School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1,291-1,300 of 1,394 Results
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Michael Wara
Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment
BioMichael Wara is a lawyer and scholar focused on climate and energy policy.
Wara is Director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program and a senior research scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment as well as Senior Director for Policy at the Sustainability Accelerator within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Wara organizes and manages cross-functional teams that provide fact-based, bipartisan, technical and legal assistance to policymakers, environmental justice advocates, and tribes engaged in the development of novel climate and energy law and regulation. He also facilitates the connection of Stanford faculty and students with cutting edge policy debates on climate, energy and climate impacts, leveraging Stanford’s energy, climate and natural resource expertise to craft real world solutions to these challenges.
Wara’s legal and policy scholarship focuses on wildfire, climate policy, electricity regulation, and insurance.. He collaborates with economists, engineers and scientists in research on the design and evaluation of technical and regulatory solutions to society's climate and energy challenges.
Wara has served as a Wildfire Commissioner for California, as a member of the California Catastrophe Response Council, the oversight body of the California Wildfire Fund, as a consultant to the Senate pro Tem on wildfire issues, and as a consultant to CPUC and OEIS on utility wildfire risk management. Wara has served on multiple National Academy of Sciences and California Council on Science and Technology reports.
Prior to joining Woods, Wara was an associate professor at Stanford Law School and an associate in Holland & Knight’s government practice. He received his J.D. from Stanford Law School and his Ph.D. in Ocean Sciences from the University of California at Santa Cruz. -
Dāshaun Washington
Lecturer, English
BioDāshaun Washington is a poet from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. His work has received support from the Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, and Ucross Foundation. His poems have appeared in Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He lives in San Francisco.
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Thomas A Wasow
Clarence Irving Lewis Professor in Philosophy and Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus and Academic Secretary to the University, Emeritus
BioTom Wasow joined the Stanford faculty as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy in 1973. He was educated at Reed College (BA in mathematics, 1967) and MIT (PhD in Linguistics, 1972). Between college and graduate school, he was a Fulbright fellow in Germany. Prior to coming to Stanford, he taught at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. His early research was on the theory of grammar, particularly syntax. Later, he did work in psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and sociolinguistics. He is a fellow of both the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At Stanford, he received the Dinkelspiel Award for contributions to undergraduate education, and was named a Bass Fellow in Undergraduate Education.
Wasow served as Dean of Undergraduate Studies from 1987 to 1991, as Associate Dean for Graduate Policy in the office of the Dean of Research (1996-2000), as Chair of the Faculty Senate (2003-2004), and, after retiring from the faculty, as Academic Secretary to the University (2017-2024). He also chaired the committee that created the Symbolic Systems Program, and chaired that program for a total of thirteen years between 1992 and 2015.
Aside from his work at Stanford, he has been active with organizations that provide housing and services to Bay Area people experiencing homelessness. He currently serves on the board of Abode Housing Development. -
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. -
Daniel Webber
Lecturer, Philosophy
BioDan Webber is a Lecturer in Philosophy. He received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2023, and his BA in computer science from Amherst College in 2014. His research is on moral theory, with a particular focus on puzzles arising from the tension between morality's universality (it's about taking everyone into account) and its particularity (it's about how we relate to one another as individuals).
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Risa Wechsler
Director, Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), Humanities and Sciences Professor, Professor of Physics and of Particle Physics and Astrophysics, and Senior Fellow at Stanford HAI
BioRisa Wechsler is the Humanities and Sciences Professor and the Director of the Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. She is also Professor of Physics (H&S) and Professor of Particle Physics & Astrophysics (SLAC), Director of the Center for Decoding the Universe, and an Associate Director and Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human Centered AI. She is a cosmologist whose work investigates some of the biggest outstanding 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.
