Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Showing 21-30 of 115 Results
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Veronica Frans
Postdoctoral Scholar, Oceans
BioVeronica is a quantitative ecologist and science communicator focused on understanding biodiversity-human relationships within the contexts of conservation, sustainability, and ecological theory. She advances methods in ecological and synthesis research by creating innovative, open-source databases, modeling tools, and frameworks that have been widely adopted for conservation and industrial applications. Her award-winning research has been published in leading journals such as Methods in Ecology & Evolution and Nature Ecology & Evolution, and has consistently gained global media attention, being featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Smithsonian Magazine.
Veronica earned a dual Ph.D. in Fisheries & Wildlife and Ecology, Evolution, & Behavior from Michigan State University in 2024. She also holds a dual M.Sc. in International Nature Conservation from Göttingen University (Germany) and Lincoln University (New Zealand). She has studied and worked in many places around the world—from as far north as Alaska’s Bering Sea, to as far south as the Falkland Islands. Speaking six languages, her international experiences and relationships with diverse communities inform her research on coupled human-natural systems at local to global scales.
Veronica is a Stanford Science Fellow and National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Biology at Hopkins Marine Station (Doerr School of Sustainability). Her faculty host is Fiorenza Micheli, the David and Lucile Packard Professor of Marine Science, Chair of the Oceans Department, and Co-Director of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions. For her postdoctoral research, Veronica is developing a novel framework for predicting human-wildlife relationships under global change. -
Laura Frouté
Postdoctoral Scholar, Energy Science and Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsLaura is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, working on subsurface engineering solutions for the energy transition. Part of her research focuses on replicating geological hydrogen production in the laboratory and identifying and mitigating reactivity constraints at the microscale. Her research also focuses on investigating carbon storage into various basalt formations by measuring their carbon mineralization potential. Her expertise includes designing laboratory-scale pilots and conducting research on rock formations in the context of hydrocarbon production, carbon storage, and hydrogen production to understand the interplay of geochemistry, reaction mechanisms and complex storage and transport processes across length scales. To study the evolution of porous media properties following reaction or transport experiments, she uses a wide spectrum of multiscale, multimodal material characterization techniques (sorption, XRD, XRF, μCT, FIB-SEM, TEM). She holds a MS in Chemical Engineering from ENSIC (France) and a PhD in Energy Science and Engineering from Stanford University. Her interests range from subsurface engineering, fluid flow in porous media, to environmental and regulatory issues in the oil & gas industry, CCUS, climate solutions and energy policy.
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Melanie Gittard
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am an applied environmental and development economist studying the impacts of climate change and water pollution in sub-Saharan Africa.
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David Gögl
Graduate Visiting Researcher Student, Energy Science and Engineering
BioDavid Gögl is a Visiting Student Researcher in the STEER group at Stanford University, where he works under the supervision of Julia Frohmann and Sally Benson.
His background is in energy system optimization, open-source energy system modeling, and the dynamics of European power markets.
David obtained his bachelor's and master's degree in Mechanical Engineering at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. -
Tianyang Guo (郭天阳)
Postdoctoral Scholar, Geological Sciences
BioDr. Tianyang Guo earned his Ph.D. degree in Rock Mechanics from the Department of Earth Sciences, the University of Hong Kong in 2020. He earned his bachelor's and master’s degree from Wuhan University (WHU) in 2013 and 2016, respectively. He was awarded the National Scholarship for Graduate in 2015 and graduated from WHU as an outstanding graduate. Before joining Stanford, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) under PolyU Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme 2021.
His research interests include (1) Cracking mechanisms and induced microseismicity during the injection of CO2 into reservoir rocks. (2) Application of machine learning in acoustic emission (AE) data interpretation. (3) Microcracking mechanisms of granite based on AE and microscopic observation. -
Alex Hedgpeth
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioAlexandra Hedgpeth is a biogeochemist whose research explores how soil carbon cycling in peatlands responds to environmental change. Her work focuses on understanding the mechanisms that regulate carbon storage and greenhouse gas production in both tropical and boreal wetlands, with a particular emphasis on the vulnerability of deep, ancient carbon to modern surface inputs and hydrologic shifts.
Through her Ph.D. research at the University of California, Los Angeles, Alex has developed and applied novel isotopic and geochemical approaches—including implementing radiocarbon dating, stable isotope analyses, and high-resolution molecular characterization—to trace the sources and fates of carbon in peat soils. Her fieldwork spans a range of ecosystems, from ombrotrophic bogs in the Arctic to saturated tropical peat domes in Central America. This comparative framework allows her to identify unifying controls on carbon preservation and loss across climate zones.
Alex's research integrates field measurements, laboratory experiments, and synthesis of global datasets. She is a key contributor to multi-institutional efforts to model peatland carbon cycling under climate change scenarios, including DOE- and NSF-supported initiatives. Her work helps clarify the role of peatlands as both long-term carbon sinks and potential sources of atmospheric CO₂ and CH₄ under future disturbance.
In addition to her scientific contributions, Alex is committed to collaborative, interdisciplinary research and has worked closely with partners at national laboratories, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and international data synthesis networks. She is especially interested in questions with high uncertainty and high relevance to climate feedbacks—such as thresholds in biogeochemical function and the persistence of deep soil carbon under hydrologic change.
