Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Showing 1-100 of 441 Results
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Ammar Alali
Ph.D. Student in Energy Science and Engineering, admitted Autumn 2023
BioI'm Ammar, a PhD student in Energy Science Engineering who is working with Hamdi Tchelepi. I got my master's degree from Stanford in 2018, and since then I have been working with Aramco as part of the development teams of two projects for Underground Gas Storage and CCUS to be developed for the first time in Saudi Arabia. My masters research was focused on numerical reservoir simulation of capillary-dominated flow in matrix-fracture systems using interface conditions. In my free time, I enjoy reading modern poetry and watching classic films.
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Anela Arifi
Ph.D. Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Autumn 2020
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAnela researches the nexus between engineering, socio-economic, policy, and environmental components of energy systems. She currently focuses on the characterization of the scale and pace of integrating different energy systems with natural climate solutions.
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Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Ph.D. Student in Geological Sciences, admitted Autumn 2022
BioI'm interested in how mass extinctions affect different types of animals, and more broadly how animals respond to their environments in general. Half of my work involves experiments to better understand the differential responses of bivalves and brachiopods to temperature-dependent hypoxia and to euxinia in settings that mimic those at the end-Permian mass extinction. The other half uses the metabolic index to explore early animal evolution and modern ecophysiology.
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Oluwafunmibi Asunmonu
Masters Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Spring 2025
Master of Arts Student in International Policy, admitted Autumn 2024BioOluwafunmibi Asunmonu is a driving force behind rural food security and resilience and has spent 3.5 years securing sustainable, catalytic financing for the climate adaptation of over 1M of the most vulnerable rural households in Africa while contributing to the development of scalable agricultural risk management solutions.
She advocates designing adaptable climate financing models for further vulnerable groups (women and youth). She has made significant contributions as a two-time speaker at the annual AGRF Summit and the AYuTe Africa Summit, a delegate at the World Bank Youth Summit and the UN ECOSOC Youth Forum, and a participant in the Nigeria National Economic Council meeting on Food Security held in the Presidential Villa. Additionally, she has contributed to technical agri-financing reports published by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Shell Foundation.
Funded by the Swiss Re Foundation, she graduated with a BA(Hons) in International Business and Trade as the Best Graduating Student from the African Leadership University, where she co-founded an Initiative that won the Queen’s Young Leader Award and interned with KPMG, Andersen, and GTB. At Stanford, she plans to leverage the innovation and exposure it offers to design improved climate-adaptation investment models.
Oluwafunmibi enjoys hiking and playing sudoku. -
Folasade Ayoola
Ph.D. Student in Energy Science and Engineering, admitted Spring 2019
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDeep decarbonization of large-scale energy systems, exploring low-carbon transition pathway alternatives for oil-dependent countries, with a focus on Nigeria.
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Alexander Basaraba
Ph.D. Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Autumn 2024
BioAlex Basaraba (he/him) is an interdisciplinary researcher, practitioner, educator, and science-informed visual storyteller working at the interstice between people, the environment, and the climate. Building on an academic foundation in the social and natural sciences, he has more than 10 years of domestic and international experience working to bridge the gap between research and practice to create more just outcomes to a changing climate. His experience includes supporting communities domestically and internationally, as well as organizations and governments at all levels (federal, state, Tribal, city, and county) in preparing for and responding to the impacts of climate change, including: the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Shoshone-Paiute Tribes, the District of Columbia, among others. Basaraba is currently a PhD student at Stanford University in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at the Doerr School of Sustainability. His current research focuses on transforming climate adaptation and resilience policy, research, and practice towards more just outcomes using community-engaged social science research methods. Beyond publishing dozens of white papers, policy reports, government plans, academic journal articles, and popular media articles, Basaraba is a contributing author on the forthcoming 6th National Climate Assessment.
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Isabela Beine
Masters Student in Energy Science and Engineering, admitted Autumn 2024
BioResearching hydrogen storage in porous media. Interest in energy storage solutions for renewable energy sources.
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Samantha Bents
Ph.D. Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Autumn 2024
BioSamantha Bents (she/her/hers) is an E-IPER PhD student interested in studying the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases across changing temporal and spatial scales. She plans to investigate how these dynamics can be leveraged to design public health interventions targeting inequities in both the built and natural environment. Prior to beginning her PhD, she was a researcher at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Fogarty International Center (FIC) NIH where her work focused on predictive disease modeling. She holds a B.A. from Princeton University in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology with a concentration in Global Health and Health Policy.
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Hilary Brumberg
Ph.D. Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Autumn 2024
BioHilary Brumberg (she/her) is a PhD student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER) at Stanford. She is an interdisciplinary environmental scientist, conservation practitioner, and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow (NSF GRFP) with extensive experience researching and implementing Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) across the tropics. She studies socioeconomic, financial, political, and ecological dimensions of NCS implementation. Hilary spent four years managing community-based restoration projects while living at a research station deep in the Costa Rican rainforest, originally as a Princeton in Latin America Fellow. She has consulted for diverse international conservation organizations, including The Nature Conservancy (TNC), World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Governors' Forest and Climate Task Force. Her work has been featured in National Geographic, Living on Earth on NPR, Mongabay Latam, and NASA DEVELOP. Hilary holds an M.S. in Environmental Studies with a Data Science Statistics Certificate from the University of Colorado Boulder as a USDA NNF Fellow, as well as a B.A. in Earth Science and Spanish from Wesleyan University.
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Stephanie Caddell
Ph.D. Student in Oceans, admitted Autumn 2024
Graduate Student Coordinator, Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability - Dean's OfficeBioStephanie Caddell graduated with a bachelor's degree in environmental science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with minors in marine science and environmental justice. While at UNC, she researched marine microbiology, fisheries dynamics, and marine ecosystem dynamics in Ecuador and the Galapagos. Additionally, she has researched bycatch mitigation efforts in the North Atlantic for sea turtle species with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Now working on her PhD in the Oceans Department under the mentorship of Dr. Larry Crowder and Dr. Nicole Ardoin, Stephanie is interested in understanding how to implement transdisciplinary solutions to marine management in coastal and island systems to ensure effective protection measures for marine migratory species, reduce interactions between pelagic species and fishing operations, and ensure sustainable resource usage for human communities. She aims to understand how to bring together local community knowledge with that of science to inform more productive policy and management strategies.
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Catherine (Hay) Callas
Ph.D. Student in Energy Resources Engineering, admitted Spring 2020
BioCatherine Callas is a Ph.D. candidate in the Benson Lab in Energy Resources Engineering. She is an ExxonMobil Emerging Energy Fellow, and her research is focused on offshore carbon capture and sequestration in the Gulf Coast. She obtained her M.S. degree in the Atmosphere and Energy program within Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from Brown University. Before attending Stanford, she worked as a Financial Analyst within the Fixed Income group at Goldman Sachs in New York City for three years. She was a Schneider Fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco where she analyzed the impact of the 2017 Northern California wildfires and 2018 Camp Fire on retail rates within PG&E’s service territory.
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Eeshan Chaturvedi
Ph.D. Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Autumn 2022
BioEeshan is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Climate Governance, and its correlations with policy, law, and earth systems. He holds an LLM in Environmental Law and Policy from Stanford Law School and has since worked with various domestic and international organizations on legal and management issues. In academia, he has held positions of Assistant Dean and Professor of Environmental Governance and continues to engage with the various stakeholders in the space.
He enjoys discussions on neuroscience, astrophysics, and geo-politics in his free time. -
Zhenlin Chen
Ph.D. Student in Energy Science and Engineering, admitted Summer 2023
BioZhenlin (Richard) Chen is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford's Adam Brandt lab, focuses on greenhouse gas emissions from oil and gas. His work primarily revolves around evaluating ground sensor technologies for methane detection and quantification ability. His methodological approach blends engineering principles, field data collection, and applied statistics. Chen is exploring AI-driven frameworks, particularly large language models, to refine energy data extraction and enhance the OPGEE model through private data fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. His emphasis remains on domain-specific tasks, aiming for efficiency in terms of latency and cost. He pursued his undergraduate studies in environmental science at Cornell University and holds a master's in Atmosphere and Energy Engineering from Stanford.
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Pedro Cintra
Ph.D. Student in Environmental Social Sciences, admitted Autumn 2025
BioTrained as a physicist until my MSc, in which I worked with neutrino detection of core collapse supernovae, I recently switched fields to apply mathematical and computational models to ecological and social systems :)
On the ecological side, I like working with individual based models for cooperation and foraging strategies from an evolutionary perspective. On the social side, I am currently interested in the evolution of cultural values on groups of humans and polarization of opinions on networks of contacts. -
Dylan Marshall Crain
Ph.D. Student in Energy Resources Engineering, admitted Autumn 2022
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy current research revolves around optimizing the monitoring design of Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) projects in such a way that the posterior (after data assimilation) predictions are as close to reality as can be hoped for.
In CCS projects within the U.S., it is important to have monitoring plan, which can consist of wells with pressure, saturation, salinity, et cetera sensors, seismic lines, or gravimetric above-ground measurements, before any injection has begun into the subsurface. This is due to the permitting requirements that must be satisfied before operations are begun.
Due to this constraint, any monitoring optimization (at least initially) needs to be determined using only a prior (highly uncertain) understanding of the subsurface. This makes the optimization much more challenging. We utilize a prior optimization scheme from a previous student which allows us to optimize a monitoring plan using only prior information to get the minimized, expected uncertainty reduction in the posterior models for a given quantity of interest. This scheme is limited by some Gaussian assumptions. We optimize it using a genetic algorithm.
From this point, with the monitoring plan established, the information gathered from the optimized monitoring scheme (using only monitoring wells at the moment) is used to history match (data assimilate) our understanding of the subsurface. The results can be used to predict the CO2 plume flow and behavior into the future.
This work was initially developed to assist a project in Illinois that is currently seeking Class VI injection well permits in the self-same state in order to begin injecting CO2 produced from two companies paying for the work from the Illinois Geological Survey. -
Iván Deiana
Ph.D. Student in Geophysics, admitted Autumn 2023
BioPh.D. student in Geophysics at Stanford Earth Imaging Project (SEP). Research interests include Geophysical Inverse Problems, Quantitative Interpretation, and Earth Imaging, integrated with HPC and ML.
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Victoria Dinov
Masters Student in Energy Science and Engineering, admitted Autumn 2025
BioHi, my name is Vicky and I am a graduate student at Stanford studying energy science and engineering. At Stanford, I worked in the INES research group, focused primarily on creating a capacity expansion model with improved spatial, temporal, and geographical resolution.
I am passionate about capacity expansion and transmission planning, power markets, utility rate structure, load forecasting, microgrids and more. I am also curious to explore the ways in which we will harness DERs and technological tools at our fingertips to create more resilient communities and energy systems. This can have broad implications for developing regions and more generally energy scarce areas.
Outside of school, you will find me running, climbing, backpacking, skiing, etc. I like everything outdoors, have an affinity for art/music, and love to salsa too. Please message me with questions or just to connect! -
Devin Dollery
Ph.D. Student in Oceans, admitted Autumn 2023
Masters Student in Oceans, admitted Autumn 2024BioI am interested in computational simulations of the natural world - focusing on developing models of ocean physics to predict the ocean's role in climate variability. At Stanford, my PhD research commencing in Autumn 2023 with Prof Fringer seeks to model and understand the interaction of surface and internal waves. This relationship will be correlated to satellite imagery of ocean surface roughness to infer stratification for assimilation into ocean models.
My professional background started in civil engineering and coastal processes modeling. I received an MSc in computational mechanics at the University of Cape Town (2018) - formulating and implementing a multiscale FEM model for cardiac tissue. Most recently, I was a scientific software developer adding parallelized tools and functionality to the ocean modeling software, UCLA ROMS, at the University of California, Los Angeles. -
Erinn Drage
Ph.D. Student in Environmental Social Sciences, admitted Autumn 2025
BioErinn Drage is an environmental filmmaker, conservation social scientist, and outdoor adventure guide from Canmore, Alberta. In addition to her primary work in international conservation policy, she has guided expeditions in the Arctic and Antarctica and written, edited, and directed award-winning documentary films. Her past scientific research has included studying nature-based tourism economies in Alaska and social well-being, human rights, and conservation in Kanungu, Uganda. At Stanford, Erinn is exploring the political and economic dimensions of biodiversity conservation, with a focus on community-led stewardship and the role of human institutions in shaping conservation outcomes. When not pursuing her intellectual passions around conservation, she can usually be found trail running, mountain biking, or backcountry skiing in the nearest mountain ranges.