School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 51-60 of 62 Results

  • David Donoho

    David Donoho

    Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
    On Leave from 01/01/2025 To 03/31/2025

    BioDavid Donoho is a mathematician who has made fundamental contributions to theoretical and computational statistics, as well as to signal processing and harmonic analysis. His algorithms have contributed significantly to our understanding of the maximum entropy principle, of the structure of robust procedures, and of sparse data description.

    Research Statement:
    My theoretical research interests have focused on the mathematics of statistical inference and on theoretical questions arising in applying harmonic analysis to various applied problems. My applied research interests have ranged from data visualization to various problems in scientific signal processing, image processing, and inverse problems.

  • Rowan Dorin

    Rowan Dorin

    Associate Professor of History

    BioI am a historian of western Europe and the Mediterranean, primarily during the high and late Middle Ages. Much of my research tries to understand how law and society interact with each other, especially where legal norms conflict with social practices. Another strand of my research explores the history of economic life and economic thought, especially medieval debates over usury and moneylending. I have also written on the circulation of goods, people, and ideas in the medieval Mediterranean.

    My first book (No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe, Princeton University Press) uses the banishment of Jewish and Christian moneylenders to explore the rise of mass expulsion as a widespread practice in the later Middle Ages. A second ongoing project examines the ways in which medieval canon law was adapted, reinterpreted, or resisted in local contexts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The latter builds on Corpus Synodalium, a prize-winning full-text database of late medieval local ecclesiastical legislation that I have been developing since 2016, with assistance from colleagues around the world.

    Born and raised in western Canada, I did my undergraduate and doctoral work at Harvard University, earning an MPhil in Medieval History from the University of Cambridge along the way. Before coming to Stanford, I was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

  • Persis Drell

    Persis Drell

    Provost, Emerita, James and Anna Marie Spilker Professor, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and of Physics

    BioPersis Drell is the James and Anna Marie Spilker Professor in the School of Engineering, a professor of materials science and engineering, and a professor of physics. From Feb 1, 2017 to Sept. 30, 2023, Drell was the provost of Stanford University.

    Prior to her appointment as provost in February 2017, she was dean of the Stanford School of Engineering from 2014 to 2017 and director of U.S. Department of Energy SLAC National Acceleratory Laboratory from 2007 to 2012.

    She earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Wellesley College and her PhD in atomic physics from UC Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Stanford in 2002, she was a faculty member in the physics department at Cornell University for 14 years.

  • Justin Du Bois

    Justin Du Bois

    Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry and Professor, by courtesy, of Chemical and Systems Biology

    BioResearch and Scholarship

    Research in the Du Bois laboratory spans reaction methods development, natural product synthesis, and chemical biology, and draws on expertise in molecular design, molecular recognition, and physical organic chemistry. An outstanding goal of our program has been to develop C–H bond functionalization processes as general methods for organic chemistry, and to demonstrate how such tools can impact the logic of chemical synthesis. A second area of interest focuses on the role of ion channels in electrical conduction and the specific involvement of channel subtypes in the sensation of pain. This work is enabled in part through the advent of small molecule modulators of channel function.

    The Du Bois group has described new tactics for the selective conversion of saturated C–H to C–N and C–O bonds. These methods have general utility in synthesis, making possible the single-step incorporation of nitrogen and oxygen functional groups and thus simplifying the process of assembling complex molecules. To date, lab members have employed these versatile oxidation technologies to prepare natural products that include manzacidin A and C, agelastatin, tetrodotoxin, and saxitoxin. Detailed mechanistic studies of metal-catalyzed C–H functionalization reactions are performed in parallel with process development and chemical synthesis. These efforts ultimately give way to advances in catalyst design. A long-standing goal of this program is to identify robust catalyst systems that afford absolute control of reaction selectivity.

    In a second program area, the Du Bois group is exploring voltage-gated ion channel structure and function using the tools of chemistry in combination with those of molecular biology, electrophysiology, microscopy and mass spectrometry. Much of this work has focused on studies of eukaryotic Na and Cl ion channels. The Du Bois lab is interested in understanding the biochemical mechanisms that underlie channel subtype regulation and how such processes may be altered following nerve injury. Small molecule toxins serve as lead compounds for the design of isoform-selective channel modulators, affinity reagents, and fluorescence imaging probes. Access to toxins and modified forms thereof (including saxitoxin, gonyautoxin, batrachotoxin, and veratridine) through de novo synthesis drives studies to elucidate toxin-receptor interactions and to develop new pharmacologic tools to study ion channel function in primary cells and murine pain models.

  • John Duchi

    John Duchi

    Associate Professor of Statistics, of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Computer Science

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy work spans statistical learning, optimization, information theory, and computation, with a few driving goals: 1. To discover statistical learning procedures that optimally trade between real-world resources while maintaining statistical efficiency. 2. To build efficient large-scale optimization methods that move beyond bespoke solutions to methods that robustly work. 3. To develop tools to assess and guarantee the validity of---and confidence we should have in---machine-learned systems.

  • Mark Duggan

    Mark Duggan

    Wayne and Jodi Cooperman Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
    On Leave from 01/01/2025 To 03/31/2025

    BioMark Duggan is a Professor of Economics at Stanford University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1999. He currently is a Co-Editor at the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and was previously a Co-Editor at the Journal of Public Economics. Before arriving to Stanford in the summer of 2014, Duggan served on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School (2011-14), the University of Maryland's Economics Department (2003-11), and the University of Chicago's Economics Department (1999-2003).

    Professor Duggan's research focuses primarily on the effect of government expenditure programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid on the behavior of individuals and firms. Some of his more recent research is exploring the effect of federal disability programs on the labor market and of changes to the Medicare and Medicaid programs on the cost and quality of health care. He is also estimating the effect of patent reforms in India on the price and utilization of pharmaceutical treatments. His research has been published in leading academic journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics and has been featured in outlets such as The Economist, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

    Professor Duggan was the 2010 recipient of the ASHEcon Medal, which is awarded every two years by the American Society of Health Economists to the economist aged 40 and under in the U.S. who has made the most significant contributions to the field of health economics. Along with his co-author Fiona Scott Morton, he received the National Institute for Health Care Management's 2011 Health Care Research Award for their work on Medicare Part D. He was a Fellow of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation from 2004 to 2006 and a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution from 2006 to 2007. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Social Security Administration, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Duggan served from 2009 to 2010 as the Senior Economist for Health Care Policy at the White House Council of Economic Advisers and has also been an Expert Witness for the U.S. Department of Justice.

  • Rob Dunbar

    Rob Dunbar

    W.M. Keck Professor in the School of Earth Sciences, Professor of Oceans and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOcean processes, biogeochemistry, climatology/paleoclimatology, isotopic chemistry, ocean policy

  • Jean-Pierre Dupuy

    Jean-Pierre Dupuy

    Professor of French and Italian and, by courtesy, of Political Science

    BioProfessor Jean-Pierre Dupuy is a Professor of Social and Political Philosophy at the École Polytechnique, Paris. He is the Director of research at the C.N.R.S. (Philosophy) and the Director of C.R.E.A. (Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée), the philosophical research group of the École Polytechnique, which he founded in 1982. At Stanford University, he is a researcher at the Study of Language and Information (C.S.L.I.) Professor Dupuy is by courtesy a Professor of Political Science.

    In his book The Mechanization of the Mind, Jean-Pierre Dupuy explains how the founders of cybernetics laid the foundations not only for cognitive science, but also artificial intelligence, and foreshadowed the development of chaos theory, complexity theory, and other scientific and philosophical breakthroughs.