Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Showing 721-730 of 1,466 Results
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Chirag Kumar
Ph.D. Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Autumn 2025
BioChirag Kumar combines next-generation modeling tools with on-the-ground field research to provide actionable strategies that improve human health amidst environmental and migratory uncertainty. He is interested in causally unraveling the environmental factors driving infectious diseases to inform targeted interventions that mitigate those threats and how those insights can be directly shared with the public to empower individual-level change. To unravel complex human-environment-health systems, he has conducted on-the-ground field work and mechanistic biological analyses to provide key inputs into his models. His findings have been used to advocate for new World Health Organization vaccine recommendations against antimicrobial-resistant pathogens. Chirag previously served as a Biden-Harris US Digital Corps Data Fellow at the US CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics and on the Biden administration’s White House AI Forum. He graduated from Princeton University as a Smith-Newton Environmental Research Scholar where he concentrated in chemistry with minors in applied math, global health, and quantitative biology. He is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.
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Angelle Desiree LaBeaud
Professor of Pediatrics (Infectious Diseases), Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Epidemiology and Population Health and of Environmental Social Sciences
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsArthropod-borne viruses are emerging and re-emerging infections that are spreading throughout the world. Our laboratory investigates the epidemiology of arboviral infections, focusing on the burden of disease and the long-term complications on human health. In particular, Dr. LaBeaud investigates dengue, chikungunya, and Rift Valley fever viruses in Kenya, where outbreaks cause fever, arthritis, retinitis, encephalitis, and hemorrhagic fever. Our main research questions focus on the risk factors for arboviral infections, the development of diagnostic tests that can be administered in the field to quickly determine what kind of arboviral infection a person has, and the genetic and immunologic investigation of why different people respond differently to the same infection. Our long-term goals are to contribute to a deeper understanding of arboviral infections and their long-term health consequences and to optimize control strategies to prevent these emerging infections. Our laboratory also investigates the effects of antenatal and postnatal parasitic infections on vaccine responses, growth, and development of Kenyan children.
My lab at Stanford supports the field work that is ongoing in Kenya, but we also have several projects that are based locally. We strive to improve diagnostics of arboviral infections and are using Luminex technology to build a new screening assay. We also have created a Luminex based platform to assess vaccine responses against multiple pathogens. -
Ching-Yao Lai
Assistant Professor of Geophysics
BioMy group attacks fundamental questions in fluid dynamics and geophysics by integrating mathematical and machine-learned models with observational data. We use our findings to address challenges facing the world, such as advancing our scientific knowledge of ice dynamics under climate change. The length scale of the systems we are interested in varies broadly from a few microns to thousands of kilometers, because the governing physical principles are often universal across a range of length and time scales. We use mathematical models, simulations, and machine learning to study the complex interactions between fluids and elasticity and their interfacial dynamics, such as multiphase flows, flows in deformable structures, and cracks. We extend our findings to tackle emerging topics in climate science and geophysics, such as understand the missing physics that governs the flow of ice sheets in a warming climate. We welcome collaborations across disciplinary lines, from geophysics, engineering, physics, applied math to computer science, since we believe combining expertise and methodologies across fields is crucial for new discoveries.
