Stanford University
Showing 241-250 of 371 Results
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Forest Olaf Peterson, Ph.D.
Research Affiliate, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Staff, Civil and Environmental EngineeringBioDr. Forest Olaf Peterson is Co-Director of the Stanford Workforce VDC Lab, an initiative of the Stanford School of Engineering and Doerr School of Sustainability. Peterson teaches Construction Project Assessment and Budgeting (CEE 240), developed the foundational concept of the VDC-capable construction workforce, and runs an educator certification program placing faculty across Silicon Valley.
As founder of Palo Alto Data Group, Peterson leads development of eCPR, a data infrastructure platform for labor standards enforcement on public works. Peterson holds the California franchise for cadwork, a Swiss BIM platform and CIFE industry member, on building information modeling for heavy civil infrastructure, including highway and rail. Previously, as the founding employee at Rhumbix, a construction technology startup backed by Greylock Partners, Peterson made the Series A pitch.
Public service roles include Palo Alto Planning and Transportation Commissioner, chair of the Flood Protection Bond Oversight Subcommittee at Valley Water, board director of the Santa Clara County Construction Careers Association, a nonprofit, and he is a subject matter expert contributor to California labor standards legislation.
Peterson holds M.S., Engineer, and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford. The doctoral work, completed under Terry Winograd, made a seminal contribution — 'change' as a formal primitive in AI agent ontologies applied to construction project monitoring. Peterson is a three-time named engineering fellow at Stanford — Brahtz, Oglesby, and Olsen. His research on teaching construction project management is one of the most cited papers for its influence on construction engineering education internationally.
Peterson brings both blue-collar and white-collar perspectives to the role of scholar of infrastructure. For seven years before Stanford, he was a concrete laborer on large infrastructure projects with the Laborers' International Union of North America. Those years taught social and environmental dimensions from the ground up. His fellow laborers wanted to work safely. However, though skilled, they often did not have the information to succeed without unnecessary hardship. Without it, on a large highway project, a two-ton barrier dropped and hit something that flipped it over where it came to rest just inches above Peterson's chest. They celebrated his chance survival. One cried in memory of a recent work fatality. They were told to get back to work. The futility of the situation has left a lasting impression.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/forest-peterson
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Forest-Peterson -
Ashton Pihl
Ph.D. Student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, admitted Summer 2025
BioI am a second-year PhD Student in the Baker Coastal Lab researching surf-zone circulation generated by short-crested breaking waves. I am interested in studying the along-crest variability in energy dissipation, the unsteady structure associated with injected vertical and horizontal vorticity, and the evolution of vertical vorticity structures linked to the shoreward propagation of bores using laboratory experimental methods and theoretical analysis.
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Carsten Prasse
Visiting Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioMy research is focusing on the occurrence and fate of anthropogenic organic contaminants in the environment and the assessment of their environmental and human impacts. My research group is using analytical tools such as high-resolution mass spectrometry to identify previously unknown organic contaminants in different environmental matrices (drinking water, wastewater, river water, biosolids, soils, vegetables) and biospecimen (human blood and hurine). We are also developing new tools that can help prioritizing chemicals of highest concern in complex environmental mixtures.
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Ram Rajagopal
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, of Electrical Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy
BioRam Rajagopal is an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Sustainable Systems Lab (S3L), focused on large-scale monitoring, data analytics and stochastic control for infrastructure networks, in particular, power networks. His current research interests in power systems are in the integration of renewables, smart distribution systems, and demand-side data analytics.
He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and an M.A. in Statistics, both from the University of California Berkeley, Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Texas, Austin and Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, Powell Foundation Fellowship, Berkeley Regents Fellowship and the Makhoul Conjecture Challenge award. He holds more than 30 patents and several best paper awards from his work and has advised or founded various companies in the fields of sensor networks, power systems, and data analytics.
