Stanford University
Showing 341-360 of 2,547 Results
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Robert Laughlin
Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
BioProfessor Laughlin is a theorist with interests ranging from hard-core engineering to cosmology. He is an expert in semiconductors (Nobel Prize 1998) and has also worked on plasma and nuclear physics issues related to fusion and nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers. His technical work at the moment focuses on “correlated-electron” phenomenology – working backward from experimental properties of materials to infer the presence (or not) of new kinds of quantum self-organization. He recently proposed that all Mott insulators – including the notorious doped ones that exhibit high-temperature superconductivity – are plagued by a new kind of subsidiary order called “orbital antiferromagnetism” that is difficult to detect directly. He is also the author of A Different Universe, a lay-accessible book explaining emergent law.
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Alison Grace Laurence
Winter CSP Instructor
BioAlison Laurence is a Lecturer in Civic, Liberal, and Global Education. She received her PhD from MIT’s interdisciplinary program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) in 2019. A cultural and environmental historian, she specializes in the historical study of nature on display, non-human animals, deep time, and extinction. Her current book manuscript--Of Dinosaurs and Culture Wars: A Monumental Reckoning with Modern American Monsters--traces how popular displays transformed dinosaurs and other creatures of deep time from scientific specimens to consumer objects and artifacts of everyday American life. Alison has published her research in Museum & Society, Notes & Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, and the Science Museum Group Journal. She holds a BA in Classics from Brown University and an MA in History and Public History from the University of New Orleans.
At Stanford, Alison has taught special topics courses like "Animal Archives: History Beyond the Human" and a variety of courses within the first-year liberal education requirement, including: "Stories Everywhere," "100,000 Years of War," "Design That Understands Us," and "The Meat We Eat." During the 2022-2023 academic year, she is teaching "Why College?: Your Education and the Good Life," "Citizenship in the 21st Century," and "Preventing Human Extinction."
