School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 101-130 of 130 Results

  • Megan Brennan

    Megan Brennan

    Lecturer

    BioDr. Megan Brennan's interests include the development of organic chemistry lab courses that give students hands-on opportunities to explore chemistry while reinforcing and building upon concepts learned in lecture classes. She aims for her labs to bring chemistry to life, and to afford students a chance to have fun and experience a taste of scientific discovery.

    While studying chemistry at Lafayette College (B.S. 2002), Dr. Brennan worked on the preparation of triazaphenanthrenes and the Oxa–Pictet–Spengler reaction of 1-(3-furyl)alkan-2-ols. She completed her doctoral work at Stanford (Ph.D. 2008), conducting her thesis research in palladium asymmetric allylic alkylation under the advisement of Professor Barry Trost. During her postdoctoral research with Professor Scott Miller at Yale University, she investigated the use of peptides containing a thiazole side chain for use in acyl anion chemistry. She joined the teaching staff at University of California, Berkeley in 2010 before coming returning to Stanford in 2011 to spearhead the development of a new summer organic chemistry sequence, a comprehensive course designed for pre-meds, offering an entire year of organic chemistry in nine weeks.

    Dr. Brennan also acts as the liaison to the chemistry majors, to promote events with faculty in both the academic and social aspect: providing an environment that allows students to be comfortable and able to learn, while helping them take advantage of every opportunity that Stanford offers.

    Dr. Brennan's current research is in the development classroom experiments that bring cutting edge industrial and academic research into the undergraduate laboratory experience.

  • Mark Brongersma

    Mark Brongersma

    Stephen Harris Professor, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and, by courtesy, of Applied Physics

    BioMark Brongersma is a Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He received his PhD in Materials Science from the FOM Institute in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 1998. From 1998-2001 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. During this time, he coined the term “Plasmonics” for a new device technology that exploits the unique optical properties of nanoscale metallic structures to route and manipulate light at the nanoscale. His current research is directed towards the development and physical analysis of nanostructured materials that find application in nanoscale electronic and photonic devices. Brongersma received a National Science Foundation Career Award, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, the International Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences (Physics) for his work on plasmonics, and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the SPIE, and the American Physical Society.

  • Philip Bucksbaum

    Philip Bucksbaum

    Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Science and Professor of Photon Science, of Applied Physics and of Physics

    BioPhil Bucksbaum holds the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Chair in Natural Science at Stanford University, with appointments in Physics, Applied Physics, and in Photon Science at SLAC. He conducts his research in the Stanford PULSE Institute (https://web.stanford.edu/~phbuck). He and his wife Roberta Morris live in Menlo Park, California. Their grown daughter lives in Toronto.

    Bucksbaum was born and raised in Iowa, and graduated from Harvard in 1975. He attended U.C. Berkeley on a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and received his Ph.D. in 1980 for atomic parity violation experiments under Professor Eugene Commins, with whom he also has co-authored a textbook, “Weak Interactions of Leptons and Quarks.” In 1981 he joined Bell Laboratories, where he pursued new applications of ultrafast coherent radiation from terahertz to vacuum ultraviolet, including time-resolved VUV ARPES, and strong-field laser-atom physics.

    He joined the University of Michigan in 1990 and stayed for sixteen years, becoming Otto Laporte Collegiate Professor and then Peter Franken University Professor. He was founding Director of FOCUS, a National Science Foundation Physics Frontier Center, where he pioneered research using ultrafast lasers to control quantum systems. He also launched the first experiments in ultrafast x-ray science at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab. In 2006 Bucksbaum moved to Stanford and SLAC, and organized the PULSE Institute to develop research utilizing the world’s first hard x-ray free-electron laser, LCLS. In addition to directing PULSE, he has previously served as Department Chair of Photon Science and Division Director for Chemical Science at SLAC. His current research is in laser interrogation of atoms and molecules to explore and image structure and dynamics on the femtosecond scale. He currently has more than 250 publications.

    Bucksbaum is a Fellow of the APS and the Optical Society, and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has held Guggenheim and Miller Fellowships, and received the Norman F. Ramsey Prize of the American Physical Society for his work in ultrafast and strong-field atomic and molecular physics. He served as the Optical Society President in 2014, and also served as the President of the American Physical Society in 2020. He has led or participated in many professional service activities, including NAS studies, national and international boards, initiatives, lectureships and editorships.

  • Patricia Burchat

    Patricia Burchat

    Gabilan Professor

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsObservational cosmology. Dark energy. Weak gravitational lensing.
    Preparing for science with the Legacy Survey of Space & Time (LSST).
    Member of the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration.

  • Mai Ly Tran Burke

    Mai Ly Tran Burke

    Bachelor of Science, Biology
    Masters Student in Biology, admitted Autumn 2021
    Minor, Psychology
    Cape Town Student Ambassador, Bing Overseas Studies

    BioI am Mai Ly Burke, a junior at Stanford University majoring in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology. My interests lie in genetics, neurobiology, and cancer biology. I plan to apply my passion for these topics to develop innovative therapies and technologies to better treat diseases like cancer. Having grown up in Vietnam—a country that grapples with many serious diseases—my work is fueled by a genuine passion for improving lives and giving back to my community. Please feel free to reach out with any questions you may have!

  • Adrien Burlacot

    Adrien Burlacot

    Assist Prof (By Courtesy), Biology

    BioAdrien Burlacot is an algal physiologist specialized in the study of photosynthesis and bioenergetics of algal cell. Adrien is a physicist by training, he received a BS and MSc in Engineering from the Ecole polytechnique (France) and a MSc in Plant Biology from the University of Paris-Saclay (France). He then obtained a PhD in Plant Science at the CEA Cadarache (France) from the Aix-Marseille University (France) where he studied the regulations of the photosynthetic electron flow in green microalgae. After a postdoctoral position in 2021 at the University of California, Berkeley (USA) with Krishna K. Niyogi were he studied photoprotection in plants and algae, he started his lab at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford on fall 2021.

    Microalgal photosynthesis is fixing annually ten times more CO2 than what humans reject. Acclimation to abiotic stress is a major driving force of microalgal community structure and productivity. Adrien investigates how microalgal photosynthesis dynamically acclimates to fluctuations in environmental parameters like light, CO2 or temperature. He will be using and developing high throughput screens based on quantitative chlorophyll fluorescence to understand the dynamics of photosynthesis. Adrien aims at unravelling the network of photosynthesis acclimatory genes and their bioenergetic role in the cell. He wants to use this knowledge and the new tools developed to propose new ways of harnessing photosynthesis for a more sustainable world.

  • Noah Burns

    Noah Burns

    Associate Professor of Chemistry

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch in our group explores the boundaries of modern organic synthesis to enable the more rapid creation of the highest molecular complexity in a predictable and controllable fashion. We are particularly inspired by natural products not only because of their importance as synthetic targets but also due to their ability to serve as invaluable identifiers of unanswered scientific questions.

    One major focus of our research is selective halogenation of organic molecules. Dihalogenation and halofunctionalization encompass some of the most fundamental transformations in our field, yet methods capable of accessing relevant halogenated motifs in a chemo-, regio-, and enantioselective fashion are lacking.

    We are also interested in the practical total synthesis of natural products for which there is true impetus for their construction due to unanswered chemical, medicinal, biological, or biophysical questions. We are specifically engaged in the construction of unusual lipids with unanswered questions regarding their physical properties and for which synthesis offers a unique opportunity for study.

  • Robert Byer

    Robert Byer

    William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor, Emeritus

    BioRobert L. Byer has served as President of The American Physical Society, of the Optical Society of America and of the IEEE LEOS. He has served as Vice Provost and Dean of Research at Stanford. He has been Chair of the Department of Applied Physics, Director of the Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory and Director of the Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory. He is a founding member of the California Council on Science and Technology and served as Chair from 1995-1999. He was a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board from 2002-2006 and has been a member of the National Ignition Facility since 2000.

    Robert L. Byer has conducted research and taught classes in lasers and nonlinear optics at Stanford University since 1969. He has made extraordinary contributions to laser science and technology including the demonstration of the first tunable visible parametric oscillator, the development of the Q-switched unstable resonator Nd:YAG laser, remote sensing using tunable infrared sources and precision spectroscopy using Coherent Anti Stokes Raman Scattering (CARS). Current research includes precision laser measurements in support of the detection of gravitational waves and laser “Accelerator on a chip”.