Archive for the ‘Seen 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

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

Wellness Fair draws 2,550

April 26th, 2013
Photo credit: Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News

David Iott, commissary executive chef in Arrillaga Family Dining Commons, and Devinder Kumar, sous chef in Florence Moore Hall, beckon Anna Cobb, graphic designer for University Communications, with an amuse bouche featuring smoked turkey at the Wellness Fair. Photo credit: Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News

The theme of last week’s Wellness Fair was “Summer Fun,” so the BeWell@Stanford and Health Improvement Program staff decorated the Arrillaga Center for Sports and Recreation with brightly colored balloons, including a palm tree made of orange and green balloons, and themselves with bright red T-shirts and leis.

The April 18 event, which opened at 10:30 a.m. and closed at 3 p.m., attracted 2,550 faculty and staff.

Inside, massage therapists kneaded backs and shoulders. Staff from Residential and Dining Enterprises prepared delicious, nutritious food for the event. Campus chefs in tall white toques handed out more than 4,000 tasty samples of green salads and blueberry smoothies – along with recipes to make them at home.

Faculty and staff could get their bone density measured, their blood pressure checked and their skin examined for sun damage.

They also had the chance to play games. There were beanbags to toss, golf balls to putt and bowling pins to juggle. Some people danced to a Wii Fit video routine. Others got their picture taken – putting their smiling faces inside the face cutout of a surfer in a wetsuit holding a boogie board. Some made their own taco spice mix and left with a recipe for the mix and for a lentil-mushroom filling for a meatless taco.

There were other give-aways, including foam rollers, miniature compost or recycling bins, lip balms with sunscreen, beach balls and reusable shopping bags. The BeWell staff also handed out raffle prizes: a cruiser bike, an outdoor grill and Stanford folding chairs.

—KATHLEEN J. SULLIVAN

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

Stanford ingenuity on display at 2013 Cool Product Expo

April 22nd, 2013

Earlier this month, hundreds of people attended the Cool Product Expo, hosted annually by the Graduate School of Business (GSB). The event, held at the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, showcased more than 40 companies and products at the cutting edge of technology and design.

“We selected these based on outstanding innovation in either technology, manufacturing or design,” said first-year MBA student DANIEL CHEN, one of six GSB students who organized the event. Chen and his classmates anticipate that these products, from foldable kayaks to electric skateboards to telepresence robots, are items that will top wish lists in 2013.

There were several clever gizmos from startups founded by Stanford students, graduates or faculty.

Boosted Boardsoffers the world’s lightest electric vehicle, a battery-powered skateboard that was born on campus by co-founders

JOHN ULMEN, SANJAY DASTOOR and MATTHEW TRAN. The battery-powered motor takes the board up to 20 mph and runs about 6 miles on a single charge. Regenerative brakes top off the battery as you go, or the plug-in battery recharges in about an hour. Supported in part by a strong KickStarter campaign, the company will ship out the first production boards in the coming months.

Another electric vehicle startup, Faraday Bicycles, was founded by Stanford grad ADAM VOLLMER. While working at IDEO, Vollmer began designing the vintage European courier-style electric bike as a way to attract people to commuting by bicycle. Vollmer refined the design with the help of ANDREW TAYLOR, a graduate of Stanford’s product design program and the company’s lead mechanical engineer. The plug-in bicycle provides 20 miles of pedal-assisted power, making climbing even San Francisco’s hills a breeze.

The booth for Instacube, a photo-sharing device from a company co-founded by BILL BURNETT, the executive director of the Stanford Design Program and a consulting assistant professor, and Stanford grad ANDY BUTLER, also drew a large crowd. The digital picture frame-like device displays a customizable photostream of content uploaded to various social networks by you or your friends. The touchscreen frame has potential outside of the home, too: Chef JAMIE OLIVER will soon be deploying the device on tabletops in his restaurants to serve as a sort of “digital sommelier” to help diners pair foods and wines.

Here’s a quick snapshot of other companies with strong ties to Stanford that were on hand at this year’s Cool Product Expo.

Freebord, another skateboard company, offers boards with wheels attached to swiveling axles, allowing for smooth free-ride steering.

Revolights has developed futuristic lighting solutions for bicycle wheels to make riders more visible at night, and to make bikes look incredibly cool.

Motrr offers a rotating platform designed to make video-conferencing with iPhones a smoother experience.

Clean Bottle, the company that launched a sports water bottle that opens on both ends for easier scrubbing, showed off the latest addition to its lineup, an aluminum bottle called The Square.

Artiphany shared a new augmented reality greeting card that can be programmed with personalized messages.

Radian, by Alpine Labs, is an iPhone- and Android-enabled tripod attachment that makes time-lapse photography a cinch.

Stealth HD presented a system that stitches together video from multiple cameras into a seamless high-resolution panoramic video.

Sifteo demonstrated its tiny intelligent videogame cubes, which have been a hit among the gaming community.

Tegu showcased the company’s children’s wooden building blocks, which are made from sustainable materials and snap together with magnets.

First Night, Twelfth Night

April 19th, 2013

Earlier this week the Stanford community commemorated the 75th anniversary of Memorial Auditorium with a performance in Pigott Theater of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which was the first-night production on August 20, 1937, in what was then called Memorial Hall.

We can thank the plumbers for bringing Twelfth Night back to MemAud. To quote from the evening’s program, “it was ‘a very midsummer madness’ that led to the discovery of a cache of materials relating to the initial staging of the play right here on these boards.”

Plumbers working in the auditorium discovered two boxes tucked away in an unused tunnel in the building. The boxes contained set and lighting designs, crew schedules, memos regarding the management of the building, purchase orders and watercolor renderings as well as a program for the inaugural production of Twelfth Night.

The accidental time capsule inspired production manager ROSS WILLIAMS and former chair ALICE RAYNER and other staff and faculty at the Department of Theater and Performance Studies (TAPS) to bring the Bard’s comedy back for an anniversary performance.

A.C.T.’s Master of Fine Arts Class of 2014, under the director of DOMENIQUE LOZANO, presented the “Will on Wheels” production of the play to a sold-out crowd. It was the students’ last performance of the play, and they were delighted with the Pigott stage, which they called warm and acoustically enveloping, and the crowd, which they said got more of the humor than the middle and high school students they’ve been performing for as part of A.C.T.’s education outreach program. “We got laughs where we’ve never had them before,” said NEMUNA CEESAY, who played Maria.

Guests attending the after-party gala in the prop shop were treated to sumptuous nibbles and beverages while surrounded by sets and mementos from previous productions.

There was an airplane overhead from Threepenny Opera, a dramatic black-and-white drop from Skin of Our Teeth and a portrait designed to look like TAPS lecturer JEFFREY BIHR from Restoration Comedy presiding over the festivities.

Vintage film footage from 1937 (digitized by University Archivist DANIEL HARTWIG) of players rehearsing Twelfth Night on the Frost Amphitheater slope, sepia-toned images of Memorial Auditorium when it appeared to stand alone in a field and photographs from other productions over the years projected on a large screen reminded the revelers of the rich history of MemAud.

TAPS department chair JENNIFER DEVERE BRODY, who organized the event, said of the celebration, “This is just the beginning of more to come in the years ahead.”

—ROBIN WANDER