatic environment in which a reaction takes place. The group has recently shown that local electric fields can control regioselectivity in isomerization reactions catalyzed by gold complexes.

  • Roanne Kantor

    Roanne Kantor

    Assistant Professor of English
    On Leave from 01/06/2025 To 03/31/2025

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsGlobal Anglophone literature and its relationship to other literary traditions of the Global South. The conditions for interdisciplinary research in the humanities, especially literature's relationship with medicine and the social sciences.

  • Aharon Kapitulnik

    Aharon Kapitulnik

    Theodore and Sydney Rosenberg Professor of Applied Physics and Professor of Physics
    On Leave from 01/01/2025 To 06/30/2025

    BioAharon Kapitulnik is the Theodore and Sydney Rosenberg Professor in Applied Physics at the Departments of Applied Physics and Physics at Stanford University. His research focuses on experimental condensed matter physics, while opportunistically, also apply his methods to tabletop experimental studies of fundamental phenomena in physics. His recent studies cover a broad spectrum of phenomena associated with the behavior of correlated and disordered electron systems, particularly in reduced dimensions, and the development of effective instrumentation to detect subtle signatures of physical phenomena.

    Among other recognitions, his activities earned him the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (1986-90), a Presidential Young Investigator Award (1987-92), a Sackler Scholar at Tel-Aviv University (2006), the Heike Kamerlingh Onnes Prize for Superconductivity Experiment (2009), a RTRA (Le Triangle de la Physique) Senior Chair (2010), and the Oliver Buckley Condensed Matter Prize of the American Physical Society (2015). Aharon Kapitulnik is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Kapitulnik holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Tel-Aviv University (1984).

  • Jarosław Kapuściński

    Jarosław Kapuściński

    Associate Professor of Music
    On Leave from 10/01/2024 To 06/30/2025

    BioJarosław Kapuściński is an intermedia composer and pianist born in Poland. He studied piano and composition at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw and furthered his education in multimedia and intermedia art during doctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a residency at Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada.

    Kapuściński presented his works at numerous gallery and concert venues worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, National Arts Centre in Canada, EMPAC, ZKM and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He has also received awards for his intermedia art at the UNESCO Film sur l'Art Festival in Paris, the VideoArt Festival in Locarno, and the International Festival of New Cinema and New Media in Montréal.

    Apart from his career as a composer and performer, Kapuściński is also an educator. He has lectured internationally and held positions at institutions such as McGill University in Montreal and the Conservatory of Music at the University of the Pacific. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Composition at Stanford University.

  • Terry Karl

    Terry Karl

    Gildred Professor in Latin American Studies, Emerita

    BioGildred Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies (Emeritus)
    Bass All-University Fellow for Excellence in Teaching (Emeritus)
    International War Crimes and Human Rights Investigator

    Terry Lynn Karl earned her Ph.D. (with distinction) from Stanford University. After serving on the faculty in the Government Department of Harvard University, she joined Stanford University’s Department of Political Science in 1987. She served as director of the Center for Latin American Studies for twelve years when it was recognized by the U.S. Department of Education as a “center of excellence.” She currently works as a war crimes/human rights investigator/ expert witness for several judicial systems: the U.S. (Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security/War Crimes Division), Spain, El Salvador, Colombia, and elsewhere, and non-governmental organizations.

    An expert in international and comparative politics, Karl has conducted field research, held visiting appointments, or led workshops on oil politics and extractive resources, democratization and/or human rights throughout Latin America, West Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. She has published widely, with special emphasis on the politics of oil-exporting countries and conflict, transitions from authoritarian rule, problems of democratization, South American and Central America politics, the politics of inequality, U.S. foreign policy, and the resolution of civil wars. A multilingual scholar, her work has been translated into at least 25 languages.

    Honors for Research and Teaching: Karl was awarded the Latin American Studies Guillermo O’Donnell Prize in March 2023 for her work on democratization and human rights. She previously received a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from the University of San Francisco and the Miriam Roland Volunteer Service Prize from Stanford University for her “exceptional commitment to public service in the cause of human rights and social justice.” The Latin American Studies Association awarded her the Oxfam Martin Diskin Prize in Toronto in 2010 for “excellence in combining scholarship and policy activism.” Karl has won all of Stanford’s major teaching awards offered during her tenure: the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (1989), the Stanford Medal for Faculty Excellence Fostering Undergraduate Research (1994), and the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Graduate and Undergraduate Teaching (1997), which is the University's highest academic prize. At Harvard, she was chosen as Radcliffe’s “mentor of the year.” She has been recognized for “exceptional teaching throughout her career,” resulting in her permanent appointment as a Stanford Bass All-University Fellow and the Gildred Chair in Latin American Studies. As an untenured professor in 1982, Karl is also known as the first woman to charge a major university with protecting sexual harassers and regain her career, resulting in an apology by Harvard’s President Bacow four decades later and a forthcoming Harvard honor.

    Recent Media: Karl has most recently appeared (2020-22) in the Washington Post, Forbes, Politico, Slate, New York Times, NBC, BBC, NPR, Newsweek, Fox News, USA Today, , the Guardian, El Faro, El Comercio, La Prensa Grafica, El Mundo, El Pais, El Nuevo Herald, Just Security, the Conversation, The Council of Foreign Relations, This Day Live, Analitica, El Impulso, Jewish News in Northern California, and the Chronicle of Higher Education on issues ranging from crimes against humanity to the politics of oil to combating sexual harassment.

  • Hemamala Karunadasa

    Hemamala Karunadasa

    J.G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Chemistry and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy

    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.

  • Abdulbasit Kassim

    Abdulbasit Kassim

    Stanford University Provostial Fellow/Lecturer

    BioAbdulbasit Kassim is a Stanford University Provostial Fellow and Lecturer at the Department of African and African American Studies. He is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the histories and cultures of Muslim societies with a geographical focus on West Africa and the African Diaspora. His cross-temporal research spans the early modern and modern periods. By studying both the “yesterday” and the “today,” he traces the ebbs and flows of the ideas that circulated in Muslim societies in West Africa and the African Diaspora. His research and pedagogical focus aim to bridge the Afrocentric, Black Atlantic, and Black Mediterranean models of African and African Diaspora Studies by synthesizing the historical interconnections between the peoples and cultures of Africa and the experiences of African diasporic communities as they adapt to new lives in the Atlantic World, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mediterranean Arab World and Lands of Islam.

    Abdulbasit's current book project, Requiem for a West African Caliphate: A Social and Intellectual History of Islamicate Societies in Hausaland and Bornu, c. 1450-2015, examines the continuities and changes in the longue durée of successive waves of Islamic reform, counter-reform, dissidence, rebellion, and jihad in Muslim West Africa. The nine-chapter book, divided into three parts (early modern, colonial, and post-imperial periods), tracks the textual practices, discursive productions, and doctrinal interpretations that reformers and dissidents in Hausaland and Bornu have debated, enunciated, and deployed to legitimize their projects of reform and jihad from the mid-fifteenth century to the early twenty-first century. His second book project, From the Black Atlantic to Sankoré, examines the multi-directional travel, global networks, and migration of Muslims of African descent from the Black Atlantic and the African Diaspora to the ancient centers of Islamic learning in Western, Central, and Eastern Sudanic Africa. The book traces the intellectual contributions of Black Muslims in the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America to the global transmission, circulation, preservation, and bio-bibliographic documentation of the centuries-old African Islamic intellectual heritage.

    Abdulbasit is the co-editor of the book The Boko Haram Reader: From Nigerian Preachers to the Islamic State (Oxford University Press and Hurst Publishers, 2018), nominated for the best critical edition or translation into English of primary source materials on Africa by the African Studies Association (Paul Hair Prize). He has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Nigeria, Senegal, Niger, Mali and Sudan. His work has received support from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the African Studies Association, among others. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), American Historical Association (AHA), African Studies Association (ASA), Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), Lagos Studies Association (LSA) and Islam in Africa Working Group.  

    Before coming to Stanford, Abdulbasit completed his PhD at Rice University. He held a postdoctoral research fellowship at New York University’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD). He was a postdoctoral scholar for the Mellon Sawyer Seminar “Unarchiving Blackness: Why the Primacy of African and African Diaspora Studies Necessitates a Creative Reconsideration of Archives” at the Center for Ideas and Society University of California, Riverside. He also held a predoctoral fellowship at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) and the Program of African Studies (PAS) at Northwestern University. He received an MA from Keele University Newcastle-under-Lyme Staffordshire in England as a Commonwealth Shared Scholar and a BSc from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria in Nigeria as a Bomarah Foundation Scholar.

  • Tom Kealey

    Tom Kealey

    Lecturer

    BioTom Kealey is the author of Thieves I’ve Known and The Creative Writing MFA Handbook. His awards include the Flannery O’Connor Prize and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and his stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, Best American NonRequired, Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review and many other places.

    Tom’s 20 years of teaching and administrating at Stanford has encompassed many areas. Along with Directors Eavan Boland and John L’Heureux he designed the Levinthal Tutorials, a unique one-on-one mentoring program between Stegner Fellows and Stanford Undergraduates. Tom guided the Levinthal Program from its inception in 2003 to 2023.

    Along with Adam Johnson, Tom co-created the Graphic Novel Project at Stanford, a two-quarter course where students artists and writers design, create, and publish a full-length graphic novel. Titles included Shake Girl, Virunga, and Pika-don. The Graphic Novel Project has been a mainstay of the Creative Writing Program since 2008.

    Tom designed the Fiction Into Film program and Fiction Into Film minor concentration in the CW Program.

    One of the most popular writing courses at Stanford is the Novel Writing Intensive course, now in its 14th year. Tom Kealey and Scott Hutchins guide students who write a full-length novel of 50,000 words. Based on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWrimo), over 300 Stanford students have completed NaNoWrimo under the guidance of Tom and Scott.

    Tom has also taught Creative Nonfiction, Screenwriting Intensive, the Novel Salon, Creative Expressions, Science Fiction, Dialogue Writing, New Media Writing, Imaginative Realms, and many others.

    In the English Department, Tom co-created The Secret Lives of the Short Story with Gavin Jones, an exploration of the short story’s evolution, voices, and techniques from the 19th to the 21st century, as well as Short Story to Big Screen, also taught with Gavin Jones, where students explored the art of screenplay adaptation.

    Tom’s current favorite course is First Chapters, where students explore how an opening chapter sets the stage for the rest of a novel. Students complete a first chapter of their own, and then workshop it in class.

    As Curriculum Coordinator of Creative Writing from 2008-2019, Tom designed the entire Creative Writing Undergraduate Course schedule, over 100 courses, on an annual basis. He worked closely with program director Eavan Boland and administrator Christina Ablaza to satisfy multiple requirements at the department, program, lecturer, and student level.

    As Jones Teaching Mentor, from 2005-2023, Tom advised and mentored over 35 creative writing lecturers over 18 years. Tom introduced new lecturers to program requirements and resources, designed orientations and follow-ups, and often visited classes and offered feedback, and provided trouble-shooting advice in classroom/student situations.

    As Liaison to and Curriculum Coordinator of Continuing Studies, 2008-2020, Tom worked closely with program director Eavan Boland and dean of continuing studies Dan Colman. He coordinated over 60 classes each year taught by 35 lecturers. Tom designed each year’s Creative Writing Continuing Studies schedule.

    And of course Tom was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford Creative Writing from 2001-2003. He continues to enjoy his Stanford experience.

    Tom received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award.

  • Srdan Keca

    Srdan Keca

    Associate Professor of Art and Art History

    BioSrdan Keca's films A LETTER TO DAD, MIRAGE and ESCAPE screened at leading documentary film festivals, including IDFA, DOK Leipzig, Jihlava IDFF and Full Frame, while his video installations have been exhibited at venues like the Venice Biennale of Architecture and the Whitechapel Gallery.

    The found-footage film FLOTEL EUROPA, produced and edited by Keca, premiered at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival, winning the Tagesspiegel Jury Prize. His upcoming feature documentary MUSEUM OF THE REVOLUTION (in postproduction) centers around a community living inside the remnants of one of the most ambitious, and never completed, architectural projects of socialist Yugoslavia. It is supported by the Sundance Documentary Film Fund, the MEDIA Fund of the European Commission, and Al Jazeera Documentary Channel, among others. His upcoming film THAT SOUND HIGH IN THE AIR (in development) explores climate change and migration. It was pitched at CPH:FORUM in 2020.

    Keca is a graduate of the Ateliers Varan and the UK National Film and Television School (NFTS). Since 2015 he has worked as Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University, teaching in the MFA Documentary Film Program.

  • Ari Y. Kelman

    Ari Y. Kelman

    Jim Joseph Professor of Education and Jewish Studies and Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Religious Studies

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProfessor Kelman's research focuses on the forms and practices of religious knowledge transmission. His work emerges at the intersection of sociocultural learning theory and scholarly/critical studies of religion, and his methods draw on the social sciences and history. Currently Professor Kelman is at work on a variety of projects ranging from a history of religious education in the post-war period to an inquiry about Google's implicit definitions of religion.

  • Amanda Helen Kennard

    Amanda Helen Kennard

    Assistant Professor of Political Science, by courtesy, of Environmental Social Sciences and Center Fellow, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment
    On Leave from 10/01/2024 To 06/30/2025

    BioAmanda Kennard is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She studies the politics of climate change and global governance, employing game theory and a range of quantitative methods. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Politics at Princeton University, an M.S. from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and a B.A. from New York University.

  • Elizabeth Kessler

    Elizabeth Kessler

    Advanced Lecturer

    BioElizabeth Kessler’s research and teaching focus on twentieth and twenty-first century American visual culture. Her diverse interests include: the role of aesthetics, visual culture, and media in modern and contemporary science, especially astronomy; the interchange between technology and ways of seeing and representing; the history of photography; and the representation of fashion in different media. Her first book, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime, on the aesthetics of deep space images, was published in 2012. She’s currently writing on book on extraterrestrial time capsules, as well as developing a new project on fashion photography.

  • Alex Ketley

    Alex Ketley

    Advanced Lecturer

    BioAlex Ketley is an independent choreographer, filmmaker, and the director of The Foundry. Formerly a classical dancer with the San Francisco Ballet and LINES Ballet, he left dancing professionally to create The Foundry as a platform to explore his interests in alternative methods of devising performance. The company has allowed Ketley the freedom to pursue projects that would be difficult to realize within his commissioning career. A few examples of these are: Syntax, an hour long duet systemically using the mechanics of language as an organizing mechanism; Lost Line researched how the application of environment affects the generation of movement and studied in direct response to California's diverse physical landscapes; Please Love Me jettisoned the structure of performing in a theater context and was developed with a curiosity about how people genuinely connect and experience artwork; the No Hero Trilogy which was a multi-year project that explored what dance and performance means to the lives of people living throughout rural America, and Distal Imprint was a film created in collaboration with artist and Death-Row inmate Bill Clark. The Foundry’s diverse work has been enthusiastically received by audiences, the press, and funders.

    For his independent work as a choreographer he has been commissioned extensively throughout the United States, as well as projects in Germany and Italy, and has received acknowledgement from the Hubbard Street National Choreographic Competition, the International Choreographic Competition of the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur, the Choo-San Goh Award, the Princess Grace Award for Choreography, four Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography Residencies, the Gerbode-Hewlett Choreographer Award, the Eben Demarest Award, the National Choreographic Initiative Residency, a Kenneth Rainin Foundation New and Experimental Works Grant, three CHIME Fellowships, the Artistry Award from the Superfest International Disability Film Festival, and his work was featured on national television through an invitation from the show So You Think You Can Dance. His pieces and collaborations have also been awarded Isadora Duncan Awards for Outstanding Achievement in the categories of; Choreography, Company, and Ensemble, as well as nominated for Outstanding Achievement in Visual Design. In 2020 he became a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, one of the most prestigious honors in the United States recognizing “individuals who have demonstrated exceptional creative ability in the arts”.

    As an educator he has taught extensively throughout the country and currently holds the position of Advanced Lecturer at Stanford University’s Theater and Performance Studies Department. He was the founding Resident Choreographer at the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance for fourteen years until its closure in 2018.

    Since 2020 he has been collaborating with his friend Bill Clark who is a prolific artist and writer that has been incarcerated on Death Row for the past 33 years. Alex invited Bill as a guest for his Stanford University class called DanceAcution: Performance Practice, Death Row, and the Evolution of Cultural Reform. The class used Bill’s vast experience as an artist and incarcerated individual as the platform for the students to develop new performance work. Bill is now collaborating with The Foundry on a new evening length work titled An Approximation of Resilience set to premiere in 2025. The project has won the prestigious National Dance Project Award from the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) and generous support from the Luger Charitable Trust.

    He is also on the Board of Directors of Death Penalty Focus, an organization whose work focuses on abolishing both the death penalty and LWOP (Life Without Parole).

  • Eugenia Khassina

    Eugenia Khassina

    Advanced Lecturer

    BioEugenia (Zhenya) Khassina is a Lecturer in Russian and Russian Language Program Coordinator. She received her BA in Linguistics and MA in Foreign Language Acquisition Methodology from Maurice Torrez Foreign Language Pedagogical University in Moscow, Russia
    Foreign language pedagogy and second language acquisition has always been central to her professional interests. She has had extensive experience in teaching Russian as a foreign language from beginning to advanced and has been teaching at Stanford since 2004.

  • Oussama Khatib

    Oussama Khatib

    Weichai Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering

    BioRobotics research on novel control architectures, algorithms, sensing, and human-friendly designs for advanced capabilities in complex environments. With a focus on enabling robots to interact cooperatively and safely with humans and the physical world, these studies bring understanding of human movements for therapy, athletic training, and performance enhancement. Our work on understanding human cognitive task representation and physical skills is enabling transfer for increased robot autonomy. With these core capabilities, we are exploring applications in healthcare and wellness, industry and service, farms and smart cities, and dangerous and unreachable settings -- deep in oceans, mines, and space.

  • Chaitan Khosla

    Chaitan Khosla

    Wells H. Rauser and Harold M. Petiprin Professor and Professor of Chemistry and, by courtesy, of Biochemistry

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch in this laboratory focuses on problems where deep insights into enzymology and metabolism can be harnessed to improve human health.

    For the past two decades, we have studied and engineered enzymatic assembly lines called polyketide synthases that catalyze the biosynthesis of structurally complex and medicinally fascinating antibiotics in bacteria. An example of such an assembly line is found in the erythromycin biosynthetic pathway. Our current focus is on understanding the structure and mechanism of this polyketide synthase. At the same time, we are developing methods to decode the vast and growing number of orphan polyketide assembly lines in the sequence databases.

    For more than a decade, we have also investigated the pathogenesis of celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine, with the goal of discovering therapies and related management tools for this widespread but overlooked disease. Ongoing efforts focus on understanding the pivotal role of transglutaminase 2 in triggering the inflammatory response to dietary gluten in the celiac intestine.

  • John Kieschnick

    John Kieschnick

    Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Professor of Buddhist Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of East Asian Languages and Cultures

    BioProfessor Kieschnick specializes in Chinese Buddhism, with particular emphasis on its cultural history. He is the author of the Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval China and the Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture. He is currently working on a book on Buddhist interpretations of the past in China, and a primer for reading Buddhist texts in Chinese.

    John is chair of the Department of Religious Studies and director of the Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford.

    Ph.D., Stanford University (1996); B.A., University of California at Berkeley (1986).

  • MinJu Kim

    MinJu Kim

    Lecturer

    BioDr. Minju Kim, a pianist from South Korea, is an accomplished soloist, chamber musician, and collaborative artist. With a deep passion for chamber music, Minju has participated as a fellow in collaborative piano at the Bowdoin International Music Festival and Music Academy of the West. She has also performed in piano trios as part of the Heifetz International Music Institute's chamber music programs. Minju won first place in the Sidney Wright Accompanying Competition at the University of Texas at Austin and served as a studio pianist for the legendary cellist Janos Starker at Indiana University.

    Before moving to Stanford, Minju held positions as a collaborative pianist at Shoreline Community College, Seattle University, Northwest Girlchoir, and Bellevue Chamber Chorus. She was also a frequent performer on local concerts, radio programs, and competitions in the Seattle area, collaborating with a wide range of musicians.

    Minju holds a Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from Seoul National University (Korea), a Master of Music and Performer Diploma from Indiana University, a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Master of Music in Collaborative Piano from the New England Conservatory.

  • Sara Elizabeth Kimberlin

    Sara Elizabeth Kimberlin

    Sr. Research Senior Scholar

    BioSara Kimberlin is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. Her research interests include alternative approaches to conceptualizing and measuring poverty, and the effects and effectiveness of anti-poverty policies.

  • Steven Kivelson

    Steven Kivelson

    Prabhu Goel Family Professor

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPast Graduate Students:

    Assa Auerbach - Professor of Physics, Technion University
    Weikang Wu - deceased.
    Shoucheng Zhang (final year) - deceased.
    Shivaji Sondhi - Wykham Professor of Physics, Oxford University
    Markku Salkola - Facebook, Menlo Park
    Vadim Oganesyan - Professor of Physics CUNY
    Kyrill Shtengle - Professor of Physics, UC Riverside
    Oron Zachar
    Zohar Nussinov - Professor of Physics, Washington University
    Erica W. Carlson - Professor of Physics, Purdue University
    Edward Sleva
    John Robertson - Citadel, Austin
    Wei-Feng Tsai
    Ian Bindloss
    Paul Oreto - Head of Machine Learning at Cantor Fitzgerald, New York
    Erez Berg - Professor of Physics, Weizmann Institute
    Hong Yao - Professor of Physics, Tsinghua University
    Li Liu
    Weejee Cho
    George Karakonstantakis
    Sam Lederer
    Laimei Nie - Assistant Professor of Physics, Purdue University
    Ilya Esterlis - Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison
    John Dodaro
    Chao Wang - Citadel LLC, New York
    Yue Yu - Post Doctoral Fellow, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
    Yuval Gannot - Software Engineer, Google, Mtn. View
    Kyung-Su KIm - Post Doctoral Fellow, A.J. Leggett Institute, UIUC
    Zhaoyu Han - Post Doctoral Fellow, Harvard Univeristy
    Andrew Yuan - Post Doctoral Fellow, University of Maryland

    Past Post Docs:

    Douglas Stone - Professor of Physics, Yale University
    Gergeley Zimanyi - Professor of Physics, UC Davis
    Dror Orgad - Professor of Physics, Tel Aviv University
    Hae-Young Kee - Professor of Physics, University of Toronto
    Oskar Vafek - Professor of Physics, University of Florida
    Eun-Ah Kim - Professor of Physics, Cornell University
    Srinivas Raghu - Professor of Physics, Stanford University
    Maisam Barkeshli - Professor of Physics, University of Maryland
    Michael Mulligan - Associate Professor of Physics, UC Riverside
    Pavan Hosur - Professor of Physics, University of Houston
    Yi Zhang - Professor of Physics, Tsinghua University
    Abulhassan Vaezi - Professor of Physics, Sharifi University
    Tomas Bzdusek - Professor of Physics, University of Zurich
    Jingyuan Chen - Assistant Professor of Physics, Tsinghua University
    Yoni Schattner - Research Scientist, Quantum Computing at the Amazon Center for
    Quantum Computing at Caltech, Pasadena
    John Sous - Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Yale University
    Chaitanya Murthy - Assistant Professor, University of Rochester

    Past Undergraduate Research Assistants:

    Kevin S. Wang - Graduate student, Princeton University
    Jeffrey Chang - Graduate student, Harvard University
    Vijay Nathan Josephs - Undergraduate, Stanford University

    Unofficial Past Students and Post Docs:

    (i.e. where I believe I played the corresponding mentoring role, but the connection
    was unofficial - a shameless attempt to claim partial credit):
    Shoucheng Zhang - (did his final year of PhD work, the part in CMT, under my direction and
    worked with me extensively while a post doc)
    Jainendra Jain - (did the final portion of his PhD work, the part relevant to the quantum
    Hall effect, under my guidance and worked with me extensively while a post doc)
    Daniel Rokhsar - (No official connection at all, but did significant portion of both his
    graduate and post-doctoral research in collaboration with me.)
    Akash Maharaj - (was a student of Srinivas Raghu with whom he worked extensively, but
    he also did a significant portion of his graduate research in collaboration with me.)

  • Herbert Klein

    Herbert Klein

    Professor of History (Teaching) and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Hoover Institution

    BioI was born in New York City in the borough of the Bronx on January 6, 1936. I attended public schools in Far Rockaway Queens. After graduating Far Rockaway High School, I first attended Syracuse University from 1953 to 1955 and then transferred to the University of Chicago, where I obtained a BA in history in 1957, an MA in 1959 and a PhD in 1963 with a major in history and a minor in anthropology. I taught Latin American history at the University of Chicago from 1962 to 1969, rising from lecturer to the rank of associate professor with tenure. I then taught at Columbia University from 1969 to 2005, being named the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History in 2003. I retired from Columbia in 2005 and was named professor of history and director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford University from 2005 to 2011. After my retirement as director, I was named research fellow and curator of Latin American Collection, of the Hoover Institution of Stanford University in 2011–2017.

    My main areas of interests are in comparative social history, quantitative methods in historical research and demographic history. I have published some 25 books dealing with the history of slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, colonial fiscal history, and demographic history and have published extensively on the history of Bolivia, Brazil and the United States. I has been a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Lecturer in numerous Latin American universities and received grants from the Ford Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Tinker Foundation.

    My honors include the 1977 "Socio-Psychological Prize" of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), joint with Jonathan Kelley; the 2010 Premio em Historia e Ciencias Sociais of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, for a co-authored book Escravismo em São Paulo e Minas Gerais (joint with Iraci Costa and Francisco Vidal Luna) and in 2015 I received the Distinguished Service Award from the Conference on Latin American History, the professional organization of Latin American historians. In 1982 I was elected chair of CLAH. I was also editor of the Cambridge University Press Series of Latin American Monographs from 2003-2015 and I am on numerous editorial boards for Iberian and Latin American Journals of History, Economics and Social Science..

  • Richard Klein

    Richard Klein

    Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Anthropology and of Biology, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCoevolution of human form and behavior over the past 6-7 million years, with special emphasis on the emergence of fully modern humans in the past 60-50,000 years. Field and lab research in South Africa.

  • Simon Klemperer

    Simon Klemperer

    Professor of Geophysics and, by courtesy, of Earth and Planetary Sciences

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI study the growth, tectonic evolution, and deformation of the continents. My research group undertakes field experiments in exemplary areas such as, currently, the Tibet plateau (formed by collision between Indian and Asia); the actively extending Basin-&-Range province of western North America (the Ruby Range Metamorphic Core Complex, NV, and the leaky transform beneath the Salton Trough, CA). We use active and passive seismic methods, electromagnetic recording, and all other available data!

  • Diana Irene Klinger

    Diana Irene Klinger

    Lecturer

    BioProfessor of Latin American Literature and Literary Theory

    2006: Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Brazil.
    2001: D.E.A., Literature, University of Buenos Aires (UBA)

  • Brian Knutson

    Brian Knutson

    Professor of Psychology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy lab and I seek to elucidate the neural basis of emotion (affective neuroscience), and explore implications for decision-making (neuroeconomics) and psychopathology (neurophenomics).

  • Mykel Kochenderfer

    Mykel Kochenderfer

    Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Computer Science

    BioMykel Kochenderfer is Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. Prior to joining the faculty, he was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he worked on airspace modeling and aircraft collision avoidance, with his early work leading to the establishment of the ACAS X program. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh and B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Stanford University. Prof. Kochenderfer is the director of the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL), conducting research on advanced algorithms and analytical methods for the design of robust decision making systems. Of particular interest are systems for air traffic control, unmanned aircraft, and other aerospace applications where decisions must be made in uncertain, dynamic environments while maintaining safety and efficiency. Research at SISL focuses on efficient computational methods for deriving optimal decision strategies from high-dimensional, probabilistic problem representations. He is an author of "Decision Making under Uncertainty: Theory and Application" (2015), "Algorithms for Optimization" (2019), and "Algorithms for Decision Making" (2022), all from MIT Press. He is a third generation pilot.

  • Matthew Kohrman

    Matthew Kohrman

    Associate Professor of Anthropology, and by courtesy, of Medicine (Stanford Prevention and Research Center) and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

    BioMatthew Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume--Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives--expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.

  • Nancy Kollmann

    Nancy Kollmann

    William H. Bonsall Professor of History

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOctober 2018: In 2017 I published a synthetic history -- "The Russian empire 1450-1801" (Oxford). I am working on images of Russia in early modern Europe, generally by eyewitness travelers but also in the scurrilous penny press. I'm exploring how the tropes of engraving culture shaped images, how knowledge of Russia was disseminated and what image of Russia literate Europeans received. Then I'll return to the law -- Catherine II's 1772 judicial reforms on the local level across the Empire.

  • Eric Kool

    Eric Kool

    George A. and Hilda M. Daubert Professor of Chemistry

    Current Research and Scholarly Interests• Design of cell-permeable reagents for profiling, modifying, and controlling RNAs
    • Developing fluorescent probes of DNA repair pathways, with applications in cancer, aging, and neurodegenerative disease
    • Discovery and development of small-molecule modulators of DNA repair enzymes, with focus on cancer and inflammation

  • Ron Kopito

    Ron Kopito

    Professor of Biology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOur laboratory use state-of-the-art cell biological, genetic and systems-level approaches to understand how proteins are correctly synthesized, folded and assembled in the mammalian secretory pathway, how errors in this process are detected and how abnormal proteins are destroyed by the ubiquitin-proteasome system.

  • William Koski

    William Koski

    The Eric and Nancy Wright Professor of Clinical Education and Professor (Teaching), by courtesy, of Education

    BioAn accomplished clinical teacher and litigator, William Koski (PhD ’03) is the founder and director of the law school’s Youth and Education Law Project (YELP). He has also taught multidisciplinary graduate seminars and courses in educational law and policy.

    Professor Koski and YELP have represented hundreds of children, youth, and families in special education, student discipline, and other educational rights matters. Professor Koski has also served as lead counsel or co-counsel in several path-breaking complex school reform litigations including Robles-Wong v. California, that sought to reform the public school finance system in the state; Emma C. v. Eastin, that has restructured the special education service delivery system in a Bay Area school district and aims to reform the California Department of Education’s special education monitoring system; Smith v. Berkeley Unified School District, that successfully reformed the school discipline policies in Berkeley, CA; and Stephen C. v. Bureau of Indian Education, that seeks to hold the federal Bureau of Indian Education accountable for their failure to provide children in the Havasupai Native American tribe in Arizona with an adequate and equitable education.

    Reflecting his multidisciplinary background as a lawyer and social scientist, Professor Koski’s scholarly work focuses on the related issues of educational accountability, equity and adequacy; the politics of educational policy reform; teacher employment policies; and judicial decision-making in educational policy reform litigation.

    Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2001, Professor Koski was a lecturer in law at Stanford and a supervising attorney at the law school’s East Palo Alto Community Law Project. He was also an associate at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and then Alden, Aronovsky & Sax.

    Professor Koski has an appointment (by courtesy) with the Stanford School of Education.

  • Jan Krawitz

    Jan Krawitz

    Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities, Emerita

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDocumentary film, women's issues

  • Christopher Krebs

    Christopher Krebs

    Gesue and Helen Spogli Professor of Italian Studies, Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature

    BioChristopher B. Krebs studied classics and philosophy in Berlin, Kiel (1st Staatsexamen 2000, Ph. D. 2003), and Oxford (M. St. 2002). He was a lecturer at University College (Oxford) and an assistant (2004-09) and then associate professor (2009-12) at the department of the Classics at Harvard, before he joined the Classics department at Stanford. In the spring of 2007 he was the professeur invité at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), in 2008/9 the APA fellow at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich (on which see his “You say putator” in the TLS), and, most recently, the recipient of the Christian Gauss Book Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

    His publications include Negotiatio Germaniae. Tacitus’ Germania und Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Giannantonio Campano, Conrad Celtis und Heinrich Bebel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), and A most dangerous book. Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), which has or will be translated into six languages. He has also co-edited a volume on Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The ‘Plupast’ from Herodotus to Appian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). He is currently preparing a commentary on Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum 7 as well as an intellectual history of the late Roman Republic (with W.W. Norton); he is also co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Caesar. Other long-term projects and interests focus on Posidonius, Sallust and Tacitus, Latin lexicography, Thersites and Prometheus, and Annio di Viterbo.

    He organized and co-chaired a seminar on Classical Traditions at Harvard Humanities Center, where he also co-hosted a conference on “The Reception of Odysseus in Literature, Art, and Music” (April 2009). He co-organized a conference on “The historians’ Plupast” (2006), an APA Panel on “Caesar the ‘Litterator’” (January 2012), and a conference on “Caesar: Writer, Speaker and Linguist,” at Amherst College (September 2012). He will deliver the third annual Herbert W. Benario lecture in Roman Studies (at Emory University) in the fall of 2013 and the forty-third Skotheim Lecture in History (at Whitman College) in the spring of 2014. In the summer of 2014 he will co-teach in France a seminar on Caesar in Gaul for the Paideia Institute.

    Most recent and forthcoming articles include: “Annum quiete et otio transiit: Tacitus (Agr. 6.3) and Sallust on liberty, tyranny, and human dignity” (A Companion to Tacitus), “M. Manlius Capitolinus: the metaphorical plupast and metahistorical reflections” (The historians’ Plupast), “Caesar, Lucretius and the dates of De Rerum Natura and the Commentarii” (Classical Quarterly), and “Caesar’s Sisenna” (Classical Quarterly).

    In 2012-13 he will offer the following courses: Advanced Latin: Cicero and Sallust on Catiline; Reinventing the Other: Greeks, Romans, Barbarians (cross-listed in Anthropology); a freshman seminar Eloquence Personified: How to Speak Like Cicero; and a graduate seminar on Sallust and Virgil. In 2013-14 he will offer graduate seminars on The fragmentary Roman Historians and Lucan and the poetics of civil war, advanced Greek: Attic Orators and advanced Latin: Tacitus. He also teaches at Stanford Continuing Studies: a course on Tacitus (Tacitus: Character Assassin, Satirist, and Trenchant Historian) in the winter term, and a course on Lucan (The Dark Genius: Lucan, his civil war epos, and the court of Nero) in the spring.

  • Jon Krosnick

    Jon Krosnick

    Frederic O. Glover Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor of Communication and of Political Science, of Environmental Social Sciences and, by courtesy, of Psychology
    On Leave from 10/01/2024 To 06/30/2025

    BioJon Krosnick is a social psychologist who does research on attitude formation, change, and effects, on the psychology of political behavior, and on survey research methods. He is the Frederic O. Glover Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor of Communication, Political Science, and (by courtesy) Psychology. At Stanford, in addition to his professorships, he directs the Political Psychology Research Group and has directed the Summer Institute in Political Psychology.

    To read reports on Professor Krosnick’s research program exploring public opinion on the environment, visit the Public Opinion on Climate Change web site.

    Research Interests
    Author of seven published books and two forthcoming books and more than 190 articles and chapters, Dr. Krosnick conducts research in three primary areas: (1) attitude formation, change, and effects, (2) the psychology of political behavior, and (3) the optimal design of questionnaires used for laboratory experiments and surveys, and survey research methodology more generally.

    His attitude research has focused primarily on the notion of attitude strength, seeking to differentiate attitudes that are firmly crystallized and powerfully influential of thinking and action from attitudes that are flexible and inconsequential. Many of his studies in this area have focused on the amount of personal importance that an individual chooses to attach to an attitude. Dr. Krosnick’s studies have illuminated the origins of attitude importance (e.g., material self-interest and values) and the cognitive and behavioral consequences of importance in regulating attitude impact and attitude change processes.

    Honors
    Winner of the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s Lifetime Achievement Award for outstanding research, and the Nevitt Sanford Award from the International Society of Political Psychology, Dr. Krosnick’s scholarship has been recognized by election as a fellow by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Erik Erikson Award for Excellence and Creativity in the Field of Political Psychology from the International Society of Political Psychology, two fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Phillip Brickman Memorial Prize for Research in Social Psychology, and the American Political Science Association’s Best Paper Award.

  • Chao-Lin Kuo

    Chao-Lin Kuo

    Professor of Physics and of Particle Physics and Astrophysics

    Current Research and Scholarly Interests1. Searching/measuring primordial gravitational waves in the CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) through experiments at the South Pole (BICEP and SPT), high plateaus in Tibet (AliCPT) and Atacama (Simons Observatory), as well as in space (LiteBIRD).

    2. Development and applications of superconducting detector and readout systems in astrophysics, cosmology, and other areas.

    3. Novel detector concepts for axion searches (https://youtu.be/UBscQSFzpLE)

  • Glenn Anthony Kurtz

    Glenn Anthony Kurtz

    Lecturer

    BioGlenn Kurtz is the author of "Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014), which was named a “Best Book of 2014” by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. The Los Angeles Times called the book “breathtaking,” and it has received high critical praise in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, and many other publications.

    A documentary film based on the book, "Three Minutes: A Lengthening," directed by Bianca Stigter, co-produced by Academy Award-winner Steve McQueen, and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021. It was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival 2022 and has screened at festivals worldwide. In May 2022, it was awarded the inaugural Yad Vashem Award for Excellence in Holocaust Documentary Filmmaking.

    Glenn’s first book, "Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music" (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), also received enthusiastic reviews from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere.

    A frequent public speaker, Glenn has presented keynote addresses at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington D.C.); the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies (University of Texas at Dallas); the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education, Chapman University (Orange, CA); the Jewish Historical Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands); The Wiener Library (London, U.K.); the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews (Warsaw, Poland), and at many other venues in the U.S. and internationally.

    For four years, he hosted “Conversations on Practice,” a discussion series about the writing process and the writer’s life. Guests included Patti Smith, Martin Amis, Jennifer Egan, Adam Gopnik, Francine Prose, Tom McCarthy, Dani Shapiro, and Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein, among many others.

    Glenn is a 2019-2023 Presidential Fellow at Chapman University, Orange, CA, and the recipient of a 2016-2017 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. A graduate of Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music, he holds a PhD from Stanford University in German studies and comparative literature. He has taught at San Francisco State University, New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and Stanford University.

  • Marci Kwon

    Marci Kwon

    Assistant Professor of Art and Art History

    BioMarci Kwon is Assistant Professor of Art History at Stanford University, and co-director of the Cantor Art Center's Asian American Art Initiative. She is the author of Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism (Princeton, 2021), and co-editor of the online Martin Wong Catalogue Raisonné. She is the recipient of Stanford’s Asian American Teaching Prize, CCSRE Teaching Prize, Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award, and the Women's Faculty Forum Inspiring Early Career Academic Award, and the Mellon Foundation Emerging Faculty Leader award.

  • Mark Labowskie

    Mark Labowskie

    Lecturer

    BioMark Labowskie is a Jones Lecturer and former Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories have appeared in ZYZZYVA, American Short Fiction, Subtropics, and elsewhere, and his writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Lighthouse Works, VCCA, and Millay Arts. In addition to fiction workshops, he teaches courses on screenwriting and queer literature. He is also the host and curator of the Stanford Storytelling Project podcast Off the Page, which spotlights the work of Stanford writers.

  • David D. Laitin

    David D. Laitin

    James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor

    BioDavid D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his BA from Swarthmore College, and then served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Somalia and Grenada, where he became national tennis champion in 1970. Back in the US, he received his Ph.D. in political science from UC Berkeley, working under the direction of Ernst Haas and Hanna Pitkin.

    He has taught at three great universities: UCSD (1975-87), the University of Chicago (1987-1999) and now at Stanford. Over his career, as a student of comparative politics, he has conducted field research in Somalia, Yorubaland (Nigeria), Catalonia (Spain), Estonia, and France, all the time focusing on issues of language and religion, and how these cultural phenomena link nation to state. His books include Politics, Language and Thought: The Somali Experience (1977), Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (1986), Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (1992), Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (1998); Nations, States and Violence (2007); Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies (2016); and African Politics Since Independence (2019).

    In collaboration with James Fearon, he has published several papers on ethnicity, ethnic cooperation, the sources of civil war, and on policies that work to settle civil wars. Laitin has also collaborated with Alan Krueger on international terrorism and with Eli Berman on suicide terrorism.

    In 2008-2009, with support from the National Science Foundation, and with a visiting appointment at Sciences-Po Paris, Laitin conducted ethnographic, survey and experimental research on Muslim integration into France, seeking to assess the magnitude of religious discrimination and isolate the mechanisms that sustain it. In collaboration with Claire Adida and Marie-Anne Valfort, they published the results in Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian Heritage Societies (Harvard Press, 2016).

    In 2016, Laitin became co-director of Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab, and has co-authored several papers published in "Science", "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" and "Nature Human Behavior" that estimate the effects of policy on immigrant integration.

    Laitin has been a recipient of fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. In 2021 Laitin was the recipient of the John Skytte Prize in Political Science from the Johan Skytte Foundation in Uppsala University, Sweden.

  • Eric Lambin

    Eric Lambin

    George and Setsuko Ishiyama Provostial Professor and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI study human-environment interactions in land systems by linking remote sensing, GIS and socio-economic data. I aim at better understanding causes and impacts of changes in tropical forests, drylands, and farming systems. I currently focus on land use transitions – i.e., the shift from deforestation (or land degradation) to reforestation (or land sparing for nature), – the influence of globalization on land use decisions, and the interactions between public and private governance of land use.

  • James Landay

    James Landay

    Denning Co-Director (Acting) of Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsLanday's current research interests include Technology to Support Behavior Change (especially for health and sustainability), Demonstrational User Interfaces, Mobile & Ubiquitous Computing, Cross-Cultural Interface Design, Human-Centered AI, and User Interface Design Tools. He has developed tools, techniques, and a top professional book on Web Interface Design.

  • Joshua Landy

    Joshua Landy

    Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization, and Professor of Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of English and of Philosophy
    On Leave from 09/01/2024 To 08/31/2025

    BioJoshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford, home to a PhD minor and undergraduate major tracks in Philosophy and Literature.

    Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and of How To Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012). He is also the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009, with Michael Saler). Philosophy as Fiction deals with issues of self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-fashioning in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, while raising the question of what literary form contributes to an engagement with such questions; How to Do Things with Fictions explores a series of texts (by Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Mark) that function as training-grounds for the mental capacities.

    Professor Landy has appeared on the NPR shows "Forum" and "Philosophy Talk" (on narrative selfhood and on the function of fiction) and has on various occasions been a guest host of Robert Harrison's "Entitled Opinions" (with Lera Boroditsky on Language and Thought, with Michael Saler on Re-Enchantment, with John Perry and Ken Taylor on the Uses of Philosophy, and with Alexander Nehamas on Beauty).

    Professor Landy has received the Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence (1999) and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2001). As of Fall 2024, he is the Eleanor Loring Ritch University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

  • Brian Lantz

    Brian Lantz

    Professor (Research) of Applied Physics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMeasure gravitational waves