Stanford University
Showing 301-371 of 371 Results
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Alfred M. Spormann
Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Chemical Engineering, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMetabolism of anaerobic microbes in diseases, bioenergy, and bioremediation
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Kirsten Stasio
Adjunct Lecturer, Atmosphere and Energy
BioKirsten Stasio is CEO of the Nevada Clean Energy Fund (NCEF), Nevada's nonprofit green bank. She also serves as an Adjunct Lecturer at Stanford University, where she co-teaches Understand Energy, a course that gives students the knowledge and tools to engage in the energy and sustainability sectors.
Throughout her career, Kirsten has strived to translate her life-long passion for environmental sustainability into real impact across the policy, education, corporate, and investment sectors. Before joining NCEF, Kirsten worked at MAP Energy, an energy investment firm, where she helped scale investments in renewable energy across the US. Her early career began at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a non-profit, where she worked with policymakers and other stakeholders to implement climate finance solutions. While getting her graduate degree at Stanford, Kirsten worked at Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) where she helped launched a new energy efficiency initiative with large businesses in the Bay Area. Kirsten also worked at Apple to implement energy measures at Apple's headquarters, retail stores, and data centers.
Kirsten began teaching at Stanford in early 2015 after graduating from Stanford with an MBA and an MS degree in the Emmet-Interdisciplinary Program on Environment and Resources (E-IPER). Kirsten also earned a dual BA in International Relations and French from the University of California, Davis.
The origins of Kirsten's passion for sustainability trace back to her childhood when she spent time on her family’s fourth-generation ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills, a place where she enjoys spending time today with her husband and daughter. -
Robert Street
William Alden and Martha Campbell Professor in the School of Engineering, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsStreet focuses on numerical simulations related to geophysical fluid motions. His research considers the modeling of turbulence in fluid flows, which are often stratified, and includes numerical simulation of coastal upwelling, internal waves and sediment transport in coastal regions, flow in rivers, valley winds, and the planetary boundary layer.
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Tao Sun
Ph.D. Student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, admitted Autumn 2024
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI develop geometric representations and generative models that help robots understand and act in the 3D world. My research spans point cloud registration, shape assembly, spatial reasoning, and compositional planning. I am particularly interested in world-action models that connect perception and prediction with robot planning and control.
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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. -
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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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.
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Kamran Tehranchi
Ph.D. Student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, admitted Autumn 2023
BioKamran Tehranchi is a Ph.D. Student in Civil & Environmental Engineering at Stanford University researching planning processes for decarbonized and reliable electricity systems. His work focuses on developing energy system optimization models to support policy analysis. He has previously worked in the public sector as a Shultz Energy Fellow at the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), an analyst at a Community Choice Aggregator (CCA), and within city and county governments. He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Energy Systems research group, advised by Professor Ines Azevedo. He holds a M.S. in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University.
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Sebastien Tilmans
Student, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioSebastien is the Executive Director at the Codiga Resource Recovery Center at Stanford University, a test-bed facility dedicated to accelerating the scale-up of innovative resource recovery systems. Prior to joining Stanford, he worked in the Process Engineering group at Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Plant for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. He has also designed and implemented several decentralized anaerobic wastewater treatment systems in Panama, and a waterless sanitation service in Haiti. He holds a PhD in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.E. in Civil Engineering from Cooper Union. He was a Fulbright scholar, an NDSEG fellow, and an EPA STAR fellow.
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Simon Treillou
Postdoctoral Scholar, Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioSimon Treillou (he/him) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Baker Coastal Lab at Stanford University, where he studies coastal transport and mixing processes with a focus on wave-driven circulation dynamics. He holds a Master's degree in Applied Mathematics from INSA Toulouse and recently completed his Ph.D. in Coastal Oceanography at the University of Toulouse (France) in the LEGOS lab under the supervision of Patrick Marchesiello. His research uses advanced 3D wave-resolving models to improve the understanding of tracer dispersal in nearshore environments, addressing critical environmental challenges such as contaminant mitigation and ecosystem resilience. Simon's work will integrate numerical modeling, remote sensing, and experimental methods to advance knowledge of coastal physics.
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Tiziana Vanorio
Associate Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Senior Fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy and, by courtesy, of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsRock Physics, Fossil Energy Exploration, Volcanic and Geothermal Environments and Microseismicity
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AJ Villaruel
Ph.D. Student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, admitted Summer 2026
BioAJ's current research focuses on the hydrodynamics of large roughness elements in the surf zone. Specifically, he is interested in the cross/along-shore variability in energy dissipation in the presence of these elements, the associated turbulence and wake-dynamics, and the resulting implications for nearshore sediment transport and coastal morphology, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and laboratory wave-basin techniques.
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Jane Woodward
Adjunct Professor, Atmosphere and Energy
BioJane Woodward is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University where she has taught classes on energy and environment since 1991. She currently serves on the teaching teams for Understand Energy and Stanford Climate Ventures. Jane also serves on Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy Advisory Council and has founded and continues to fund multiple sustainable energy education initiatives at the university.
Jane is a Founder and Managing Partner of WovenEarth Ventures, a US early-stage climate venture fund of funds. Additionally, she is an investor in several early-stage sustainable energy companies and funds, as well as an advisor and director for some of them.
Jane is a Founding Partner at MAP Energy, an energy investment firm currently focused on oil and gas royalty interests. MAP began investing in natural gas mineral rights in 1987, wind energy in 2004, utility scale solar in 2015, and energy storage in 2017. In December 2020, MAP sold its renewable energy and energy storage assets under management to Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP). The company remains one of the longest-standing private energy investment fund management firms in the US.
In 2016, Jane created The Foster Museum, a 14,000-square-foot art venue in Palo Alto, to share artist-explorer Tony Foster’s powerful exhibitions of watercolor journeys with an intention to inspire connection to the natural world.
Prior to founding MAP in 1987, Jane worked as an exploration geologist with ARCO Exploration Company and later as a petroleum engineering consultant to Stanford University’s endowment. Jane has a BS in Geology from UC Santa Barbara, an MS in Engineering and Petroleum Geology, and an MBA, both from Stanford University. -
Katie Wu
Ph.D. Student in Environment and Resources, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Civil and Environmental EngineeringBioKatie's research explores how community-driven social interventions and infrastructure development impact community and climate resilience in informal settlements. Her work advances how we operationalize resilience to better inform community-based strategies, policy, and investments that support urban transformation for vulnerable populations. She incorporates participatory methods essential for driving community-led efforts, ensuring a community's deep participation in every step of the iterative analysis, planning, and decision-making processes, in collaboration with multi-sectoral partners and decision-makers. Katie integrates advanced data science techniques, including network science and graph neural networks (GNNs), with community-generated, ground-truthed data to redefine how resilience is measured and applied for more equitable, community-driven strategies for sustainable development. She uses unconventional data sources, such as satellite imagery and citizen-sourced data, to model the built and natural environment in areas with limited conventional data.
Prior to Stanford, Katie studied data science and AI for Product Innovation at Duke University, where she obtained a Master of Engineering Management (MEM). She was a Sustainability Graduate Intern at Lyft, Inc., where she completed and rebuilt their 2020 Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Inventory and Report and designed an air quality model forecasting potential health benefits of EV adoption for underserved communities. She received an M.S. in Medical Science from the University of Colorado School of Medicine and a B.S. in Animal Science with Distinction in Research from Cornell University. Katie is a Dean's Graduate Scholar in the Doerr School of Sustainability, an Emerson Consequential Scholar with the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), a Graduate Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), and a Stanford Dalai Lama Fellow. -
Yaochun Yu
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioMy research focuses on functional environmental microbiology and environmental analytical chemistry to uncover and harness microorganisms for chemical biotransformation. We integrate high-resolution mass spectrometry, meta-omics sequencing, molecular microbiology and biochemistry, and computational modeling to identify the functional microbes, genes, and enzymes that drive these processes. Building on these mechanistic insights, we aim to develop environmentally benign chemicals and novel biosolutions for bioremediation and waste-to-resource recovery.
I am also interested in how anthropogenic perturbations (i.e., chemical exposure) reshape microbial biodiversity and ecosystem function across natural and engineered ecosystems. We aim to resolve these cause–effect relationships and, using standardized and synthetic microbial communities, run comparable, hypothesis-driven experiments that translate fundamental insights into predictive tools and practical interventions. The aim is to help keep human activities within the safe operating space of planetary boundaries while advancing environmental and public health. -
Haoqi (Nina) Zhao
Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering
BioNina joined Stanford CEE as an Assistant Professor in Summer 2026. Her research bridges computational metabolomics and exposomics to uncover unknown lifestyle chemicals and their impacts on health. Nina earned her B.S. from Peking University, her Ph.D. from the University of Washington, and was a postdoctoral scientist at UC San Diego. She received the Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00) from the National Institutes of Health in 2025.
The Zhao Lab at Stanford will operate at the interface of environmental chemistry, environmental health, and computational mass spectrometry. We aim to identify previously unrecognized chemical drivers that influence human and ecosystem health. We pursue this goal by developing innovative computational and analytical methods centered around untargeted mass spectrometry. Through these efforts, we aim to enable precision environmental health strategies, inform public health policies, and inspire sustainable chemical design.
Current research interests include (but are not limited to):
1.Leveraging mass spectrometry data repositories and advanced informatics tools to systematically map the chemical exposome.
2.Developing tools and resources for mass spectrometry data analysis to advance exposomics research.
3.Investigating host-microbiome-xenobiotic interactions and their impacts on human health.
4.Integrating toxicology with untargeted screening to accelerate the discovery and risk assessment of unknown molecules.
5.Pediatric environmental health: chemical exposures through breastfeeding and their implications for infant development.
6.Traffic-related chemical pollution: environmental fate, occurrence, and relevance to human exposures. -
Adam Zsarnoczay
Senior Research Engineer, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAdam's research focuses on disaster simulations that support multi-hazard risk assessment and management at a regional scale. His research interests include probabilistic natural hazard assessment, model development and calibration for structural response estimation and performance assessment, surrogate modeling and uncertainty quantification in large-scale, regional simulations, and using quantitative disaster simulations to support risk management and mitigation.
