School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 101-150 of 483 Results
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Lynette Cegelski
Monroe E. Spaght Professor of Chemistry and Professor, by courtesy, of Chemical Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch in the Cegelski laboratory is driven by the need to uncover and define the chemistry that underlies outstanding challenges in human health, the environment, and sustainability. Beyond discovery, we use chemistry as a tool to innovate and create solutions to these pressing problems. The laboratory is highly interdisciplinary, designing experimental approaches to understand how complex biological systems are built, organized, and controlled, and then perturb and influence assembly processes. The lab develops new methods and uniquely leverages: (1) small molecules in new biochemical assay development, chemical genetics approaches, and therapeutic discovery in infectious diseases, (2) fluorescence and electron microscopy coupled to analytical HPLC, mass spectrometry, and complementary biochemical techniques, and (3) spectroscopy, particularly solid-state NMR, to uncover new “dark matter” and define chemistry in insoluble, heterogeneous and complex assemblies relevant to human health, plants, and the ocean.
Long-standing efforts in the laboratory focus on defining mechanisms underlying bacterial biofilm formation and identifying new antibiotic and anti-virulence strategies, including advancing therapeutic candidates for the most difficult-to-treat infections. Through these efforts, we uncovered a new chemical structure in nature: phosphoethanolamine (pEtN) cellulose. Cellulose is the most abundant biopolymer on earth and this discovery provided the first experimental validation of a naturally produced chemically modified cellulose. We are developing alternatively modified celluloses and polysaccharides and advancing new solutions for ecofriendly, sustainably sourced, and recyclable materials. Collectively, our projects span disciplines from molecular structure and assembly chemistry to living microbial communities and natural marine systems, while aiming to translate fundamental discoveries into therapeutic and materials solutions. -
Luther Cox Cenci
Ph.D. Student in History, admitted Autumn 2018
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy dissertation examines the unexpected itineraries, mutations, and afterlives of late imperial Chinese legal culture across the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia during the long 19th century. Empirically, my study uses archives in classical and vernacular Chinese, Dutch, and English and situated in Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, London, and the Hague. Viewed together, they reveal how the communal identities and institutions of Chinese migrants and their descendants were shaped by world-historical forces: the rise of global capitalism and European colonialism, the contest between liberal and pluralist models of law and sovereignty, and the transformation and eventual collapse of the late Qing state.
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Carlos Centeno Lairet
Affiliate, Ethics In Society
BioCarlos is a 2026 Ethics & Tech Practitioner Fellow at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. He co-founded SOMOS Civic Lab. At the lab, the team is researching and designing tools to democratize generative AI in Global Majority countries. Somos is part of the UNDP AI Trust & Safety Programme, and it's supported by the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability program. As MIT Emerging Talent Director, he equips learners from migrant and refugee communities with computer science skills. He co-founded and directed MIT's Governance Innovation Initiative, as Associate Director of Innovation; co-designed and launched MIT's first Governance Innovation Research Fellowship, and hosted MIT's "Power to the Who" governance innovation podcast. He was previously at the UN for 10 years, where he worked in community and government preparedness to natural disasters based in Latin America, Asia and Africa. His AI (NLP) prototype ALIA was a Google launchpad finalist in Munich (2018). He has supported investigative journalism projects at Pro Publica on disappearances and detentions by the US federal government.
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Giovanna Ceserani
Professor of Classics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIntellectual history, data science in the humanities, ancient and modern historiography, history of archaeology, early modern travels and explorations of the past
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Chris Chafe
Duca Family Professor
BioChris Chafe is a composer, improvisor, and cellist, developing much of his music alongside computer-based research. He is Director of Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). In 2019, he was International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies The University of British Columbia, Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Torino, and Edgard-Varèse Guest Professor at the Technical University of Berlin. At IRCAM (Paris) and The Banff Centre (Alberta), he has pursued methods for digital synthesis, music performance and real-time internet collaboration. CCRMA's jacktrip project involves live concertizing with musicians the world over. Online collaboration software and research into latency factors continue to evolve. An active performer either on the net or physically present, his music reaches audiences in sometimes novel venues. An early network project was a simultaneous five-country concert was hosted at the United Nations in 2009. Chafe’s works include gallery and museum music installations which are now into their second decade with “musifications” resulting from collaborations with artists, scientists and MD’s. Recent work includes the Earth Symphony, the Brain Stethoscope project (Gnosisong), PolarTide for the 2013 Venice Biennale, Tomato Quintet for the transLife:media Festival at the National Art Museum of China and Sun Shot played by the horns of large ships in the port of St. Johns, Newfoundland.
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Enrique Chagoya
Professor of Art and Art History
BioDrawing from his experiences living on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in the late 70’s, and also in Europe in the late 90’s, Enrique Chagoya juxtaposes secular, popular, and religious symbols in order to address the ongoing cultural clash between the United States, Latin America and the world as well. He uses familiar pop icons to create deceptively friendly points of entry for the discussion of complex issues. Through these seemingly harmless characters Chagoya examines the recurring subject of colonialism and oppression that continues to riddle contemporary American foreign policy.
Chagoya was born and raised in Mexico City. His father, a bank employee by day and artist by night, encouraged his interest in art by teaching Chagoya color theory and how to sketch at a very early age. As a young adult, Chagoya enrolled in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, where he studied political economy and contributed political cartoons to union newsletters. He relocated to Veracruz and directed a team focused on rural-development projects, a time he describes as “an incredible growing experience…[that] made me form strong views on what was happening outside in the world.” This growing political awareness would later surface in Chagoya’s art. At age 26, Chagoya moved to Berkeley, California and began working as a free-lance illustrator and graphic designer. Disheartened by what he considered to be the narrow political scope of economics programs in local colleges, Chagoya turned his interests to art. He enrolled in the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned a BFA in printmaking in 1984. He then pursued his MA and MFA at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating in 1987. He moved to San Francisco in 1995. He has been exhibitng his work nationally and internationally for over two decades with a major retrospective organized by the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa in 2007 that traveled to UC Berkelye Art Museum and to the Palms Spring Art Museum in 2008 ( fully illustrated bilingual catalog was published). In the Fall of 2013, a major survey of his work opened at Centro Museum ARTIUM, in Vitoria-Gasteiz, capital city of the Basque Country, near Bilbao, Spain (with a trilingual catalog documenting the exhibition). The exhibition will travel to the CAAM in the Canary Islands in 2015.
He is currently Full Professor at Stanford University’s department of Art and Art History and his work can be found in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco among others. He has been recipient of numerous awards such as two NEA artists fellowships, one more from the National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, residencies at Giverny and Cite Internationale des Arts in France, and a Tiffany fellowship to mention a few.
He is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, George Adams Gallery in New York, and Lisa Sette Gallery in Scottsdale, AZ. His prints are published by Shark’s Ink in Lyons, Co, Electric Works in San Francisco, CA, Magnolia Editions in Oakland, CA, ULAE Bay Shore, NY, Segura Publishing in Pueblo, AZ, Trillium press in Brisbaine, CA, Made in California in Oakland, CA, and Smith Andersen Editions in Palo Alto, CA. -
Page Chamberlain
Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and of Earth System Science
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch
I use stable and radiogenic isotopes to understand Earth system history. These studies examine the link between climate, tectonics, biological, and surface processes. Projects include: 1) examining the terrestrial climate history of the Earth focusing on periods of time in the past that had CO 2-levels similar to the present and to future projections; and 2) addressing how the chemical weathering of the Earth's crust affects both the long- and short-term carbon cycle. Field areas for these studies are in the Cascades, Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada, the European Alps, Tibet and the Himalaya and the Southern Alps of New Zealand.
International Collaborations
Much of the research that I do has an international component. Specifically, I have collaborations with: 1) the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt Germany as a Humboldt Fellow and 2) the Chinese University of Geosciences in Bejiing China where I collaborate with Professor Yuan Gao.
Teaching
I teach courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in isotope biogeochemistry, Earth system history, and the relationship between climate, surface processes and tectonics.
Professional Activities
Editor American Journal of Science; Co-Director Stanford Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry Laboratory (present);Chair, Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences (2004-07); Co-Director Stanford/USGS SHRIMP Ion microprobe facility (2001-04)
