Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Showing 211-220 of 231 Results
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Erika Veidis
Casual - Non-Exempt, Human and Planetary Health
Staff, Human and Planetary HealthBioErika Veidis is the Planetary Health Program Manager for the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health. Before joining the CIGH team, she spent three years at the Planetary Health Alliance, a non-profit organization housed at Harvard University focused on understanding and addressing the intersections between global environmental challenges and public health. In this role, she managed a global network of universities, NGOs, research institutes, and government entities and led community engagement, outreach, and education efforts. In addition to her work with the PHA, Erika conducted research in environmental economics, with a particular focus on microplastics and grassroots campaigns targeting relevant governmental and corporate policies, and worked in regenerative agriculture in rural Wisconsin. Most recently, Erika helped to launch a project highlighting Indigenous place names across California with the California Institute for Community, Art & Nature. Erika graduated from Harvard in 2015 with a BA in Government and Mind/Brain/Behavior, holds an MBA from Cal Poly, and serves on the board of the Harvard Alumni for Agriculture and Food.
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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
Education Advisor, Human and Planetary Health
Staff, Human and Planetary HealthBioKatie Vogelheim is an Education Advisor to 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 biosensors, information storage and spintronics. His research and inventions span across a variety of areas including 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 hierarchical and multiscale weather and climate models in combination with space-borne and in situ measurements to address those scientific questions. Dr. Wang 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
Senior Research Scholar
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 of post docs, legal fellows and graduate students 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 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 mitigation, energy innovation, and regulated industries. 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 the California, as a member of the California Catastrophe 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. He is also a member of the Tamalpais Design Review Board.
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 and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
On Leave from 01/01/2025 To 06/30/2025BioBarry 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. -
Leif Wenar
Olive H. Palmer Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science
BioLeif Wenar is a political philosopher. After receiving his AB at Stanford, he earned his PhD at Harvard, worked in Britain, and returned to Stanford in 2020.
He is the author of Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules that Run the World and the author-meets-critics volume Beyond Blood Oil: Philosophy, Policy, and the Future. He is also the author of the entries for ‘John Rawls’ and ‘Rights’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. His articles have appeared in Mind, Analysis, Philosophy & Public Affairs, Ethics, The Journal of Political Philosophy, The Columbia Law Review, and The Philosopher’s Annual. He co-edited Giving Well: The Ethics of Philanthropy, as well as an autobiographical volume by the economist FA Hayek.
He has been a Visiting Professor at the Stanford Center on Ethics and Society, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the William H. Bonsall Visiting Professor in the Stanford Philosophy Department, a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow and a Visiting Professor at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, a Visiting Professor at the Princeton Department of Politics, a Fellow of the Program on Justice and the World Economy at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Affairs at The Murphy Institute of Political Economy, and a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University School of Philosophy.
His public writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, and the playbill for the White Light Festival at Lincoln Center. In London, he served for several years on the Mayor’s Policing Ethics Panel, which advises the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police on issues such as digital surveillance and the use of force.
He is currently developing unity theory, a foundational account of what makes for more valuable lives, relationships, and societies. His published work can be found at wenar.info.