Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
Showing 1,161-1,180 of 1,350 Results
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Yida Sun
Affiliate, Earth System Science
BioYida Sun’s research examines how climate extremes and trade disruptions spread through infrastructure and global supply chains, shaping economic outcomes and the transition to sustainable energy. He combines climate modeling, engineering, and economic models to explore how interconnected systems can become more resilient and sustainable. His doctoral research at Tsinghua University and visiting research at the University of Cambridge focused on climate risks to infrastructure and economic networks. His work has appeared in Nature, Nature Climate Change, and Nature Health.
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Yudong Sun
Postdoctoral Scholar, Geophysics
BioYudong's study areas are earthquake physics, numerical modeling, InSAR, glaciology, and geodynamics. He specializes in numerical simulations of earthquake cycles and dynamic ruptures, integrating models with observations and laboratory experiments. He has published papers covering topics including back-propagating ruptures, slow slip events, fault roughness, deformation of glaciers, and lithospheres.
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Veda Sunkara
Ph.D. Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Autumn 2024
BioVeda Sunkara (she/her) is an E-IPER PhD student interested in studying disaster adaptation approaches and equity in outcomes for flood-prone communities in the face of increasing extremes due to climate change. Prior to starting her PhD, she worked as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Floodbase (formerly Cloud to Street), where she built machine learning algorithms to create flood maps from remotely-sensed imagery, in-situ sensors, and physics-based models for disaster planning and parametric flood insurance. She seeks to combine her earth observation and machine learning expertise with community-centered research to co-develop the data necessary to enable long term adaptation and resilience to flooding. She holds a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from Brown University.
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James Sweeney
Professor of Management Science & Engineering, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDeterminants of energy efficiency opportunities, barriers, and policy options. Emphasis on behavioral issues, including personal, corporate, or organizational. Behavior may be motivated by economic incentives, social, or cultural factors, or more generally, by a combination of these factors. Systems analysis questions of energy use.
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Joel Swisher
Adjunct Professor, Atmosphere and Energy Operations
BioJoel N. Swisher, PhD, PE, is Consulting Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he teaches graduate-level courses on greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation (covering technical and business strategies to manage GHG risks) and electric utility planning methods (covering supply and demand-side resources, resource integration and expansion planning). His current research at Stanford addresses the integration of plug-in vehicles with the power grid and the barriers and synergies related to metering, tariffs, load management, customer incentives, and charging infrastructure.
Dr. Swisher is also an independent consultant with over 30 years experience in research and consulting on many aspects of clean energy technology. He is an expert in energy efficiency technology and policy, carbon offsets and climate change mitigation, and electric utility resource planning and economics. He has consulted with numerous utilities, manufacturers and technology companies on resource planning, energy efficiency, vehicle electrification and clean energy deployment strategies. He has also helped consumer-oriented firms design strategies to expand simple cost-saving energy investment programs into brand-building corporate sustainability campaigns.
Dr. Swisher is a thought leader in several areas of clean energy technology and business strategy. As Director of Technical Services and CTO for Camco International, Dr. Swisher helped develop carbon offset projects in reforestation, agriculture, renewable energy and building energy efficiency, and he has authored emission inventories, baseline studies and monitoring and verification plans for multilateral banks and private offset buyers. Starting in 1989, Dr. Swisher performed seminal research on carbon offset baselines and technical and economic analysis of carbon offsets in the energy and land-use sectors.
Dr. Swisher was managing director of research and consulting at Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), where he led RMI’s consulting team in work for numerous high-profile clients, including electric utilities and producers of goods ranging from semiconductor chips to potato chips. At RMI, he created the concept of the Smart Garage, which explores the energy system synergies in which vehicle electrification helps enable zero-emission vehicles and a cleaner power grid. He led an RMI team that convened an industrial consortium (including Alcoa, Johnson Controls, Google, etc.) to develop a new, lightweight, plug-in hybrid vehicle platform for Class 2 truck fleet applications. Collaborating with the design firm IDEO to conduct interdisciplinary design workshops, the RMI team initiated a working design to attract funding and move toward production, which proceeded as a spin-off company, Bright Automotive in Indiana.
Dr. Swisher holds a Ph.D. in Energy and Environmental Engineering from Stanford University. He is a registered Professional Engineer and speaks five languages. He is author of over 100 professional publications including The New Business Climate: A Guide to Lower Carbon Emissions and Better Business Performance and a bilingual (English and Portuguese) textbook on energy efficiency program design and evaluation and integrated energy resource planning. -
Paul Switzer
Professor of Statistics and of Environmental Earth System Science, Emeritus
BioDr. Switzer's research interests are in the development of statistical tools for the environmental sciences. Recent research has focused on the interpretation of environmental monitoring data, design of monitoring networks, detection of time trends in environmental and climatic paramenters, modeling of human exposure to pollutants, statistical evaluation of numerical climate models and error estimation for spatial mapping.
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Katie Taflan
Assistant Director, Explore Energy, Precourt Institute for Energy
Current Role at StanfordAssistant Director for Explore Energy, Precourt Institute for Energy
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Sindy Tang
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and Professor, by courtesy, of Radiology and of Bioengineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsProf. Sindy K.Y. Tang develops engineering platforms that measure biological systems and convert these measurements into quantitative datasets. Her research focuses on experimental systems that probe biological processes across cellular and tissue scales, particularly how physical context—geometry, mechanics, and spatial organization—shapes biological function. Current work spans immune diagnostics, spatial tissue sampling for multi-omics analysis, and single-cell perturbation studies.
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William Abraham Tarpeh
Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Engergy and, by courtesy, of Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioReimagining liquid waste streams as resources can lead to recovery of valuable products and more efficient, less costly approaches to reducing harmful discharges to the environment. Pollutants in effluent streams can be captured and used as valuable inputs to other processes. For example, municipal wastewater contains resources like energy, water, nutrients, and metals. The Tarpeh Lab develops and evaluates novel approaches to resource recovery from “waste” waters at several synergistic scales: molecular mechanisms of chemical transport and transformation; novel unit processes that increase resource efficiency; and systems-level assessments that identify optimization opportunities. We employ understanding of electrochemistry, separations, thermodynamics, kinetics, and reactor design to preferentially recover resources from waste. We leverage these molecular-scale insights to increase the sustainability of engineered processes in terms of energy, environmental impact, and cost.
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Daniel Tartakovsky
Professor of Energy Science Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEnvironmental fluid mechanics, Applied and computational mathematics, Biomedical modeling.
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Clyde Tatum
Obayashi Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus
BioTatum's teaching interests are construction engineering and technical construction. His research focuses on construction process knowledge and integration and innovation in construction.
