Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Showing 201-220 of 233 Results
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Jenny Suckale
Associate Professor of Geophysics and, Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment
BioMy research group studies disasters to reduce the risk they pose. We approach this challenge by developing customized mathematical models that can be tested against observational data and are informed by community needs through a scientific co-production process. We intentionally work on extremes across different natural systems rather than focusing on one specific natural system to identify both commonalities in the physical processes driving extremes and in the best practices for mitigating risk at the community level. Our current research priorities include volcanic eruptions, ice-sheet instability, permafrost disintegration, induced seismicity and flood-risk mitigation. I was recently awarded the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers and the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.
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James Sweeney
Professor of Management Science & Engineering, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDeterminants of energy efficiency opportunities, barriers, and policy options. Emphasis on behavioral issues, including personal, corporate, or organizational. Behavior may be motivated by economic incentives, social, or cultural factors, or more generally, by a combination of these factors. Systems analysis questions of energy use.
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Paul Switzer
Professor of Statistics and of Environmental Earth System Science, Emeritus
BioDr. Switzer's research interests are in the development of statistical tools for the environmental sciences. Recent research has focused on the interpretation of environmental monitoring data, design of monitoring networks, detection of time trends in environmental and climatic paramenters, modeling of human exposure to pollutants, statistical evaluation of numerical climate models and error estimation for spatial mapping.
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Sindy Tang
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Radiology and of Bioengineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProf. Sindy K.Y. Tang develops engineering platforms that measure biological systems and convert these measurements into quantitative datasets. Her research focuses on experimental systems that probe biological processes across cellular and tissue scales, particularly how physical context—geometry, mechanics, and spatial organization—shapes biological function. Current work spans immune diagnostics, spatial tissue sampling for multi-omics analysis, and single-cell perturbation studies.
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Clyde Tatum
Obayashi Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus
BioTatum's teaching interests are construction engineering and technical construction. His research focuses on construction process knowledge and integration and innovation in construction.
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Leif Thomas
Professor of Earth System Science and, by courtesy, of Oceans
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPhysical oceanography; theory and numerical modeling of the ocean circulation; dynamics of ocean fronts and vortices; upper ocean processes; air-sea interaction.
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Barton Thompson
Robert E. Paradise Professor of Natural Resources Law, Professor of Environmental Social Sciences and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment
BioA global expert on water and natural resources, Barton “Buzz” Thompson focuses on how to improve resource management through legal, institutional, and technological innovation. He was the founding Perry L. McCarty Director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, where he remains a Senior Fellow and directs the Water in the West program. He also has been a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies, and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He founded the law school’s Environmental and Natural Resources Program. He also is a faculty member in Stanford’s Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER).
Professor Thompson served as Special Master for the United States Supreme Court in Montana v. Wyoming, an interstate water dispute involving the Yellowstone River system. He also is a former member of the Science Advisory Board of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. He chairs the boards of the Resources Legacy Fund and the Stanford Habitat Conservation Board, is a California trustee of The Nature Conservancy, and is a board member of the American Farmland Trust, the Sonoran Institute, and the Santa Lucia Conservancy.
Professor Thompson is of counsel to the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers, where he specializes in water resources and was a partner prior to joining Stanford Law School. He also serves as an advisor to a major impact investment fund. He was a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist ’52 (BA ’48, MA ’48) of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Joseph T. Sneed of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. -
Shripad Tuljapurkar
The Dean and Virginia Morrison Professor of Population Studies
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsStochastic dynamics of human and natural populations; prehistoric societies; probability forecasts including sex ratios, mortality, aging and fiscal balance; life history evolution.
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Erika Veidis
Staff, Human and Planetary Health
Strategic Initiatives Advisor, Human and Planetary HealthBioErika Veidis is the Strategic Initiatives Advisor for the Stanford Center for Human and Planetary Health, where she supports a range of efforts focused on community engagement, outreach, education, and impact. Prior to this role, Erika directed the forestry program at the Tahoe Truckee Community Foundation, where she led funding and capacity-building initiatives focused on forest restoration and wildfire resilience, and served as program manager for the Stanford Center for Human and Planetary Health and Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, where she led policy influence and strategic communications initiatives, coordinated research and outreach programs, and designed and implemented curricula for undergraduate and graduate students in planetary health and environmental systems thinking. Erika also previously built and managed a global network of 200+ universities, NGOs, research institutes, and government entities investigating the linkages between global environmental change and public health through the Planetary Health Alliance.
Erika has published on the health and social dimensions of climate change and other environmental challenges, ranging from wildfires to plastic pollution to heat stress. She graduated from Harvard University in 2015 with a BA in Government and Mind/Brain/Behavior, where she studied the sociological determinants of community resilience and adaptation responses, particularly in response to economic and political stress, and obtained an MBA from the California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo in 2016, where she focused on environmental economics, nonprofit and philanthropic strategy, and corporate sustainability. -
Peter Vitousek
Clifford G. Morrison Professor of Population and Resource Studies and Professor of Earth System Science, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsVitousek's research interests include: evaluating the global cycles of nitrogen and phosphorus, and how they are altered by human activity; understanding how the interaction of land and culture contributed to the sustainability of Hawaiian (and other Pacific) agriculture and society before European contact; and working to make fertilizer applications more efficient and less environmentally damaging (especially in rapidly growing economies)
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Katie Vogelheim
Ecopreneurship Summer Innovation Coach, Graduate School of Business - Center for Entrepreneurial Studies
Education Advisor, Human and Planetary Health
Staff, Human and Planetary HealthBioKatie Vogelheim is an Education Advisor and Lecturer at the Human and Planetary Health (HPH) Center at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, where she has designed a series of project-based courses—HPH Action Labs—focused on tackling complex climate and sustainability challenges. She also serves as an Innovation Coach for the Stanford Ecopreneurship program, mentoring entrepreneurial student teams in the early stages of product and market development. Through these roles, Katie actively supports student education and mentorship in developing innovative solutions to address climate change.
With a 30-year business career spanning multiple industries, Katie has been directing funding since 2010 toward global nature-based solutions and early-stage companies committed to sustainability. From 2020 to 2022, she was a Distinguished Career Institute Fellow at Stanford, concentrating on sustainability, climate, and energy.
Katie collaborates across campus to develop curriculum and connect resources that advance human and planetary health initiatives. She also holds additional affiliations, serving on the Board of Dean’s Advisers at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, the Harvard Data Science Initiative, and Conservation International’s Science and Leadership Councils. -
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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Shan X. Wang
Leland T. Edwards Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering and, by courtesy, of Radiology (Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford)
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsShan Wang was named the Leland T. Edwards Professor in the School of Engineering in 2018. He directs the Center for Magnetic Nanotechnology and is a leading expert in Edge AI, biosensors, information storage and spintronics. His research and inventions span across a variety of areas including Edge AI, magnetic biochips, in vitro diagnostics, cancer biomarkers, magnetic nanoparticles, magnetic sensors, magnetoresistive random access memory, and magnetic integrated inductors.
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Yuan Wang
Assistant Professor of Earth System Science and Center Fellow, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment
BioYuan Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth System Science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He is also a Center Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment. Prior to joining Stanford, he was an Associate Professor at Purdue University and a research scientist at California Institute of Technology. His research group aims to advance the understanding of the physical and chemical interactions between atmospheric constituents and climate change. Specifically, his group conducts research related to aerosol-cloud-radiation interactions and their climatic implications, aerosol properties and haze formation, cloud and precipitation microphysics, and the assessment of the greenhouse gas and aerosol forcings on the atmosphere, ocean, and cryosphere. They develop and use multiscale numerical and AI models in combination with space-borne and in situ measurements to address those scientific questions. Yuan is a recipient of the James B. Macelwane Medal and James R. Holton Award from the American Geophysical Union, the Henry G. Houghton Award from the American Meteorological Society, and the CAREER Award from National Science Foundation.
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Michael Wara
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. -
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. -
Barry R. Weingast
Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
BioBarry R. Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor, Department of Political Science, and a Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution. He served as Chair, Department of Political Science, from 1996 through 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Weingast’s research focuses on the political foundation of markets, economic reform, and regulation. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism and decentralization, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. Weingast is co-author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass C. North and John Joseph Wallis, 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Analytic Narratives (1998, Princeton). He edited (with Donald Wittman) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006). Weingast has won numerous awards, including the William H. Riker Prize, the Heinz Eulau Prize (with Ken Shepsle), the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz), and the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics.
