Archive for the ‘Heard on Campus’ Category

Stanford Humanities Center fellows represent a diverse range of scholarship

May 20th, 2013

Stanford Humanities Center

The Stanford Humanities Center recently named the 28 scholars who will pursue individual research and writing projects at the center during the 2013-2014 academic year as residential fellows.

The group’s proposed research topics range from race in American theater to autism under Nazism, from the history of same-sex unions in 18th-century China to cognitive neuroscience in relation to Victorian literature.

Chosen from a pool of over 400 applicants, the group is one of the largest cohorts to date, as well as one of the most diverse. The 10 internal faculty fellows represent three of Stanford’s schools: Humanities and Sciences, Law and Education, and the 10 external faculty fellows come from eight different states and France.

Through participation in workshops, lectures and courses, Humanities Center fellows foster collaborations and develop campus-wide academic connections.

ARON RODRIGUE, a history professor and the center director noted, “The scope and diversity of scholarship among next year’s fellows speaks to one of the center’s core missions of fostering an interdisciplinary research environment.”

The center’s fellowship program also is open to current Stanford graduate students working on their dissertations. Next year’s fellows will spend their time at the center completing their dissertations while also contributing to the intellectual life of the Stanford community.

In addition to the yearlong fellowships, the Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies will host five international visitors to participate in four-week residencies. During their time at Stanford, these scholars will give lectures in conjunction with the departments and research centers that nominated them.

Find out more about the incoming fellows on the Humanities Center website.

—VERONICA MARIAN, the Humanities at Stanford

 

‘I am Stanford’

May 15th, 2013

In this video, created by Stanford Athletics, seniors talk about what makes the Farm special to them as athletes and scholars.

Crown Prince and Princess of Norway visit Stanford

May 10th, 2013

Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and his wife, Crown Princess Mette-Marit, with David Kelley, a professor of mechanical engineering

CROWN PRINCE HAAKON OF NORWAY and his wife, CROWN PRINCESS METTE-MARIT, toured Stanford on Wednesday during an official visit to the United States that also included stops in Houston, San Francisco and Palo Alto

Leading the royal couple through the Quad, University President JOHN HENNESSY shared Stanford’s history and pointed out distinctive architecture and artwork, including the Rodin sculptures and Memorial Church.

The couple also was treated to presentations at the d.school (official name: The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design), where Professor DAVID KELLEY spoke about the goals of the institute and shared some of the successes of its students.

TINA SEELIG, who directs the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, also described her method to unlock creativity and be routinely innovative.

In brief remarks to a crowd of Stanford students and Norwegian entrepreneurs who gathered there, the Crown Princess thanked Stanford for hosting the couple and lauded the innovative spirit at Stanford and the d.school, in particular.

“You tear down hurdles by combining methods from engineering and design, ideas from the arts, tools from social sciences and insights from the business world,” she said. “By combining expertise from different fields, the d.school finds solutions to complex, real-life challenges.”

—BROOKE DONALD

Martin Reinhard wins Humboldt Research Award

May 6th, 2013

MARTIN REINHARD, professor emeritus of civil and environmental engineering, has been selected for a Humboldt Research Award, conferred annually in recognition of lifetime achievements in research. The award is presented by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Bonn, Germany, to promote academic collaboration between top international scientists and scholars and colleagues in Germany.

Martin Reinhard

Reinhard studies the fate of organic substances in the subsurface environment. His lab develops technologies for the remediation of contaminated groundwater through chemical and biological transformation reactions in soils, natural waters and treatment systems.

Humboldt awardees are invited to carry out research projects of personal interest in cooperation with German counterparts.

—ANDREW MYERS, School of Engineering

Senior Maya Kornberg awarded Shultz Fellowship

May 3rd, 2013

Thomas L. Friedman, Maya Kornberg and George Shultz

While thousands of Stanford students earn scholarships and have the opportunity to study abroad, for senior MAYA KORNBERG, the awarding of her fellowship to study in Israel this summer was anything but ordinary. “This is an only-at-Stanford kind of morning,” said RABBI SERENA EISENBERG, executive director of Hillel at Stanford. Or as New York Times columnist and author THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN said, “Not many people get a fellowship handed to them by two former secretaries of state.” Not to mention a best-selling author.

Condoleezza Rice and Maya Kornberg

At a breakfast gathering at Hillel Thursday morning, Kornberg was awarded the George and Charlotte Shultz Fellowship for Modern Israel Studies from former U.S. Secretary of State CONDOLEEZZA RICE. Rice, also a professor of political science and business at Stanford, happened to teach Kornberg in her undergraduate foreign policy seminar winter quarter. Kornberg also received accolades from the namesake of the fellowship, GEORGE SHULTZ, also a former U.S. secretary of state. And Friedman, who established the fellowship in honor of Shultz on the occasion of Shultz’s 90th birthday two years ago, also joined in bestowing the honor.

“This fellowship is an example of what Stanford does best,” Rice said. “Great research universities bring together people from the entire academic spectrum, from 18-year-old freshmen to Nobel laureates, and put them together to instill in all of us a desire to search for the truth.” Despite her many commitments, Rice said she did not hesitate when asked to serve on the Shultz Fellowship review committee: “Anything with George’s name, I pay attention. George is emblematic of a great public servant, and he is also a university person, deeply involved with students. And Tom Friedman, he has helped us see inside this complicated region more clearly than any author or scholar I know.”

Rice, Shultz and Friedman all noted that a visit to Israel is essential for any scholar working to understand the Middle East. Friedman said he established the fellowship in recognition of Shultz’s “tireless efforts to broker Middle East peace,” and that the honor is available to any Stanford student interested in studying Israel or the Arab-Israeli peace process. The Shultzes then added to the fellowship, as did philanthropists LAURA LAUDER and JIM KOSHLAND. (Because of university restrictions on funding research opportunities in Israel while the State Department maintains a travel advisory there, the fellowship fund was established at Hillel at Stanford, which administers the award.)

Last year, the first fellowship was awarded to EMILY WARREN, a joint JD-economics PhD candidate, who used the time to study how Israel’s defense investments in the late 1980s resulted in a tech boom in the early 1990s.

Kornberg, a graduating senior majoring in international relations, intends to use her fellowship to examine Israeli political parties’ campaigns in elections between 1967 and 2013, investigating the platforms and rhetoric on issues relating to the peace process, such as territorial division, the status of Jerusalem and rights of return.

“What I have appreciated most about my Stanford experience is that they just keep throwing these amazing opportunities at you all the time,” said Kornberg, who is the daughter and granddaughter of two Nobel laureates, ROGER KORNBERG and the late ARTHUR KORNBERG. Her proud mother, who was toting a camera Thursday morning, is YAHLI LORCH, associate professor of structural biology.

Maya Kornberg plans to pursue a graduate degree in public policy at Columbia University. But when she returns from Israel, she has a date to meet with Rice, Shultz and Friedman to share what she learned.

—LISA LAPIN

Harold Hwang wins top Korean Award

April 30th, 2013

 

Harold Hwang

HAROLD Y. HWANG, professor of applied physics and photon science at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has won the 2013 Ho-Am Award in Science, one of five annual awards often referred to as the Korean equivalent of the Nobel prizes.

The award – which consists of a 6-ounce gold medal, a laureate diploma and a cash prize of 300 million Korean won (about $265,000) – will be presented May 31 in Seoul. Recipients also are scheduled to give commemorative lectures at major universities, academies and high schools across Korea.

Hwang is an expert in creating complex oxide materials with extraordinary electronic and magnetic properties, including superconductivity. Made of alternating atomic layers of metals and oxygen, these materials are the focus of intense worldwide research seeking to design new combinations for electronics, sensing and energy applications.

“Complex oxides are today where semiconductors were early in the 20th century, when crystal radios were state of the art,” Hwang said. “If you put various semiconductors together, you can make fantastic devices just because the semiconductor interface can range from an insulator to a good conductor. With complex oxides, however, you can add superconductivity, magnetism, ferroelectricity and many other properties. Imagine the possibilities.”

The key, he said, is determining the principles that give each atomic arrangement its special behavior. Hwang and colleagues use SLAC’s light sources to probe the electronic behavior of these materials. His team is creating a chamber that will enable researchers to create complex materials layer by layer and measure their properties at the same time.

The Ho-Am Prize was established by Samsung in 1990 to honor its founding chairman, the late Byung-Chull Lee. “Ho-Am” was Lee’s pen name. Awards are given each year in the categories of science, engineering, medicine, arts and community service. In addition, a Ho-Am Prize in Mass Communication was awarded from 1991 to 1994 and in 1996.

A total of 177 people have received Ho-Am prizes, including two Stanford professors: THOMAS LEE (2011, engineering) and STUART K. KIM (2004, medicine).

Ho-Am Prizes are awarded to people of Korean origin. (The prize for community service, however, can also be awarded to non-Koreans who made outstanding contributions to Korea and Koreans at home and abroad.) Hwang’s parents are from Korea, and came to Southern California for graduate school. He said he’s descended from a Chinese merchant who moved to the Korean peninsula about a thousand years ago.

—MIKE ROSS, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Stanford’s Asian Staff Forum hosts Adam Johnson

April 29th, 2013

Newly minted Pulitzer Prize winner and English Professor Adam Johnson signs books at an Asian Staff Forum talk.

When the Asian Staff Forum (ASF) invited ADAM JOHNSON, associate professor of English, to speak to their group about his novel The Orphan Master’s Son, they had no idea that just a few days before the event their guest would win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

The Orphan Master’s Son, Johnson’s third novel, is a gripping tale about a young man’s life and struggles in North Korea during Kim Jong Il’s reign. The ASF seeks to promote the interests of Stanford employees of Asian/Pacific/Indian subcontinent descent or affinity.

Originally planned as an intimate discussion at the Asian American Activities Center, the event was moved to the Humanities Center to accommodate more people. But Johnson played down the impact the prize was having on his daily life. Asked by an audience member how it felt to win a Pulitzer, Johnson said that since the announcement his dishwasher had broken and he had gotten a parking ticket, so “everything feels the same.”

A curiosity about the “great tragedies of the world” inspired Johnson to learn more about the turbulent history of the Korean peninsula and the harsh reality of life in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). He gleaned what he could from policy texts and frequent visits to propaganda laden DPRK websites. “Scenarios, scenes and dialogue” that filled in the missing human stories “just started coming out,” he said.

As a fiction writer, Johnson was particularly intrigued by how the strict rules of the Kim dynasty have created a “single national story” for North Koreans.

In an effort to learn more about the cryptic society, Johnson visited North Korea in 2007. He knew that in such a closed society where even family members censor each other, he wouldn’t be able to stop people on the streets to learn more about their lives, but said that he learned a lot through observation. His imagination filled in the rest.

“Legend, myth, rumor and dreams are powerful tools” when it comes to “building a psychological portrait,” Johnson told the group.

—CORRIE GOLDMAN, Humanities at Stanford

Al Gore dedicates bench in memory of Stephen Schneider

April 25th, 2013

Former Vice President AL GORE was on campus Tuesday to remember a friend. Gore spoke at a private ceremony dedicating a stone bench in the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden in memory of renowned climate scientist STEPHEN SCHNEIDER, a former Stanford biology professor and senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, who died in 2010. Gore also spoke later that day, giving the inaugural Stephen H. Schneider Memorial Lecture.

Schneider and Gore worked together on several projects and shared, along with Schneider’s colleagues on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”

Before Gore spoke, Schneider’s widow, TERRY ROOT, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute and frequent scientific collaborator with Schneider, thanked Schneider’s friends.

A bench dedicated to Stephen H. Schneider sits in the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden. An engraving reads, ''Teach your children well.'' At right, Terry Root, Schneider's widow and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, leaves a stone at the bench.

“I promised I wasn’t going to cry,” she said through the onset of tears, throwing up her arms. Then, the Rev. Canon SALLY G. BINGHAM, president of climate change advocacy group Interfaith Power and Light, compared Schneider to Old Testament prophets. “He raged on about drought, fires, floods, rising seas with the spread of disease unless we changed our ways.” Although Schneider was “not a believer,” Bingham said, he was among a small number of scientists willing to include religion in the climate change dialogue and to emphasize the moral issues involved.

“He was a force of nature,” Gore said of Schneider. “He was sui generis.” Schneider inspired others, Gore noted, with “his passion, his commitment, his stamina, his relentless desire to keep working for the truth and to get the message out.”

Gore recalled first seeing Schneider on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in the mid-1970s, when climate change had barely made it into the American consciousness. Schneider’s work to raise awareness of the issue was “awe inspiring,” Gore said. “There are very few people in history as successful as Steve was in helping to protect that only home we have ever known.”

After Gore’s comments, Stanford Woods Institute Co-Director JEFF KOSEFF wrapped up the proceedings. He called Schneider a “mensch,” a Yiddish term that Koseff translated as “a person you want to be around because he or she makes you feel genuine and whole. A mensch makes you feel good about yourself and what you do, lifts up those around him or her. A mensch inspires [people] to do good, to heal the world.”

Koseff paused to imagine Schneider asking him if he could come up with a slogan for the day’s event. “I said, ‘Yes, I can, Steve. We’re dedicating a bench for a mensch.’”

Watch a video montage of Schneider discussing climate change.

—ROB JORDAN, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Expert advice on talking to kids about violence

April 16th, 2013

Victor Carrion

Ubiquitous news reports of incidents like yesterday’s explosions at the Boston Marathon and the Newtown, Conn., shootings in December present a challenge for parents.

VICTOR CARRION, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital  (LPCH) who has conducted extensive research on childhood trauma, says honest, age-appropriate communication with children is one of the most important elements of helping youngsters handle news of traumatic events.

In the following Q&A reprinted from the LPCH website, Carrion offers several suggestions for parents to help their kids process difficult news.

What are the potential short-term psychological effects on school-age children hearing or seeing information about these events?

The short-term effects include children becoming concerned about their safety or the safety of their family. In addition, children who are closer in terms of proximity to the event will be at increased risk for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. However, because the images in the media are now so prevalent, the psychological effect on the child can be the same as if the child were at the scene of the incident. We must protect children by limiting their exposure to these images.

What about the long-term psychological impacts?

For some children—if they are not treated via an assessment and psychosocial therapy—their academic and social life will be impacted. Difficulty paying attention, managing emotional responses and problems with memory are common symptoms children may experience.

What are some of the early warning signs of childhood trauma for parents to look out for?

Irritability, a greater susceptibility to crying, and difficulty with sleep are among the symptoms that should raise a red flag if they persist longer than a month. Younger children may become clingier and experience nightmares and distressing or bad dreams. Children may regress in some behaviors—such as bedwetting or sucking their thumb—and you may hear them complaining more about a stomachache or headache.

What is your recommendation for parents on how to talk to their children about disturbing events and images they witness or hear about?

Encourage discussion with your children, but do not force it. Let them know that it’s OK to be fearful or angry or sad. It’s also very important to give the message, “You are protected. You are safe.” In the event you notice warning signs in your children’s behavior, I would recommend taking them to their pediatrician or mental health specialist to obtain a consultation.

Learn more about Victor Carrion, MD, and his research interests.

 

 

From the TEDxStanford archives: Professor Sherry Wren on global health

April 4th, 2013

At last year’s TEDxStanford conference, SHERRY WREN, professor of surgery, gave a talk explaining the importance of surgery in global health care. In a video of that talk, recently posted on the Medical School’s news website, Wren stresses the need to reject the current dogma that surgery is not cost effective or part of basic health.

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share ideas that spark deep discussion and connection.

TEDxStanford 2013 is scheduled for Saturday, May 11, and tickets go on sale at 9 a.m. Monday, April 8. In the meantime, watch Wren’s 2012 talk, in which she offers some staggering statistics about surgery and global health.