Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Showing 91-100 of 155 Results
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Pamela Matson
Richard and Rhoda Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute, Emerita
BioPAMELA MATSON is an interdisciplinary sustainability scientist, former academic leader, and organizational strategist. She served as dean of Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences from 2002-2017, building interdisciplinary departments and educational programs focused on resources, environment and sustainability, as well as co-leading university-wide interdisciplinary initiatives. In her role as the Goldman Professor of Environmental Studies and Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment, she lead the graduate program on Sustainability Science and Practice. Her research addressed a range of environment and sustainability issues, including sustainability of agricultural systems, vulnerability and resilience of particular people and places to climate change, and characteristics of science that can contribute to sustainability transitions at scale. as an emerita faculty member, she continues to engage in questions related to transformational change for sustainability goals, and advises Stanford's efforts in that realm.
Dr. Matson served as chair of the board of the World Wildlife Fund-US and as a board member of the World Wildlife Fund-International and several university advisory boards. She served on the US National Academy of Science Board on Sustainable Development and co-wrote the National Research Council’s volume Our Common Journey: A transition toward sustainability (1999); she also led the NRC committee on America’s Climate Choices: Advancing the Science of Climate Change. She was the founding chair of the National Academies Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability, and founding editor for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources. She is a past President of the Ecological Society of America. Her recent publications (among around 200) include the books 'Seeds of Sustainability: Lessons from the Birthplace of the Green Revolution' (2012) and 'Pursuing Sustainability' (2016).
Pam is an elected member of the National Academy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a AAAS Fellow. She received a MacArthur Foundation Award, contributed to the award of the Nobel Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, among other awards and recognitions, and is an Einstein Fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Matson holds a Bachelor of Science degree with double majors in Biology and Literature from the University of Wisconsin (Eau Claire), a Master degree in Environmental Science and Policy from Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs, a Doctorate in Forest Ecology from Oregon State University, and honorary doctorates from Princeton, McGill and Arizona State Universities. She spent ten years as a research scientist with NASA-Ames Research Center before moving to a professorship at the University of California Berkeley and, in 1997, to Stanford University. -
Eric Mayer
Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science
BioEnding catastrophic wildfires by making biochar.
Eric Mayer earned a PhD in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University (2020), where he studied fluid mechanics and published research parameterizing lee-wave drag for ocean circulation models, tangentially improving global climate simulations.
Graduating in the early months of the pandemic and eager to act on the implications of his research, Eric went looking for a more immediate way to effect the climate crisis. Upon learning of biochar’s potential for rapidly-scalable carbon sequestration and the simple technologies already developed for on-site biochar production, Eric founded the biochar-as-a-service company Napachar. Today, you can find Napachar in the vineyards and forests of Napa and Sonoma, California, diverting pulled vines and forestry slash from burn piles to bake in flame-cap biochar kilns, returning "waste" carbon to the soil.
Beginning in the spring of 2026, Eric returned to Stanford in a postdoctoral position with the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Doerr School of Sustainability Accelerator, with the mission of ending catastrophic wildfire in fire-adapted forests by making biochar. -
Anna M. Michalak
Visiting Scholar, Earth System Science
Affiliate, Konings ProgramBioDr. Anna M. Michalak is the Founding Director of the Carnegie Climate and Resilience Hub at the Carnegie Institution for Science, where she has been a Faculty Member since 2011 and served as Director of the Department of Global Ecology for 2020-2023. Michalak also holds appointments as Professor (by courtesy) in the Department of Earth System Science at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the Department of Biology at Stanford University. Prior to joining Carnegie, she was the Frank and Brooke Transue Faculty Scholar and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.Sc.(Eng.) in Environmental Engineering from the University of Guelph, Canada.
Dr. Michalak studies the cycling and emissions of greenhouse gases at the Earth surface at urban to global scales – scales directly relevant to informing climate and policy – primarily through the use of atmospheric observations that provide the clearest constraints at these critical scales. She also explores climate change impacts on freshwater and coastal water quality via influences on nutrient delivery to, and on conditions within, water bodies. Her approach is highly data-driven, with a common methodological thread being the development and application of spatiotemporal statistical data fusion methods for optimizing the use of limited in situ and remote sensing environmental data.
She is the lead author of the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan, Co-Chair of the National Academies committee for the midterm assessment of the NASA decadal survey for Earth system observations from space, Co-Chair of the carbon and water advisory boards for Schmidt Sciences, Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society, and Visiting Faculty Researcher at Google Research. Previously, she was Editor of the journal Water Resources Research and Chair of the scientific advisory board for the European Integrated Carbon Observation System. She is the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (nominated by NASA), the NSF CAREER award, the Leopold Fellowship in environmental leadership, and the American Geophysical Union’s Simpson Medal. -
Kimber Moreland, Ph.D.
Physical Science Research Scientist
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrently my research mainly focuses on soil carbon biogeochemistry in different land use types such as agriculture, forests, meadows, and grasslands. I use stable and radioactive isotopes to trace the movement of carbon and nitrogen through the entire soil system. Specifically, I have focused on response to fire, disturbance, and climate change.
