School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 101-120 of 299 Results
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Jonathan Payne
Dorrell William Kirby Professor, Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Biology,
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy goal in research is to understand the interaction between environmental change and biological evolution using fossils and the sedimentary rock record. How does environmental change influence evolutionary and ecological processes? And conversely, how do evolutionary and ecological changes affect the physical environment? I work primarily on the marine fossil record over the past 550 million years.
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Roy Pea
Director, H-STAR, David Jacks Professor of Education and Professor, by courtesy, of Computer Science
Current Research and Scholarly Interestslearning sciences focus on advancing theories, research, tools and social practices of technology-enhanced learning of complex domains
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Nolan Peard
Ph.D. Student in Applied Physics, admitted Autumn 2020
BioNolan is currently a PhD candidate in the Schleier-Smith Lab in the Department of Physics. He specializes in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics, chemical physics, and materials science with a developing interest in bioengineering. Beyond his research career, Nolan is an accomplished cellist and is interested in climbing, reading, and nature.
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Scott Pearson
Professor at the Food Research Institute, Emeritus
BioScott Pearson taught economic development and international trade in the Food Research Institute. Pearson came to Stanford in 1968 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 1974 and to Professor in 1980. He served as the Food Research Institute’s Associate Director (1977-1984) and Director (1992-1996). Pearson became Professor Emeritus in 2002. In retirement, Pearson has lectured on 67 travel/study programs for the Stanford Alumni Association and 121 educational travel trips in total, visiting all seven continents.
Pearson grew up in Baraboo, Wisconsin and graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor of Sciences degree in American history in 1961. Between 1961 and 1963, he was one of the first Peace Corps Volunteers – serving as a secondary school teacher in Northern Nigeria. Pearson’s marriage to Sandra Anderson in Lagos, Nigeria in 1962 was the first wedding in the Peace Corps.
Pearson decided to pursue a career in academia, specializing in international development. He spent one year in Bologna, Italy and another in Washington, D.C. to earn a Master of Arts degree at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1965. Pearson then earned a doctorate in economics at Harvard University in 1968. He wrote his dissertation on the impact of petroleum exports on Nigerian development under the direction of Albert Hirschman and revised his thesis for his first book, Petroleum and the Nigerian Economy (Stanford University Press, 1970).
Pearson began his empirical research in Nigeria (1961-69) and Ghana (1970-78). He later focused on Indonesia (1979-2004), Portugal (1981-95), and Kenya (1986-96). Pearson’s professional work abroad combined research (in collaboration with local university or government researchers), teaching (of short courses to transfer methods of field research and analysis), and policy analysis (to provide policy advice to government officials).
During most years, Pearson taught during two Stanford quarters and spent five months working abroad. In 1978, Pearson received the Dean’s Award for Teaching in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.
Pearson’s research focused on food and agricultural policy analysis, especially links among price, macroeconomic, and investment policies. He also worked on food price stabilization, trade and exchange rate policies, and social benefit-cost analysis. Wally Falcon, Peter Timmer, and Pearson collaborated for many years in Indonesia and co-authored Food Policy Analysis (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), which received the Award for Professional Excellence, Quality of Communication in 1984 from the American Agricultural Economics Association and was translated into five languages.
In 1982, Eric Monke and Pearson began developing the Policy Analysis Matrix (PAM) approach to integrate policy and project analysis. PAM is a marriage of benefit-cost analysis and economic policy analysis in a matrix framework. Monke and Pearson explained the PAM approach in The Policy Analysis Matrix for Agricultural Development (Cornell University Press, 1989). Most of the 12 books that Pearson co-authored are applications of the PAM. Pearson presented PAM short-courses in China, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Thailand, Washington (the World Bank), and Zimbabwe.
Pearson was a member of numerous university committees and served on the Board of Trustees Committee on Finance and Administration and the Faculty Senate. Pearson and his wife, Sandra, were Faculty Residents in undergraduate dormitories at Stanford for five years (Serra House, 1968-1969 and 1977-1978, Madera House, 1978-1980, and Potter House, 1983-1984). Sandra Pearson later served as Principal of Palo Alto High School (1987-1994 and 2002-2004), and in 2004 she won the Tall Tree Award, sponsored by the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce and the Palo Alto Weekly. -
Kabir Peay
Director of the Earth Systems Program, Associate Professor of Biology, of Earth System Science and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOur lab studies the ecological processes that structure natural communities and the links between community structure and the cycling of nutrients and energy through ecosystems. We focus primarily on fungi, as these organisms are incredibly diverse and are the primary agents of carbon and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. By working across multiple scales we hope to build a 'roots-to-biomes' understanding of plant-microbe symbiosis.
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Robert Pecora
Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThe development of the basic principles behind the dynamic light scattering (DLS) technique and its application to a wide variety of liquid systems is one of Pecora's outstanding contributions to physical chemistry. DLS is now an indispensable tool in the repertoire of polymer, colloid and biophysical chemists. It is generally accepted to be one of the best methods for measuring the mutual diffusion coefficients and, in dilute systems, the hydrodynamic sizes of polymers and particulates in solution or suspension. It is widely used, among other things, for studying size distributions of polymer and colloid dispersions; for testing theories of polymer dynamics in dilute and concentrated systems; and for studying interactions between macromolecules and colloidal particles in liquid dispersions. The basic work that established the foundation of this technique was done in the 1960s. Pecora has revisited this area over the years-formulating theories, for instance, of scattering from hollow spheres, large cylindrically symmetric molecules and wormlike chains.
An experimental program began in the early seventies resulted in a now classic series of studies on the rotational dynamics of small molecules in liquids. This work, utilizing mainly depolarized DLS and carbon 13 nuclear magnetic relaxation, has had a wide impact in the area of liquid state dynamics.
It was also during this period that the theoretical foundation for the fluorescence correlation spectroscopy technique (FCS) was formulated. Because of recent advances in equipment and materials, this technique has recently been revived and is now a powerful tool in biophysics.
The experimental and theoretical techniques developed for the study of the dynamics of relatively simple small molecule liquids have been used to investigate more complex systems such as the rotation of small molecule solvents in glassy and amorphous polymers. The resonance- enhanced depolarized light scattering technique was also developed in this period.
Extensive studies using depolarized dynamic light scattering (using the Fabry-Perot interferometer) as well as photon correlation spectroscopy, NMR, FCS and small angle X-ray scattering to the dynamics of oligonucleotides have determined the hydrodynamic diameter of DNA and the internal bending angles of the bases. They also provided support for relations relating hydrodynamic parameters to molecular dimensions for short rodlike molecules and “polyelectrolyte effects” on the translational and rotational motions of these highly charged molecules.
A major area of experimental and theoretical study has been the study of the dynamics of rigid and semirigid rodlike polymers in both dilute and semidilute dispersions. The work on translation and rotation of poly (-benzyl-L-glutamate) in semidilute solution is a foremost early work in this area.
The Pecora group has synthesized and studied the dynamics of model
rigid rod/sphere composite liquids. Studies of the translation of dilute spheres through solutions of the rods as functions of the rod and sphere sizes and the rod concentrations have provided the stimulus for more experiment and theoretical work in this area. Transient electric birefringence decay studies of the rotation of dilute rigid rod polymers in suspensions of comparably sized spherical particles have revealed scaling laws for the rod rotation.
A unique feature of part of this work on rigid and semirigid rodlike polymers is the utilization of genetic engineering techniques to construct a monodisperse, homologous series of DNA restriction fragments. These biologically-produced fragments have served as well-characterized model macromolecules for solution studies of the dynamics of semirigid rodlike polymers.
The well-regarded book of Pecora and Berne on dynamic light scattering, first published in 1976, has become a major reference work. It is now a Dover paperback. -
Rui Pei
Postdoctoral Scholar, Psychology
BioRui (/ˈreɪ/) received her B.Sc. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Brown University, and her Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania. She is interested in understanding how adolescents and young adults make social decisions in the context of psychological and neural development. Her research focuses on social risk taking, or risk taking behaviors that bring social consequences. Some of the questions that her research tries to answer include: what motivates people to take social risks, and how does social risk taking contribute to adolescent health and well-being?
