Stanford University
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Elaine Lai
COLLEGE Lecturer
BioElaine Lai is a Lecturer for Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE) who has spent over a decade of her life working and studying in Nepal, Hong Kong, India, Taiwan, and China, where she made many lifelong friends.
Elaine is a scholar of Buddhism, trained in the languages of Tibetan, Chinese, and Sanskrit. She specializes in a tradition known as the Great Perfection in Tibet. Elaine’s recent research explores the relationship between Buddhist literature and time, specifically, how form and content interplay to cultivate more compassionate temporal relationalities. Elaine is committed to making the study of Buddhism accessible to a wider audience through technology and the arts. As a part of her dissertation, she created an intertextual heatmap to trace the citational history of a scripture throughout an important corpus of Great Perfection literature. Elaine also created a virtual reality (VR) experience to present Great Perfection history in a novel way.
At Stanford, Elaine has co-taught different courses in Religious Studies and guest lectured in Asian American Studies. In 2022, Elaine is proud to have created and taught the course “Queering Buddhism: Gender, Sexuality, and Liberatory Praxis.” This course sought to investigate the possibilities and constraints to “queering” or transforming any institution, and how the fields of queer studies and feminist studies might constructively and ethically be in conversation with Buddhist theories of liberation. In her pedagogy, Elaine emphasizes the importance of reciprocity, respect, and co-creation. Elaine is a firm believer that the process of how we engage in dialogue is as important, if not more important, than what the ultimate outcome of our conversations might be.
In Elaine’s free time, she writes screenplays (film and TV), spanning the genres of comedy, sci-fi, animation, historical drama, and more. -
Jiewen Lai
Visiting Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
BioJiewen (Sam) Lai is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, where he works with the Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab. He is also a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He earned his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2022 and completed his postdoctoral training at CUHK in 2023.
Sam works on soft and bioinspired robotic systems, focusing on compliant mechanisms, modeling, mechatronics, sensorimotor control, and robophysical intelligence for biomedical applications. His work has been published in various venues, including Nat. Rev. Electr. Eng., IJRR, T-MECH, RA-L, and ICRA, among others. He has served as an Associate Editor for ICRA since 2023.
