School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1,501-1,600 of 6,123 Results
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Michael Fayer
David Mulvane Ehrsam and Edward Curtis Franklin Professor of Chemistry
BioMy research group studies complex molecular systems by using ultrafast multi-dimensional infrared and non-linear UV/Vis methods. A basic theme is to understand the role of mesoscopic structure on the properties of molecular systems. Many systems have structure on length scales large compare to molecules but small compared to macroscopic dimensions. The mesoscopic structures occur on distance scales of a few nanometers to a few tens of nanometers. The properties of systems, such as water in nanoscopic environments, room temperature ionic liquids, functionalized surfaces, liquid crystals, metal organic frameworks, water and other liquids in nanoporous silica, polyelectrolyte fuel cell membranes, vesicles, and micelles depend on molecular level dynamics and intermolecular interactions. Our ultrafast measurements provide direct observables for understanding the relationships among dynamics, structure, and intermolecular interactions.
Bulk properties are frequently a very poor guide to understanding the molecular level details that determine the nature of a chemical process and its dynamics. Because molecules are small, molecular motions are inherently very fast. Recent advances in methodology developed in our labs make it possible for us to observe important processes as they occur. These measurements act like stop-action photography. To focus on a particular aspect of a time evolving system, we employ sequences of ultrashort pulses of light as the basis for non-linear methods such as ultrafast infrared two dimensional vibrational echoes, optical Kerr effect methods, and ultrafast IR transient absorption experiments.
We are using ultrafast 2D IR vibrational echo spectroscopy and other multi-dimensional IR methods, which we have pioneered, to study dynamics of molecular complexes, water confined on nm lengths scales with a variety of topographies, molecules bound to surfaces, ionic liquids, and materials such as metal organic frameworks and porous silica. We can probe the dynamic structures these systems. The methods are somewhat akin to multidimensional NMR, but they probe molecular structural evolution in real time on the relevant fast time scales, eight to ten orders of magnitude faster than NMR. We are obtaining direct information on how nanoscopic confinement of water changes its properties, a topic of great importance in chemistry, biology, geology, and materials. For the first time, we are observing the motions of molecular bound to surfaces. In biological membranes, we are using the vibrational echo methods to study dynamics and the relationship among dynamics, structure, and function. We are also developing and applying theory to these problems frequently in collaboration with top theoreticians.
We are studying dynamics in complex liquids, in particular room temperature ionic liquids, liquid crystals, supercooled liquids, as well as in influence of small quantities of water on liquid dynamics. Using ultrafast optical heterodyne detected optical Kerr effect methods, we can follow processes from tens of femtoseconds to ten microseconds. Our ability to look over such a wide range of time scales is unprecedented. The change in molecular dynamics when a system undergoes a phase change is of fundamental and practical importance. We are developing detailed theory as the companion to the experiments.
We are studying photo-induced proton transfer in nanoscopic water environments such as polyelectrolyte fuel cell membranes, using ultrafast UV/Vis fluorescence and multidimensional IR measurements to understand the proton transfer and other processes and how they are influenced by nanoscopic confinement. We want to understand the role of the solvent and the systems topology on proton transfer dynamics. -
Shaghayegh Fazliani
Ph.D. Student in Mathematics, admitted Autumn 2021
BioShaghayegh, my first name, means red poppy in Persian. Here in the US, I go with 'Shay' as a nickname since Shaghayegh might be hard to pronounce! I graduated with a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Sharif University of Technology, focusing on pure mathematics. As of September 2021, I'll be a mathematics graduate student at Stanford University.
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James Fearon
Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Current Research and Scholarly Interestspolitical violence
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Ben Feldman
Associate Professor of Physics
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHow do material properties change as a result of interactions among electrons, and what is the nature of the new phases that result? What novel physical phenomena and functionality (e.g., symmetry breaking or topological excitations) can be realized by combining materials and device elements to produce emergent behavior? How can we leverage nontraditional measurement techniques to gain new insight into quantum materials? These are some of the overarching questions we seek to address in our research.
We are interested in a variety of quantum systems, especially those composed of two-dimensional flakes and heterostructures. This class of materials has been shown to exhibit an incredible variability in their properties, with the further benefit that they are highly tunable through gating and applied fields. -
Jessica Feldman
Associate Professor of Biology
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCell differentiation requires cells to polarize, translating developmental information into cell-type specific arrangements of intracellular structures. The major goal of the research in my laboratory is to understand how cells build these functional intracellular patterns during development, specifically focusing on the molecules and mechanisms that build microtubules at cell-type specific locations and the polarity cues that guide this patterning in epithelial cells.
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Marcus Feldman
Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHuman genetic and cultural evolution, mathematical biology, demography of China
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Anne Fernald
Josephine Knotts Knowles Professor of Human Biology, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWorking with English- and Spanish-learning children from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, our research examines the importance of early language experience in supporting language development. We are deeply involved in community-based research in San Jose, designing an innovative parent-engagement program for low-resource Latino families with young children. We are also conducting field studies of beliefs about child development and caregiver-child interaction in rural villages in Senegal. A central goal of this translational research is to help parents understand their vital role in facilitating children’s language and cognitive growth.
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Russell D. Fernald
Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIn the course of evolution,two of the strongest selective forces in nature,light and sex, have left their mark on living organisms. I am interested in how the development and function of the nervous system reflects these events. We use the reproductive system to understand how social behavior influences the main system of reproductive action controlled by a collection of cells in the brain containing gonodotropin releasing hormone(GnRH)
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Brian Ferneyhough
The William H. Bonsall Professor in Music, Emeritus
BioStudies with Ton de Leeuw, Amsterdam Conservatory, and Klaus Huber, Basel Conservatory.
Awards: Mendelssohn Scholarship, 1968; Lady Holland Composition Award, Royal Academy of Music, 1967; Grand Prix du Disque, 1978 and 1982; Gaudeamus Music Week Prizes 1969 and 1970; Composition Stipend, City of Basle, 1969-71; Koussevitsky Prize 1978; Composition Stipend of Southwest German Radio, 1974-5; Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Artes et des Lettres, Paris 1984; Associate Royal Academy of Music, 1990; Royal Philharmonic Award for Chamber Music Composition, 1996; Fellow, Birmingham Conservatoire, 1995; Elected Member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, 1996; Fellow, Royal Academy of Music, 1998; Elected Corresponding Member of the Bayrische Akademie der Schönen Künste 2005.
Activities: member of International Jury ISCM, 1980 (Finland) and 1988 (Hong Kong); member jury Gaudeamus Composition Competition 1983; member of International Reading Panel, IRCAM, 1993 & 1999; member of Kranichsteiner Preis Jury, Darmstadt, 1978-96; member of board, Perspectives of New Music 1995-present.
Compositions featured throughout the world and at all the major European festivals of contemporary music. Compositions include: Fourth String Quartet, Bone Alphabet, Terrain, Allgebrah, Incipits, Unsichtbare Farben, String Trio. His opera Shadowtime was premiered as part of the Munich Biennale 2004, and has been taken to Paris, New York, Bochum and London 2004-5. In 2006, it was staged in Stockholm, Sweden. In October 2006, his orchestral piece Plötzlichkeit was premiered at the Donaueschingen Festival, Germany. His Fifth String Quartet was premiered in Witten and later played in the Aldeburgh and Salzburg Festivals.
Publications: Collected Writings, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998; POETIK, and various articles and interviews. -
Chris Field
Melvin and Joan Lane Professor of Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Director, Woods Institute for the Environment & Professor of Earth System Science, of Biology and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute and at the Precourt Institute
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch
My field is climate-change science, and my research emphasizes human-ecological interactions across many disciplines. Most studies include aspects of ecology, but also aspects of law, sociology, medicine, or engineering. -
Christian Figueroa
Undergraduate, History
BioChristian Figueroa is a native of Los Angeles County with a passion for Democratic communications.
His early communications career includes frontline Democratic Congressional campaigns, the Democratic Party, the U.S. Senate, and the Los Angeles Mayor's Office.
As one of the youngest delegates to the 2024 Democratic National Convention, Christian has been featured in on-the-record interviews with The New York Times, NPR, PBS, Los Angeles Times, CalMatters, Washington Examiner, KABC, and KTLA.
He is a third-year history candidate at Stanford University and serves on the organizing committee of the California Democratic Party. -
Paula Findlen
Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Professor, by courtesy, of French and Italian
BioI have taught the early history of science and medicine for many years on the premise that one of the most important ways to understand how science, medicine and technology have become so central to contemporary society comes from examining the process by which scientific knowledge emerged. I also take enormous pleasure in examining a kind of scientific knowledge that did not have an autonomous existence from other kinds of creative endeavors, but emerged in the context of humanistic approaches to the world (in defiance of C.P. Snow's claim that the modern world is one of "two cultures" that share very little in common). More generally, I am profoundly attracted to individuals in the past who aspired to know everything. It still seems like a worthy goal.
My other principal interest lies in understanding the world of the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Italy. I continue to be fascinated by a society that made politics, economics and culture so important to its self-definition, and that obviously succeeded in all these endeavors for some time, as the legacy of such figures as Machiavelli and Leonardo suggests. Renaissance Italy, in short, is a historical laboratory for understanding the possibilities and the problems of an innovative society. As such, it provides an interesting point of comparison to Gilded Age America, where magnates such as J.P. Morgan often described themselves as the "new Medici," and to other historical moments when politics, art and society combined fruitfully.
Finally, I have a certain interest in the relations between gender, culture and knowledge. Virginia Woolf rightfully observed at the beginning of the twentieth century that one could go to a library and find a great deal about women but very little that celebrated or supported their accomplishments. This is no longer true a century later, in large part thanks to the efforts of many scholars, male and female, who have made the work of historical women available to modern readers and who have begun to look at relations between the sexes in more sophisticated ways. Our own debates and disagreements on such issues make this subject all the more important to understand. -
Thomas Fingar
Lecturer
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsChinese domestic and foreign policy, US-China relations, US foreign policy, intelligence analysis, mega-trends and global challenges, geopolitical consequences of climate change
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Jordan Marie Finley
Undergraduate, Theater and Performance Studies
Bio2021 Transfer Cohort. Theatre & Performance Studies Major (Acting Concentration). Creative Writing Minor. Stanford Rams Head Theatrical Society. Stanford Cheer 2021. Grammy U San Francisco Chapter.
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Chelsea Finn
Assistant Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical Engineering
BioChelsea Finn is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and the William George and Ida Mary Hoover Faculty Fellow. Professor Finn's research interests lie in the ability to enable robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction. Her work lies at the intersection of machine learning and robotic control, including topics such as end-to-end learning of visual perception and robotic manipulation skills, deep reinforcement learning of general skills from autonomously collected data, and meta-learning algorithms that can enable fast learning of new concepts and behaviors. Professor Finn received her Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and her PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. Her research has been recognized through the ACM doctoral dissertation award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and the MIT Technology Review 35 under 35 list, and her work has been covered by various media outlets, including the New York Times, Wired, and Bloomberg. Throughout her career, she has sought to increase the representation of underrepresented minorities within CS and AI by developing an AI outreach camp at Berkeley for underprivileged high school students, a mentoring program for underrepresented undergraduates across three universities, and leading efforts within the WiML and Berkeley WiCSE communities of women researchers.
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Morris P. Fiorina
Wendt Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution
BioMorris P. Fiorina is the Wendt Family Professor of Political Science and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. He received an undergraduate degree from Allegheny College and a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester, and taught at Caltech and Harvard before joining Stanford in 1998. Fiorina has written widely on American politics, with special emphasis on the study of representation, public opinion and elections. He has published numerous articles and written or edited thirteen books, including: Representatives, Roll Calls, and Constituencies; Congress--Keystone of the Washington Establishment; Retrospective Voting in American National Elections; The Personal Vote (coauthored with Bruce Cain and John Ferejohn); Divided Government; Civic Engagement in American Democracy (co-edited with Theda Skocpol), Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America (with Samuel Abrams and Jeremy Pope), Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics (with Samuel Abrams), Can We Talk: The Rise of Rude, Nasty, Stubborn Politics (co-edited with Dan Shea) and most recently, Unstable Majorities. Fiorina has served on the editorial boards of a dozen journals in Political Science, Political Economy, Law, and Public Policy, and from 1986-1990 served as Chairman of the Board of Overseers of the American National Election Studies. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. He has received Career Achievement Awards from the American Political Science Association’s Organized Sections on Elections, Public Opinion, and Voting Behavior, and Political Organizations and Parties.
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Stephanie Fischer
Ph.D. Student in Earth System Science, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
Grad OCT, Hume CenterBioStephanie Fischer (she/her) is a Ph.D. Candidate with the Behavioral Decisions and the Environment group with Dr. Gabrielle Wong-Parodi, and is a Ph.D. minor with the Center for Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity. She is largely interested in community-led solutions that bolster adaptive capacity in the face of acute disasters and chronic climate hazards, and the ways culture and identity play a pivotal role in achieving holistic well-being and transformative climate justice.
Stephanie also holds a B.A. in Music Composition and a B.A. in Earth Systems (Human Environmental Systems) from Stanford University. -
Roberta Leonie Claude Fischli
Postdoctoral Scholar, Political Science
BioRoberta Fischli is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the social and political impact of artificial intelligence (AI), with a particular focus on how novel AI systems can promote personal freedom and democracy.
Roberta was previously a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google, where she worked on AI agents and value alignment. Previous research appointments include the University of California Berkeley, Georgetown University, and the University of St. Gallen. She is a research affiliate at the Machine Intelligence and Normative Theory (MINT) Lab at Australian National University, led by Seth Lazar.
Roberta holds a PhD (summa cum laude) in International Affairs and Political Economy from the University of St. Gallen. Her dissertation monograph "Freedom after Algorithms" investigates the changing role of freedom in the digital age. Her research has appeared in Perspectives on Politics, the European Journal of Political Theory, and History of Political Thought, among others. Roberta also works as a freelance journalist. -
Daniel Fisher
Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEvolutionary & ecological dynamics & diversity, microbial, expt'l, & cancer
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Ian Fisher
Humanities and Sciences Professor, Professor of Applied Physics and, by courtesy, of Materials Science and Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOur research focuses on the study of quantum materials with unconventional magnetic & electronic ground states & phase transitions. Emphasis on design and discovery of new materials. Recent focus on use of strain as a probe of, and tuning parameter for, a variety of electronic states. Interests include unconventional superconductivity, quantum phase transitions, nematicity, multipolar order, instabilities of low-dimensional materials and quantum magnetism.
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James Fishkin
Janet M. Peck Professor of International Communication, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
BioJames S. Fishkin holds the Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication at Stanford University where he is Professor of Communication, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) and Director of the Deliberative Democracy Lab.
He received his B.A. from Yale in 1970 and holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale as well as a second Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge.
He is the author of Democracy When the People Are Thinking (Oxford 2018), When the People Speak (Oxford 2009), Deliberation Day (Yale 2004 with Bruce Ackerman) and Democracy and Deliberation (Yale 1991).
He is best known for developing Deliberative Polling® – a practice of public consultation that employs random samples of the citizenry to explore how opinions would change if they were more informed. His work on deliberative democracy has stimulated more than 100 Deliberative Polls in 28 countries around the world. It has been used to help governments and policy makers make important decisions in Texas, China, Mongolia, Japan, Macau, South Korea, Bulgaria, Brazil, Uganda and other countries around the world.
He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. -
Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor, by courtesy, of African and African American Studies
BioShelley Fisher Fishkin is the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Stanford, where she is also Director of Stanford's American Studies Program and Co-Director of the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. She is the author, editor, or co-editor of forty-eight books and has published over one hundred fifty articles, essays and reviews, many of which have focused on issues of race and racism in America, and on recovering and interpreting voices that were silenced, marginalized, or ignored in America's past. Her books have won awards from Choice, Library Journal, the New York Public Library, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. Before coming to Stanford in 2003, she was chair of the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the New York Times, and twice on the front page of the New York Times Arts section. In 2017 she was awarded the John S. Tuckey Lifetime Achievement award by the Center for Mark Twain Studies in recognition of her efforts "to assure that a rigorous, dynamic account of Twain stays in the public consciousness," and stated that "Nobody has done more to recruit, challenge, and inspire new generations and new genres of Mark Twain studies." Her most recent book, Writing America: Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee, came out in 2017. Junot Díaz called it "a triumph of scholarship and passion, a profound exploration of the many worlds which comprise our national canon....a book that redraws the literary map of the United States."
She has served as President of the American Studies Association and the Mark Twain Circle of America, was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and was a founding editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. She has given keynote talks at conferences in Beijing, Cambridge, Coimbra, Copenhagen, Dublin, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Kunming, Kyoto, La Coruña, Lisbon, Mainz, Nanjing, Regensburg, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Taipei, Tokyo, and across the U.S.
In June 2019, the American Studies Association created a new prize, the "Shelley Fisher Fishkin Prize for International Scholarship in Transnational American Studies." The prize honors publications by scholars outside the United States that present original research in transnational American Studies. In its announcement of the new award, the ASA said, "Shelley Fisher Fishkin's leadership in creating a crossoads for international scholarly collaboration and exchange has transformed the field of American Studies in both theory and practice. This award honors Professor Fishkin's outstanding dedication to the field by promoting exceptional scholarship that seeks multiple perspectives that enable comprehensive and complex approaches to American Studies, and which produce culturally, socially, and politically significant insights and interpretations relevant to Americanists around the world." In 2023 the Ameriican Studies Association awarded Fishkin the "Bode-Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Outstanding Contribution to the field of American Studies." Her most recent book is "Jim (Huckleberry Finn's Comrade)" published (2025) in Yale University Press's "Black Lives" biography series. Current projects include a book about Hal Holbrook and Mark Twain. -
Lazar Fleishman
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature
BioLazar Fleishman studied at a music school and the Music Academy in Riga, Latvia before graduating from Latvian State University in 1966. His first scholarly papers (on Pushkin, the Russian elegy, and Boris Pasternak) were published during his university years. He emigrated to Israel in 1974, where his academic career began at the Department for Russian Studies and the Department of Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was co-founder and co-editor of the series Slavica Hierosolymitana: Slavic Studies of Hebrew University (1977-1984). He was Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1978-1979; 1980-1981), The University of Texas at Austin (1981-1982), Harvard, and Yale (1984-1985) before joining the Stanford faculty in 1985. He also taught at the Russian State University for the Humanities, Princeton, Latvian State University, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic), and the University of Vienna, Austria. His research interests encompass the history of 19th and 20th century Russian literature (especially, Pushkin, Pasternak, and Russian modernism); poetics; literary theory; 20th-century Russian history; Russian émigré literature, journalism and culture. He is the founder of the series Stanford Slavic Studies (1987-present), editor of the series Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures and History (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2007-present) and co-editor of the series Verbal Art: Studies in Poetics (Fordham, formerly Stanford University Press).
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Ayana Omilade Flewellen
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioAyana Omilade Flewellen (they/she) is a Black Feminist, an archaeologist, an artist scholar, and a storyteller. As a scholar of anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies, Flewellen's intellectual genealogy is shaped by critical theory rooted in Black feminist epistemology and pedagogy. This epistemological backdrop not only constructs the way they design, conduct, and produce their scholarship but acts as foundational to how she advocates for greater diversity within the field of archaeology and within the broader scope of academia. Flewellen is the co-founder and current Board Chair of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. In July 2022, they joined the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University as an Assistant Professor. Her research and teaching interests address Black Feminist Theory, historical archaeology, memory, maritime heritage conservation, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, and representations of slavery and its afterlives. Flewellen has been featured in National Geographic, Science Magazine, PBS, and CNN; and regularly presents her work at institutions including The National Museum for Women in the Arts.
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James Flynn
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2023
Master of Arts Student in Religious Studies, admitted Autumn 2024Current Research and Scholarly InterestsJames Flynn is a PhD student in Ancient History. He focuses on the political, economic, and religious history of ancient Greece, and on connections with other contemporary societies, particularly ancient India. He is interested in the role of religion in legitimizing political institutions from a comparative perspective, and in the subordination of religion to political authority in the Greek poleis. For his undergraduate thesis at Brown, he compared trends among Hellenistic philosophers and Indian ascetics of withdrawal from society. For his Master’s capstone project at Yale, he wrote about the historical impact of climate change on 1st century BCE South Asia. He is concurrently pursing a second MA in religious studies, with a focus on Indian religions, and he studies the languages Sanskrit and Pali in addition to Latin and Greek. He is interested in using epigraphy and papyrology for historical sources. He is also interested in applying social scientific methods to large, cross-cultural datasets, looking for long-term trends in ancient history.
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Kate Folk
Lecturer
BioKate Folk is the author of a novel, Sky Daddy (Random House 2025), and a short story collection, Out There (Random House 2022). Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, n+1, One Story, Granta, and The Baffler, among other venues. A 2019-2021 Stegner Fellow, she’s also received fellowships from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR. She is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University.
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Sean Follmer
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Computer Science
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHuman Computer Interaction, Haptics, Robotics, Human Centered Design
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Debra Fong
Academic Staff Hourly, Music
BioViolinist Debra Fong is Concertmaster of the Peninsula Symphony, Associate Concertmaster of the San Jose Chamber Orchestra, and Principal Second Violinist of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra. She spends her summers as a first violinist with the Grammy Award-winning Santa Fe Opera Orchestra.
Also dedicated teacher, Debra is a Lecturer in Music at Stanford University, teaching violin and chamber music, and she maintains a private violin studio. She is a faculty coach for Young Chamber Musicians, a guest conductor for the Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra, and a judge for several annual young artist concerto competitions. Debra is a former violin faculty member at The College of William & Mary, The Music Institute of Chicago, and New England Conservatory of Music Preparatory School.
Debra received her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees in Violin Performance with Honors and Distinction from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she studied with Eric Rosenblith, James Buswell, Eugene Lehner, and Louis Krasner.
Debra has been a featured chamber musician at Toronto Summer Music; Bay Chamber Concerts in Maine; Grand Teton Music Festival; Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival; Yellow Barn Chamber Music Festival in Vermont; Sarasota Music Festival; and Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in Connecticut. She has been a guest artist with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Chicago Chamber Musicians, North American New Music Festival in Buffalo, NY, and the New Music Festival at Santa Clara University. Debra is an avid proponent of contemporary music and has worked closely with composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Thomas Adès, Joan Tower, Bright Sheng, and Kaija Saariaho.
Debra's discography includes recordings with The Santa Fe Opera, indie pop vocalist Vienna Teng, Stanford Chamber Chorale, composer John Luther Adams, Mannheim Steamroller, and she has performed on numerous film soundtracks.
Debra plays a Giuseppe Rocca violin kindly on loan from Stanford University’s Harry R. Lange Instrument Collection. In her leisure time, Debra enjoys reading modern fiction, practicing yoga, playing word games, and seeking out excellent coffee. -
Vivienne Fong
Director of Programs and Faculty Affairs, SIEPR Operations
Current Role at StanfordDirector of Programs and Faculty Affairs
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Charlotte Fonrobert
Associate Professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, of Classics and of German Studies
BioCharlotte Elisheva Fonrobert specializes in Judaism: talmudic literature and culture. Her interests include gender in Jewish culture; the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity; the discourses of orthodoxy versus heresy; the connection between religion and space; and rabbinic conceptions of Judaism with respect to GrecoRoman culture. She is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender(2000), which won the Salo Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish Studies of that year and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Scholarship. She also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007), together with Martin Jaffee (University of Washington). Currently, she is working on a manuscript entitled Replacing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and the Neighborhood.
