Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability


Showing 1-26 of 26 Results

  • Barbara Block

    Barbara Block

    Charles and Elizabeth Prothro Professor of Marine Sciences, Professor of Oceans and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsThermal physiology, open ocean predators, ecological physiology and tuna biology

  • Alexandria Boehm

    Alexandria Boehm

    Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, of Oceans and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    BioI am interested in pathogens in the environment including their sources, fate, and transport in natural and engineered systems. I am interested in understanding of how pathogens are transmitted to humans through contact with water, feces, and contaminated surfaces. My research is focused on key problems in both developed and developing countries with the overarching goal of designing and testing novel interventions and technologies for reducing the burden of disease.

    I am also interested broadly in coastal water quality where my work addresses the sources, transformation, transport, and ecology of biocolloids - specifically fecal indicator organisms, DNA, pathogens, and phytoplankton - as well as sources and fate of nitrogen. This knowledge is crucial to formulating new management policies and engineering practices that protect human and ecosystem health at the coastal margins.

  • Karen Casciotti

    Karen Casciotti

    Associate Dean for Facilities and Shared Labs, Professor of Oceans, of Earth System Science and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProfessor in Oceans and ESS, focus on marine chemistry and biogeochemistry.

  • Larry Crowder

    Larry Crowder

    Edward Ricketts Provostial Professor, Professor of Oceans, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Biology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEcology, conservation, fisheries, protected species, ecosystem-based management

  • Giulio De Leo

    Giulio De Leo

    Professor of Oceans, of Earth System Science, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy of Biology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a theoretical ecologist mostly interested in investigating factors and processes driving the dynamics of natural and harvested populations and on how to use this knowledge to inform practical management. I have worked broadly on life histories analysis, fishery management, dynamics and control of infectious diseases and environmental impact assessment.

  • Anne Dekas

    Anne Dekas

    Assistant Professor of Earth System Science and, by courtesy, of Oceans and of Earth and Planetary Sciences

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEnvironmental microbiology, deep-sea microbial ecology, marine biogeochemistry

  • Rob Dunbar

    Rob Dunbar

    W.M. Keck Professor in the School of Earth Sciences, Professor of Oceans, of Earth System Science and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOcean processes, biogeochemistry, climatology/paleoclimatology, isotopic chemistry, ocean policy

  • Robin Elahi

    Robin Elahi

    Advanced Lecturer

    BioI am an advanced lecturer at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, where I teach courses in kelp forest ecology, statistics, and scientific computing. In general, I study drivers of spatial and temporal change in marine ecosystems. Ongoing and recent research projects include:
    -examining the consequences of fisheries closures on fisher behavior
    -understanding why some coral reefs fare better than their neighbors
    -biodiversity and body size change, particularly in the context of recent human impacts

  • Christopher Francis

    Christopher Francis

    Professor of Earth System Science, of Oceans and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMicrobial cycling of carbon, nitrogen, and metals in the environment; molecular geomicrobiology; marine microbiology; microbial diversity; meta-omics

  • Oliver Fringer

    Oliver Fringer

    Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Oceans

    BioFringer's research focuses on the development and application of numerical models and high-performance computational techniques to the study of fundamental processes that influence the dynamics of the coastal ocean, rivers, lakes, and estuaries.

  • William Gilly

    William Gilly

    Professor of Oceans

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy work has contributed to understanding electrical excitability in nerve & muscle in organisms ranging from brittle-stars to mammals. Current research addresses behavior, physiology and ecology of squid through field and lab approaches. Electronic tagging plus in situ video, acoustic and oceanographic methods are used to study behaviors and life history in the field. Lab work focuses on control of chromogenic behavior by the chromatophore network and of locomotion by the giant axon system.

  • Jeffrey R. Koseff

    Jeffrey R. Koseff

    Director, Sustainability Science and Practice, William Alden Campbell and Martha Campbell Professor in the School of Engineering, Professor of Oceans and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    BioJeff Koseff, founding co-director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, is an expert in the interdisciplinary domain of environmental fluid mechanics. His research falls in the interdisciplinary domain of environmental fluid mechanics and focuses on the interaction between physical and biological systems in natural aquatic environments. Current research activities are in the general area of environmental fluid mechanics and focus on: turbulence and internal wave dynamics in stratified flows, coral reef and sea-grass hydrodynamics, the role of natural systems in coastal protection, and flow through terrestrial and marine canopies. Most recently he has begun to focus on the interaction between gravity currents and breaking internal waves in the near-coastal environment, and the transport of marine microplastics. Koseff was formerly the Chair of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the Senior Associate Dean of Engineering at Stanford, and has served on the Board of Governors of The Israel Institute of Technology, and has been a member of the Visiting Committees of the Civil and Environmental Engineering department at Carnegie-Mellon University, The Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research, and Cornell University. He has also been a member of review committees for the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, The WHOI-MIT Joint Program, and the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment. He is a former member of the Independent Science Board of the Bay/Delta Authority. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015, and received the Richard Lyman Award from Stanford University in the same year. In 2020 he was elected as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences. Koseff also serves as the Faculty Athletics Representative to the Pac-12 and NCAA for Stanford.

  • James Leape

    James Leape

    William and Eva Price Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Oceans

    BioJim Leape is the William and Eva Price Senior Fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He also serves as co-director of the Center for Ocean Solutions. Through research, writing and direct engagement with private and public sector leaders, Jim looks at how to drive large-scale systemic shifts to sustainability, with particular interest in expanding private sector leadership on sustainability globally.

    Jim has more than three decades of conservation experience, spanning a broad range of conservation issues on every continent. From 2005 to 2014, he served as Director General of WWF International and leader of the global WWF Network, which is one of the world’s largest conservation organizations, active in more than 100 countries. In that capacity, he worked with government, business and civil society leaders on a wide range of issues, including climate change, marine conservation, forest protection, water resources management, and sustainability in global commodity markets. Before going to WWF International, Jim directed the conservation and science initiatives of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, a leading philanthropy in the U.S. Previously, he served as executive vice president of WWF-US in Washington, D.C.; as a lawyer for the United Nations Environment Programme in Nairobi, Kenya; as a law professor; and as a litigator for the National Audubon Society and for the U.S. Department of Justice.

    Jim serves on the boards of the Marine Stewardship Council, Mission 2020 and the Luc Hoffmann Institute, and on the Global Future Council for the Food Security and the Environmental Stewards Board of the World Economic Forum. From 2007 to 2017, he was a member of the China Council for International Cooperation in Environment and Development, which advises the Premier of China. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the ClimateWorks Foundation.

    Leape received an A.B. with honors from Harvard College and a J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School.

  • Justin Leidwanger

    Justin Leidwanger

    Associate Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of Oceans
    On Leave from 10/01/2023 To 06/30/2024

    BioJustin Leidwanger's work focuses on Mediterranean mobilities, maritime communities, and systems of exchange. Shipwrecks and port sites, especially in southeast Sicily and southwest Turkey, are central to exploring these themes in the field, providing evidence for connections and the long-term dynamics of communities situated amid the economically, socially, and politically changing worlds from the rise of Rome through late antiquity.

    Between 2013 and 2019, he led investigations of the 6th-century “church wreck” at Marzamemi (Sicily), which sank while carrying nearly 100 tons of marble architectural elements. Work continues through underwater survey, 3D analysis, and publication as well as immersive heritage initiatives in the local Museum of the Sea and associated pop-up exhibits and dive trails. Project 'U Mari extends this collaborative field research in southeast Sicily, interrogating the heritage of diverse but co-dependent interactions with and across the sea that have long defined the central Mediterranean and offer a resource for deeper engagement with the past and sustainable future development.

    Building on survey since 2017, the project’s newest work examines socioeconomic dynamics spanning 2500 years of tuna fishing through maritime landscape archaeology and documentation of fading material culture and traditional knowledge of the mattanza. Our efforts simultaneously foreground heritage activism through community-based archaeology of the spaces, materialities, and memories of contemporary journeys of forced and undocumented migration across the central Mediterranean.

    Justin teaches courses and advises students on topics in Hellenistic, Roman, and late antique archaeology, economies and interaction, port networks, ceramic production and exchange, and Greco-Roman architecture and engineering. The Maritime Archaeology Lab at the Archaeology Center serves as a fieldwork base and resource for digital modeling (structured light scanning, laser scanning, photogrammetry, GIS, network analysis) and pottery analysis (petrography, pXRF, computational morphological analysis).

    Author of Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies (Oxford), and editor or co-editor of four more volumes, including Regional Economies in Action (Vienna) and Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge), his current project is titled Fluid Technologies: Innovation on the Ancient Mediterranean. This newest work arises from research with students in the field, lab, and museum, analyzing transport amphoras, port infrastructure, and other clues to ancient technologies of distribution.

  • Richard Luthy

    Richard Luthy

    Silas H. Palmer Professor of Civil Engineering and Professor, by courtesy, of Oceans

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDick Luthy studies sustainable solutions to urban water supplies and management of contaminated sediments. Current work includes experimentation and systems-level analysis of innovative, decentralized water reuse and management of urban stormwater for water supply. He is working with a group to assess strategies for coping with reduced water imports and requirements from the State's Water Board to leave more water in California rivers for ecosystems.

  • Fiorenza Micheli

    Fiorenza Micheli

    David and Lucile Packard Professor of Marine Science, Professor of Oceans, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Biology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDr Fiorenza Micheli is a marine ecologist and conservation biologist conducting research and teaching at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University. Micheli’s research focuses on the processes shaping marine communities and incorporating this understanding in the management and conservation of marine ecosystems. She is a Pew Fellow, a fellow of the California Academy of Science and the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, and past president of the Western Society of Naturalists.

  • Stephen Monismith

    Stephen Monismith

    Obayashi Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Oceans

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHydrodynamics of lakes, estuaries, coral reefs, kelp forests and the coastal ocean

  • Stephen Palumbi

    Stephen Palumbi

    Jane and Marshall Steel Jr. Professor of Marine Sciences, Professor of Oceans and of Biology

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsWe're interested in ecological, evolutionary, and conservation questions related to marine (and sometimes terrestrial) organisms and ecosystems. We use evolutionary genetics and molecular ecology techniques, and our fieldwork takes us all around the world. Currently, we're studying coral diversity, the adaptive potential of corals in response to climate change, the movement of organisms between marine reserves, genetic changes in abalone in response to environmental.

  • Manu Prakash

    Manu Prakash

    Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Oceans and of Biology

    BioWe use interdisciplinary approaches including theory and experiments to understand how computation is embodied in biological matter. Examples include cognition in single cell protists and morphological computing in animals with no neurons and origins of complex behavior in multi-cellular systems. Broadly, we invent new tools for studying non-model organisms with significant focus on life in the ocean - addressing fundamental questions such as how do cells sense pressure or gravity? Finally, we are dedicated towards inventing and distributing “frugal science” tools to democratize access to science (previous inventions used worldwide: Foldscope, Abuzz), diagnostics of deadly diseases like malaria and convening global citizen science communities to tackle planetary scale environmental challenges such as mosquito surveillance or plankton surveillance by citizen sailors mapping the ocean in the age of Anthropocene.

  • Krish Seetah

    Krish Seetah

    Associate Professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, of Oceans, of Anthropology and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    BioI am a zooarchaeologist, whose focus is primarily on colonisation and colonialism. My zooarchaeological research has used butchery analysis (with the benefit of professional and ethnographic actualistic experience) to investigate agency within the human-animal relationship. More recently, I have employed geometric morphometrics (GMM) as a mechanism for identifying and distinguishing animal populations. This approach to studying colonial activity centres on understanding how people manipulate animal bodies, both during life and after death.

    Alongside the strictly faunal research is a research interest in technologies associated with animal processing. This has been used to investigate issues of technology, trade and socio-economic attitudes within colonial contexts in the Mediterranean (Venice & Montenegro) and the Baltic (Poland, Latvia & Lithuania).

    I am also the Director of the ‘Mauritian Archaeology and Cultural Heritage’ (MACH) project, which studies European Imperialism and colonial activity. This project centres on the movement of peoples and material cultures, specifically within the contexts of slavery and Diaspora. The work of this project has focused on key sites in Mauritius and is based on a systematic programme of excavation and environmental sampling. The underlying aims are to better understand the transition from slavery to indentured labour following abolition, the extent and diversity of trade in the region and the environmental consequences of intense, monoculture, agriculture.

  • Leif Thomas

    Leif Thomas

    Professor of Earth System Science and, by courtesy, of Geophysics, of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Oceans

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsPhysical oceanography; theory and numerical modeling of the ocean circulation; dynamics of ocean fronts and vortices; upper ocean processes; air-sea interaction.

  • Earle Wilson

    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.