Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability


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  • Justin Leidwanger

    Justin Leidwanger

    Associate Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of Oceans

    BioJustin Leidwanger's research focuses on Mediterranean mobilities and connectivity, maritime livelihoods, and their heritage. Ships and ports are central to exploring these themes, providing evidence for the long-term dynamics that shaped coastal communities economically, socially, and politically. He is drawn to the long arc of the Roman Mediterranean, especially its temporal edges, from the emergence of Hellenistic states to the long Late Antiquity and beyond. Through a focus on diverse but co-dependent seaborne interactions that have and continue to define the Mediterranean, this work aligns critical engagement with the past, advocacy for local communities in the present, and sustainable development for the future.

    Current collaborative fieldwork in Sardinia with the University of Sassari examines the socio-environmental dynamics spanning three millennia of tuna trap fisheries (tonnare). In Croatia, joint excavation with the Croatian Conservation Institute of a wreck carrying a high-ranking individual and perhaps a goldsmith around 700 CE sheds new light on the transformation of interactions at the end of antiquity (featured in National Geographic, Reuters, and elsewhere). A maritime landscape survey with Dokuz Eylül University in southwest Türkiye explores the impacts of early Hellenistic sociopolitical shifts on local economies and mobilities.

    Previously, Justin co-directed investigations (2011-2015) at the Archaic through Late Antique harbors of Burgaz (“Old Knidos”) in Türkiye, and led excavations (2013-2019) of the 6th-century Marzamemi 2 “church wreck” off Sicily, which carried 100 tons of marble architectural elements. Work in Sicily continues through 3D and other analyses of the assemblage as well as immersive museum-based and other heritage initiatives that link past and present. One facet of this work mobilizes archaeology to understand the creation and circulation of plastics as maritime material assemblages, offering a new vantage point on socio-environmental systems. Another uses archaeology to foreground heritage activism through the spaces, materialities, and memories of forced and undocumented migration across these waters.

    On campus, he teaches courses and advises students on topics in Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique archaeology, Mediterranean heritage, economies and interaction, port networks, ceramic production and exchange, archaeological theory, and Greco-Roman architecture and engineering. The Maritime Archaeology & Digital Heritage Lab (MEDLab) at the Archaeology Center serves as a fieldwork base and collaborative resource for shipwreck and harbor archaeology, digital modeling (structured light scanning, laser scanning, photogrammetry, GIS, network visualization), and pottery analysis (petrography, pXRF, computational morphological analysis, finite element method, experimental archaeology).

    Author of Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies (Oxford), and editor or co-editor of various volumes, including Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge), Regional Economies in Action (Vienna), and Across the Shore: Integrating Perspective on Maritime Heritage (Springer), he is currently working on two books. The first, Fluid Technologies: Innovation on the Ancient Mediterranean, examines the interdependence of maritime logistics in Greco-Roman economies, from transport amphora standardization to changes in ship design and port infrastructure. The second, The Tuna Trap, uses the distinctive practices surrounding community fisheries to shed light on the entanglement of human and non-human mobilities across central Mediterranean waters.

  • Larry John Leifer

    Larry John Leifer

    Member, Bio-X

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsOur "designXlab" at the Stanford Center for Design Research (CDR) has long (30+ years) been focused on Engineering Design Team dynamics at global collaboration scale working with corporate partners in my graduate course ME310ABC. In our most recent studies we have added Neuroscience visualization of brain activity using fMRI and fNIRS. In doing so we have launched "NeuroDesign" as a professional discipline.

  • Michael Lepech

    Michael Lepech

    C. L. Peck, Class of 1906, Professor and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    BioUnsustainable energy and material consumption, waste production, and emissions are some of today’s most pressing global concerns. To address these concerns, civil engineers are now designing facilities that, for example, passively generate power, reuse waste, and are carbon neutral. These designs are based foremost on longstanding engineering theory. Yet woven within this basic knowledge must be new science and new technologies, which advance the field of civil engineering to the forefront of sustainability-focused design.

    My research develops fundamental engineering design concepts, models, and tools that are tightly integrated with quantitative sustainability assessment and service life modeling across length scales, from material scales to system scales, and throughout the early design, project engineering, construction, and operation life cycle phases of constructed facilities. My research follows the Sustainable Integrated Materials, Structures, Systems (SIMSS) framework. SIMSS is a tool to guide the multi-scale design of sustainable built environments, including multi-physics modeling informed by infrastructure sensing data and computational learning and feedback algorithms to support advanced digital-twinning of engineered systems. Thus, my research applies SIMMS through two complementary research thrusts; (1) developing high-fidelity quantitative sustainability assessment methods that enable civil engineers to quickly and probabilistically measure sustainability indicators, and (2) creating multi-scale, fundamental engineering tools that integrate with sustainability assessment and facilitate setting and meeting sustainability targets throughout the life cycle of constructed facilities.

    Most recently, my research forms the foundation of the newly created Stanford Center at the Incheon Global Campus (SCIGC) in South Korea, a university-wide research center examining the potential for smart city technologies to enhance the sustainability of urban areas. Located in the smart city of Songdo, Incheon, South Korea, SCIGC is a unique global platform to (i) advance research on the multi-scale design, construction, and operation of sustainable built environments, (ii) demonstrate to cities worldwide the scalable opportunities for new urban technologies (e.g., dense urban sensing networks, dynamic traffic management, autonomous vehicles), and (iii) improve the sustainability and innovative capacity of increasingly smarter cities globally.

    With an engineering background in civil and environmental engineering and material science (BSE, MSE, PhD), and business training in strategy and finance (MBA), I continue to explore to the intersection of entrepreneurship education, innovation capital training, and the potential of startups to more rapidly transfer and scale technologies to solve some of the world's most challenging problems.

  • Andrew Leslie

    Andrew Leslie

    Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am interested in morphological evolution. I approach this broad topic by investigating how interactions among form, function, and environment have influenced evolutionary patterns in plant reproductive structures over million-year time scales. This approach requires synthesizing information from different disciplines, and my work uses approaches from paleontology, biomechanics, phylogenetics, and biogeography.

  • Philip Levis

    Philip Levis

    Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical Engineering

    BioProfessor Levis' research focuses on the design and implementation of efficient software systems for embedded wireless sensor networks; embedded network sensor architecture and design; systems programming and software engineering.

  • Raymond Levitt

    Raymond Levitt

    Kumagai Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDr. Levitt founded and directs Stanford’s Global Projects Center (GPC), which conducts research, education and outreach to enhance financing, governance and sustainability of global building and infrastructure projects. Dr. Levitt's research focuses on developing enhanced governance of infrastructure projects procured via Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) delivery, and alternative project delivery approaches for complex buildings like full-service hospitals or data centers.

  • Haipeng Li

    Haipeng Li

    Ph.D. Student in Geophysics, admitted Autumn 2022

    BioHaipeng Li is a Ph.D. candidate in geophysics at the Stanford Earth imaging Project (SEP), beginning in the fall of 2022. His research interests include studying the Earth's interior structures and monitoring related dynamics. He uses and develops time-lapse seismic waveform inversion methods to address real-life problems, including hydrocarbon exploration, CO2 sequestration, and urban environment monitoring, often using Distributed Acoustic Sensing data. He is also interested in leveraging SciML techniques to advance inverse problems and uncertainty quantification.

  • Katherine Li

    Katherine Li

    Program Success Manager, Sustainability Accelerator

    BioKatherine Li is a Sustainability Technology & Business Analyst at the Stanford Sustainability Accelerator, where she supports Stanford-led research teams in externalizing their innovations to create sustainability impact. She holds an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford and a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Duke University, where she was a Pratt Research Fellow and NAE Grand Challenge Scholar.

    Katherine previously worked in the Intellectual Property Office at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, supporting the commercialization of energy and physical sciences technologies. Her research background spans water affordability, environmental pollution, and uncertainty modeling, with work conducted at Stanford, Duke, and Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has co-authored peer-reviewed publications and received multiple honors, including the Eric Pas Award for Outstanding Research from Duke, the NSERC Undergraduate Research Award, and the Stanford Digital Learning Design Challenge. She is also passionate about climate and science communication and has led youth-focused climate storytelling and education initiatives.

  • Langlang Li

    Langlang Li

    Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEnvironmental geochemistry, hydrology, and plant nutrient supply

  • Lei Li

    Lei Li

    Affiliate, Department of Geophysics - Beroza Program

    BioLei Li is an Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Geophysics at Central South University and was a visiting scholar at Stanford University (April 2024 to April 2025). His research focuses on induced seismicity monitoring associated with industrial activities. He received his PhD from University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2018, focused on waveform-based seismic source location methods. From 2016 to 2017, he was a joint PhD student at University of Hamburg. He was a postdoctoral researcher at Central South University from 2018 to 2020, where he optimized workflows for modeling, processing, and inversion of induced seismicity related to shale gas and geothermal energy production.