School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-50 of 91 Results
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Robert Wagoner
Professor of Physics, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProbes (accretion disks, ...) of black holes, sources and detectors of gravitational radiation, theories of gravitation, anthropic cosmological principle.
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Virginia Walbot
Professor of Biology, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOur current focus is on maize anther development to understand how cell fate is specified. We discovered that hypoxia triggers specification of the archesporial (pre-meiotic) cells, and that these cells secrete a small protein MAC1 that patterns the adjacent soma to differentiate as endothecial and secondary parietal cell types. We also discovered a novel class of small RNA: 21-nt and 24-nt phasiRNAs that are exceptionally abundant in anthers and exhibit strict spatiotemporal dynamics.
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Patrick Walsh
Ph.D. Student in Applied Physics, admitted Autumn 2025
BioPatrick graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2025 with a B.S. in Applied Math, Engineering, and Physics. He conducted his undergraduate research under Professor Mark Eriksson, where he studied Semiconductor Quantum Dot Qubits. His work focused on developing experimental techniques and numerical tools to automate gate-voltage calibration procedures for quantum dot devices. As an NSF Fellow and rotation student with the Bøttcher group at Stanford, Patrick is interested in using Josephson Junction Arrays to study a variety of problems in condensed matter, including vortex dynamics, quantum phase transitions, and highly correlated materials.
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Guenther Walther
John A. Overdeck Professor
BioGuenther Walther studied mathematics, economics, and computer science at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and received his Ph.D. in Statistics from UC Berkeley in 1994.
His research has focused on statistical methodology for detection problems, shape-restricted inference, and mixture analysis, and on statistical problems in astrophysics and in flow cytometry.
He received a Terman fellowship, a NSF CAREER award, and the Distinguished Teaching Award of the Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, the Annals of Statistics, the Annals of Applied Statistics, and Statistical Science. He was program co-chair of the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and served on the executive committee of IMS from 1998 to 2012. -
Li Wang
Assistant Professor of Biology
BioLi is a developmental neurobiologist with interdisciplinary training in genomics, proteomics, and neuroscience. His research seeks to understand how cellular and synaptic diversity arises during human brain development and evolution, and how these same mechanisms may be hijacked in diseases such as brain cancer.
Li received his B.S. from Fudan University in China, where he studied synaptic plasticity during critical periods in the visual cortex. During his Ph.D. with Dr. Huda Zoghbi at Baylor College of Medicine, Li explored the molecular basis of neurodevelopmental disorders, uncovering how mutations in key proteins like SHANK3 and MeCP2 disrupt neural function. His postdoctoral work with Dr. Arnold Kriegstein at UCSF expanded this focus to human brain development at single-cell resolution. He generated multi-omic atlases and cross-species proteomic maps that revealed novel progenitor cell types and human-specific synapse maturation programs, with implications for cognition and brain cancer. Li directs the Human Brain Development Lab (https://www.liwanglab.org) at Stanford University, where he continues to investigate human brain development with a focus on stem cell lineages and synaptic diversity.
Li has received many awards, including the NIH K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award, the Trainee Professional Development Award from the Society for Neuroscience, the Keystone Symposia Scholarship, the Dennis Weatherstone Predoctoral Fellowship from Autism Speaks, and the Dean’s Award for Excellence from Baylor College of Medicine. -
Zijun Wang
Affiliate, Chemistry
Visiting Scholar, ChemistryBioZijun Wang is an industrial R&D partner with Stanford Chemistry, Founder of CaliResearch Corporation, and serves in a scientific business development role at Rigaku Corporation.
His research interests include next-generation energy storage materials, low-dimensional materials, and the development of advanced characterization methodologies.
Email:
zjwang1@stanford.edu -
Dr. Victoria Watson-Zink
Postdoctoral Scholar, Biology
BioI am an evolutionary marine invertebrate biologist, and I use bioinformatics and high-throughput sequencing technologies (genomics and transcriptomics) to explore life-history evolution in terrestrial crabs.
I completed my B.S. in Biological Sciences (concentration in Ecology and Evolution) at Cornell University in 2013 with academic and research honors. While there, I studied climate science, marine biology, and coral reef biodiversity via several internships/fellowships at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Indonesian Biodiversity Research Center in Bali, Indonesia, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
After graduating, I worked for two years as a lab manager and research technician at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA, which is where I discovered my passion for understanding life-history evolution in terrestrial crabs. I began my PhD in Population Biology at UC Davis in 2015, and as a Fellow of both the NSF GRFP and the NSF EAPSI programs, I have traveled extensively across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean to observe and collect genetic samples from several land crab species.
As a disabled Black woman in evolution and ecology, I am also passionate about increasing, supporting, and retaining diversity of all kinds in STEM, and during my PhD, I served as the first Graduate Student Advisor to the Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the College of Biological Sciences at UC Davis. I graduated as the first Black PhD from my degree program, and was also awarded the Merton Love Award for Best Dissertation in Ecology and Evolution for my dissertation work.
I am now a postdoc at Stanford University as a joint Stanford Science Fellow/NSF PRFB Fellow and hope to one day launch my own research lab studying major evolutionary transitions. -
Ward Watt
Professor, Biology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEvolutionary adaptive mechanisms, molecules to ecosystems
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Robert Waymouth
Robert Eckles Swain Professor of Chemistry and Professor, by courtesy, of Chemical Engineering
BioRobert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry Robert Waymouth investigates new catalytic strategies to create useful new molecules, including bioactive polymers, synthetic fuels, and sustainable plastics. In one such breakthrough, Professor Waymouth and Professor Wender developed a new class of gene delivery agents.
Born in 1960 in Warner Robins, Georgia, Robert Waymouth studied chemistry and mathematics at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia (B.S. and B.A., respectively, both summa cum laude, 1982). He developed an interest in synthetic and mechanistic organometallic chemistry during his doctoral studies in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology under Professor R.H. Grubbs (Ph.D., 1987). His postdoctoral research with Professor Piero Pino at the Institut fur Polymere, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, focused on catalytic hydrogenation with chiral metallocene catalysts. He joined the Stanford University faculty as assistant professor in 1988, becoming full professor in 1997 and in 2000 the Robert Eckles Swain Professor of Chemistry.
Today, the Waymouth Group applies mechanistic principles to develop new concepts in catalysis, with particular focus on the development of organometallic and organic catalysts for the synthesis of complex macromolecular architectures. In organometallic catalysis, the group devised a highly selective alcohol oxidation catalyst that selectively oxidizes unprotected polyols and carbohydrates to alpha-hyroxyketones. In collaboration with Dr. James Hedrick of IBM, we have developed a platform of highly active organic catalysts and continuous flow reactors that provide access to polymer architectures that are difficult to access by conventional approaches.
The Waymouth group has devised selective organocatalytic strategies for the synthesis of functional degradable polymers and oligomers that function as "molecular transporters" to deliver genes, drugs and probes into cells and live animals. These advances led to the joint discovery with the Wender group of a general, safe, and remarkably effective concept for RNA delivery based on a new class of synthetic cationic materials, Charge-Altering Releasable Transporters (CARTs). This technology has been shown to be effective for mRNA based cancer vaccines. -
Risa Wechsler
Director, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), Humanities and Sciences Professor and Professor of Physics and of Particle Physics and Astrophysics
BioRisa Wechsler is the Humanities and Sciences Professor and Professor of Physics in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Particle Physics & Astrophysics at SLAC National Laboratory. She is the Director of the Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and the Center for Decoding the Universe and an Associate Director at Stanford Data Science. She is a cosmologist whose work investigates some of the most profound questions about our universe — how it formed, what it is made of, how it is structured, and what its future holds.
Her research focuses on understanding the evolution of galaxies, the large-scale structure of the universe, and the nature of dark matter and dark energy. She uses large numerical simulations, theoretical models, and the largest observed maps of the universe to explore these forces that shape the cosmos. Her recent work also investigates the formation and cosmological context of the Milky Way and probes dark matter through small-scale cosmic structure, and explores how data science and AI/ML can drive new understanding. Wechsler has played key leadership roles in major international collaborations including the Dark Energy Survey, Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, and Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and time, a decade-long survey that will reveal the dynamic universe in unprecedented detail. She is recently involved in the Via Survey, which will map the Milky Way at high precision to probe dark matter physics in new ways.
Wechsler is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
