Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Showing 1-60 of 60 Results
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Adrian A. Wackett
Ph.D. Student in Geological Sciences, admitted Autumn 2022
BioAdrian A. Wackett was born and raised in Saint Paul, Minnesota (unceded Wahpekute/Dakota lands). He double majored in Chemistry and Geosciences at Trinity University (TX) before returning to Saint Paul and completing his MS degree in Land & Atmospheric Sciences (specifically pedology/biogeochemistry) at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, where he studied global w'o'rming. Before coming to Stanford as an NSF GRFP Fellow he traveled extensively through Latin America and SE Asia (by bike) and worked as an independent researcher affiliated with the Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences at Umeå University and the Climate Impacts Research Centre in Abisko, Sweden. He is broadly curious in learning how the world works, and this informs his outlook towards research. Previous topics of inquiry include: coupling ant bioturbation to the erosion and weathering of hillslope soils in SE Australia, exploring earthworm invasions and their deterministic effects on soil carbon stocks and forms in Fennoscandian and Alaskan forests, and examining the biogeochemical diversity of ‘black smoker’ plume particles at deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
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Diane M. Wade
Research Admstr 3: Finance, Grant & Affiliate Management, Energy Science & Engineering
BioDiane is a Research Administrator for the Department of Energy Science and Engineering at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. Her role involves Finance, Grant & Affiliate Management. She is responsible for affiliate accounts, department accounts, sponsored grants (pre & post award) and faculty financial portfolios. She is the financial liaison to the affiliates, works with faculty to submit research proposals and then manages sponsored awards. She also is responsible for affiliate faculty appointments and visas.
Previously, she was interim Diversity Officer for the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion while the Associate Dean was on leave.
Diane’s university education includes Mechanical Engineering and an internship at NASA building flight simulators. Prior to earning her MBA, she was a board member and representative for three non-profits. -
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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Luwen Wan
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioLuwen is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, working with Dr. Kate Maher, Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science. Her postdoctoral research focuses on developing tools for tracking the recovery and activity of the North American beaver from a computer version and evaluating beaver as a tool for fostering sustainable waterways. She received her Ph.D. in Earth and Environmental Science from Michigan State University, where she worked on nutrient transport modeling across the Great Lakes Basin and agricultural tile drainage mapping across the US Midwest region.
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Shiqi (Axel) Wang
Ph.D. Student in Geophysics, admitted Autumn 2017
BioI am a PhD student in geophysics. My research interest is on high-frequency guided seismic waves primarily in the lithosphere. One application of these waves is to use their amplitude ratios to determine if an earthquake nucleated within the continental mantle.
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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
BioYuan Wang is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He is also an affiliated faculty 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-precipitation interactions and their climatic implications, aerosol properties and haze formation, cloud microphysics and dynamics, 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.
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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. -
Karrie Weaver
Technical Director, SIGMA Lab Facility; Research Scientist and Engineer, Earth System Science
Current Role at StanfordTechnical Director, SIGMA Shared Lab Facility
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Xiaolong Wei
Postdoctoral Scholar, Geological Sciences
BioXiaolong Wei is a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Stanford University. He is a member of the Stanford Mineral-X Initiative. Xiaolong focuses on addressing significant challenges associated with mineral exploration, and leading to a step change in the discovery of new mineral deposits. Xiaolong is currently working with Prof. Jef Caers on exploring mineral resources as well as quantifying the uncertainties of deposits using geological, geochemical and geophysical measurements.
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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
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. -
Paula V. Welander
Associate Dean for Integrative Initiatives in DEI, Associate Professor of Environmental Earth System Science and, by courtesy, of Biology and of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsBiosynthesis of lipid biomarkers in modern microbes; molecular geomicrobiology; microbial physiology
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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 Law and 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. -
John Weyant
Professor (Research) of Management Science and Engineering, of Energy Science Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy
BioJohn P. Weyant is Professor of Management Science and Engineering and Director of the Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy and an an affiliated faculty member of the Stanford School of Earth, Environment and Energy Sciences, the Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. His current research focuses on analysis of multi-sector, multi-region coupled human and earth systems dynamics, global change systems analysis, energy technology assessment, and models for strategic planning.
Weyant was a founder and serves as chairman of the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium (IAMC), a seventeen-year old collaboration among over 60 member institutions from around the world. He has been an active adviser to the United Nations, the European Commission, U.S.Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of State, and the Environmental Protection Agency. In California, he has been and adviser to the California Air Resources, the California Energy Commission and the California Public Utilities Commission..
Weyant was awarded the US Association for Energy Economics’ 2008 Adelmann-Frankel award for unique and innovative contributions to the field of energy economics and the award for outstanding lifetime contributions to the Profession for 2017 from the International Association for Energy Economics, and a Life Time Achievement award from the Integrated Assessment Modeling Consortium in 2018. Weyant was honored in 2007 as a major contributor to the Nobel Peace prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in 2008 by Chairman Mary Nichols for contributions to the to the California Air Resources Board's Economic and Technology Advancement Advisory Committee on AB 32.
Fields of Specialization:
Energy/Environmental Policy Analysis, Strategic Planning
Interests:
Overall goal is to accelerate the use of systems models at state, country, and global scales, aiming to provide the best available information and insights to government and private-sector decision makers. Specific areas include energy, climate change, and sustainable development policy, including emerging technologies and market design alternatives. Draws on concepts and techniques from science and engineering fundamentals (e.g., thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, materials science, and electrical power systems), operations research, economics, finance, and decision theory. -
Mele Wheaton
Academic Prog Prof 3, Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources
Current Role at StanfordAssociate Director of Program Strategy (E-IPER)
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Elliott White Jr.
Assistant Professor of Earth System Science and Center Fellow, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment
BioElliott White Jr. is an assistant professor of Earth System Science. He is a coastal ecosystem scientist that studies the effects of saltwater intrusion and sea level rise (SWISLR) on vegetation in the coastal land margin. His research experience in wetlands spans the North American Coastal Plain of the US, in addition to constructed prairie potholes in Iowa. His interdisciplinary approach to research draws from ecology, hydrology, biogeochemistry, and remote sensing. He is expanding his research to also understand the effects of SWISLR on humans living in the coastal zone. He received a BS in Biology and Animal Ecology from Iowa State University in 2015 and PhD in Environmental Engineering Sciences from the University of Florida in 2019. For more information you can visit: https://coasts.stanford.edu/.
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Jane Kathryn Willenbring
Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences and, by courtesy of Earth System Science
BioJane Willenbring joined Stanford as an Associate Professor in the summer of 2020. Jane is a geologist who solves problems related to the Earth surface. Her research is primarily done to understand the evolution of the Earth’s surface - especially how landscapes are affected by tectonics, climate change, and life. She and her research group use geochemical techniques, high-resolution topographic data, field observations, and, when possible, couple these data to landscape evolution numerical models and ice sheet models. The geochemical tools she uses and develops often include cosmogenic nuclide systems, which provide powerful, novel methods to constrain rates of erosion and mineral weathering. Jane has also started to organize citizen science campaigns and apply basic science principles to problems of human health with an ultimate broader impact goal of cleaning up urban areas and environments impacted by agriculture. She received her B.Sc. with honors from the North Dakota State University where she was a McNair Scholar and in the NDSU scholars program. She holds a Masters degree from Boston University. Her Ph.D. is in Earth Science from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada where she was a Killam Scholar. She was a Synthesis Postdoctoral Fellow through the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics at the Saint Anthony Falls Lab at the University of Minnesota, and an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow and then subsequently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Helmholz GFZ Potsdam, Germany. Jane was previously an Associate Professor in the Geosciences Research Division and Thomas and Evelyn Page Chancellor's Endowed Faculty Fellow at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego where she was the director of the Scripps Cosmogenic Isotope Laboratory (SCI-Lab). She was also a tenure-track professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She will be a Stanford University Gabilan Faculty Fellow in 2021-2023. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and was the inaugural recipient of the Marguerite T. Williams award from the American Geophysical Union.
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Cynthia Williams
Assistant Director, External Engagement, Precourt Institute for Energy
Current Role at StanfordAssistant Director, External Engagement, Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy
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Earle Wilson
Assistant Professor of Earth System Science, by courtesy, of Geophysics, of Oceans and Center Fellow, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment
BioEarle Wilson is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth System Science. He is a physical oceanographer who studies ocean dynamics at high latitudes and their far-reaching impacts on the global climate. He is particularly interested in the circulation of the Southern Ocean and its interactions with the cryosphere (i.e., sea ice and marine-terminating glaciers). Dr. Wilson and his group explore these research questions using various tools and methods, ranging from in situ ocean observations and idealized numerical models.
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Frank Wolak
Holbrook Working Professor of Price Theory and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at the Precourt Institute for Energy
BioFrank A. Wolak is the Holbrook Working Professor of Commodity Price Studies in the Department of Economics and the Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University. His research and teaching focuses on design, performance, and monitoring of energy and environmental markets. He served as Chair of the Market Surveillance Committee (MSC) of the California Independent System Operator and was a member of the Emissions Market Advisory Committee (EMAC) for California’s Market for Greenhouse Gas Emissions allowances.
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Philip Womble
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioPhilip Womble is an attorney and a hydrologist specializing in water policy and water markets. He is a legal/postdoctoral fellow with the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Philip received his Ph.D. in Environment and Resources from Stanford and his J.D. from Stanford Law School, where his research evaluated optimal environmental water rights marketing in the Upper Colorado River Basin, barriers to water marketing in the state of Colorado, and Native American groundwater claims across the western United States. His work has been published in journals such as Science, Water Resources Research, and the Harvard Environmental Law Review. During graduate school, Philip worked for the Special Master in the U.S. Supreme Court interstate water dispute Montana v. Wyoming, The Nature Conservancy's Colorado River Program, and a water law firm. Before graduate school, he worked for the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, DC, where he analyzed the most established market for freshwater ecosystem services in the United States – wetland and stream compensatory mitigation under the Clean Water Act. Philip grew up in North Carolina, where he received his B.S. in Environmental Sciences from UNC-Chapel Hill.
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H.-S. Philip Wong
Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the School of Engineering
BioH.-S. Philip Wong is the Willard R. and Inez Kerr Bell Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. He joined Stanford University as Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2004. From 1988 to 2004, he was with the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. From 2018 to 2020, he was on leave from Stanford and was the Vice President of Corporate Research at TSMC, the largest semiconductor foundry in the world, and since 2020 remains the Chief Scientist of TSMC in a consulting, advisory role.
He is a Fellow of the IEEE and received the IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award, the IEEE Technical Field Award to honor individuals for outstanding contributions to solid-state devices and technology, as well as the IEEE Electron Devices Society J.J. Ebers Award, the society’s highest honor to recognize outstanding technical contributions to the field of electron devices that have made a lasting impact.
He is the founding Faculty Co-Director of the Stanford SystemX Alliance – an industrial affiliate program focused on building systems and the faculty director of the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility – a shared facility for device fabrication on the Stanford campus that serves academic, industrial, and governmental researchers across the U.S. and around the globe, sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation. He is the Principal Investigator of the Microelectronics Commons California-Pacific-Northwest AI Hardware Hub, a consortium of over 40 companies and academic institutions funded by the CHIPS Act. He is a member of the US Department of Commerce Industrial Advisory Committee on microelectronics. -
Jeffrey Wong
Research Administrator 3, Earth & Planetary Sciences
Current Role at StanfordJeff is responsible for supporting the Earth & Planetary Sciences Department’s sponsored grants portfolio and faculty members' financial accounts. Jeff assists faculty members with budgeting and submitting sponsored research proposals, and managing the financial aspects of their sponsored awards. Additionally, Jeff serves as a department financial liaison with other university departments and schools, the Office of Sponsored Research and other academic institutions involved in collaborative research projects.
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Gabrielle Wong-Parodi
Assistant Professor of Earth System Science, Center Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Assistant Professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsTrained as an interdisciplinary social scientist theoretically grounded in psychology and decision science, my work has two aims. First, to understand how people make decisions to address the impacts of climate change. Second, to understand how robust interventions can empower people to make decisions that serve their lives, communities, and society.
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Jane Woodward
Adjunct Professor, Atmosphere and Energy
BioJane Woodward has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University since 1991 where she has taught classes on energy and environment. She currently plays supporting roles on the teaching teams for Understanding Energy and Stanford Climate Ventures. Jane also serves on Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy Advisory Council and founded and or funds a variety of sustainable energy education initiatives at Stanford.
Jane is a founder and Managing Partner of WovenEarth Ventures, an early-stage energy climate venture and project fund of funds and she is an investor and advisor or director of several early-stage sustainable energy companies and funds.
Jane is a Founding Partner at MAP Energy, an energy investment firm currently focused on oil and gas royalty interests. MAP is one of the longest-standing private energy investment fund management firms in the U.S. MAP began investing in natural gas mineral rights in 1987, wind energy in 2004, utility scale solar in 2015 and energy storage in 2017. In December 2020, MAP sold its renewable energy and energy storage assets under management to Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP).
In 2016, Jane created The Foster Museum, a 14,000-square-foot art venue in Palo Alto, to share artist-explorer Tony Foster’s powerful exhibitions of watercolor journeys with an intention to inspire connection to the natural world.
Prior to founding MAP in 1987, Jane worked as an exploration geologist with ARCO Exploration Company and later as a petroleum engineering consultant to Stanford University’s endowment.
Jane has a BS in Geology from UC Santa Barbara, an MS in Engineering and Petroleum Geology, and an MBA, both from Stanford University. -
Katie Wu
Ph.D. Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Autumn 2022
BioKatie is interested in using large-scale data analysis and AI to understand how infrastructure development impacts human and planetary health in urban contexts. Specifically, she focuses on improving social connectedness and well-being for climate resilience. She aims to develop adaptive decision support tools to identify and implement optimal development strategies prioritizing resource access, equity, human health, and nature.
Katie holds a Master of Engineering Management from Duke University, an M.S. in Medical Science from the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and a B.S. in Animal Science with Distinction in Research from Cornell University. She is a Dean's Graduate Scholar, a Graduate Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), and a Stanford Dalai Lama Fellow.
