Stanford alumni Gayatri Datar, MBA ’14, co-founder and CEO of EarthEnable, and Pamela Ronald, MS ’84, a renowned plant geneticist, are this year’s recipients of the President’s Award for Advancement of the Common Good.
The award honors alumni who use their talent and education to positively and sustainably change the trajectory of people’s lives. Award recipients exemplify the university’s mission and values, and demonstrate a commitment to learning, social responsibility, and ethical and effective service.
“Pamela and Gayatri have created real and lasting change in communities around the world,” said President Jonathan Levin. “They have used their talents and their education to advance society – Pamela by applying groundbreaking research to improve food security for millions, and Gayatri by working with local communities to provide affordable, sustainable, and healthier housing solutions. I’m thrilled to recognize them both with the President’s Award for the Advancement of the Common Good.”
Gayatri Datar
Datar’s journey to helping hundreds of thousands of people obtain affordable, sustainable, and safer housing began with a conversation. Datar was an MBA student spending her spring break in Rwanda as part of the d.school course Design for Extreme Affordability when she met a single mother of three. The woman lived in a home with no windows, dirt floors, and cracking walls, and she told Datar that she wanted to provide a safer environment for her children to have a better future.
The encounter inspired Datar to co-found EarthEnable, a social enterprise that provides people in Africa with healthier homes by training local masons to craft earthen floors, which are made with packed, locally sourced materials like gravel, sand, clay, and fibrous substances before being sealed with a drying oil. These floors are more cost-effective than concrete and also significantly reduce infectious disease, respiratory illness, malnutrition, and vector-borne disease associated with dirt floors, which can harbor pathogens and bacteria. Earthen floors can also be safer in extreme weather conditions.
“If you can fix a shelter problem, you can contribute to health, safety, jobs, and to climate resilience,” Datar said. “Africa needs 400 million more homes in the next 25 years. There’s so much impact and so many dimensions that get unlocked with this one thing.”
Since its founding in 2014, EarthEnable has impacted more than 250,000 lives, created more than 1,000 jobs in East Africa, and completed approximately 45,000 projects.
Every single person on this Earth is here to support other beings to self-actualize, and to do that through love and service.”Gayatri Datar
For Datar, the award is “a great testament to what the team has built over the last 10 years,” she said. “We couldn’t be more proud.”
One of the reasons Datar was drawn to Stanford was the opportunity to take the d.school course, in which students apply innovation and design methods to challenges related to poverty in collaboration with communities worldwide. Design for Extreme Affordability is a Cardinal Course that gives students the opportunity to integrate their classroom learning to address real-world issues and serve communities.
The d.school’s methodology of prototyping, failing fast, and trying again was invaluable to Datar’s journey. “Having this bias toward action is extremely efficient because you learn quickly,” she said.
The idea for EarthEnable came out of the Extreme course, and Datar received the Social Impact Founder Fellowship from the Graduate School of Business’ Center for Social Innovation to help launch EarthEnable.
“Studying at Stanford absolutely changed my life,” Datar said. “None of this would have happened had I not gone there. There’s just something in the water at Stanford, and the entrepreneurship bug bit.”
Datar is a co-founder of Unlock Impact and co-operator of The Creativity Fund Rwanda, an effort to disrupt the traditional philanthropic model and shift grant decisions to those most impacted by awarded projects. She is also a board member of Water Access Rwanda.
“At the end of the day, I think that every single person on this Earth is here to support other beings to self-actualize, and to do that through love and service,” Datar said. “And that can happen in business, government, NGOs, and social enterprise by providing services to people who need them.”
Pamela Ronald
Growing up in San Mateo, Ronald’s father often told his family about the struggles he faced when fleeing Nazi Germany and how he was refused an education in Germany and then in France. He finally completed high school in Cuba and a bachelor’s degree at San Francisco State University.
“He always said, ‘You are privileged with a home, a family, and education. Don’t take it for granted. Use your privilege to help others and leave the world a better place,’” Ronald said. Ronald found that studying plant biology, specifically rice genetics, was her way to follow her father’s guidance.
Ronald has spent three decades studying rice, a staple food for more than half of the world's population. Her discoveries have advanced understanding of fundamental biological processes and enhanced sustainable agriculture and food security. Her groundbreaking research led to the discovery of genes conferring immunity and the development of rice that can tolerate flooding, now grown by more than 6 million farmers in Southeast Asia.
“Understanding the molecular basis of resistance to disease and tolerance of environmental stress is not only something I’m scientifically very interested in but also a chance to help the world’s poorest people,” she said. “For me, it was the perfect niche.”
Ronald is a distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and the Genome Center at the University of California, Davis, and an investigator at the Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley, the director of Grass Genetics at the Joint BioEnergy Institute and an affiliated scholar at the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford.
She earned her undergraduate degree in biology at Reed College and then began her master's degree in a Stanford lab – a pivotal move that launched her career in plant biology. Ronald was mentored by Stanford plant geneticists Patricia Bedinger, Judy Callis, Kathy Newton, David Stern, and Virginia Walbot.
“They were so kind and patient in teaching me things, and they were also very excited about the research themselves,” Ronald said. “Even as a young person, I felt very welcome there, and that really influenced me.”
Use your privilege to help others and leave the world a better place.”Pamela Ronald
Ronald has also helped shape the narrative around genetic engineering and its use in sustainable agriculture and poverty alleviation. She co-authored the book, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food, which supports public understanding on how to bridge the gap between organic farming and genetic engineering, with her husband Raoul Adamchak. Her 2015 TED Talk, “The case for engineering our food,” has been watched by more than 2 million people and translated into 26 languages.
“It’s been tremendously satisfying to be able to make a difference,” Ronald said. “The success of these projects has really thrilled me and it’s due in large part to my colleagues.”
Ronald is a Wolf Prize and VinFuture Prize laureate; a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Forestry and Agriculture; and an invited member of the French National Academy of Agriculture.
Ronald also founded the Interdisciplinary Forum for Advancing Science Learning to provide the next generation of scientists with the training they need to become effective communicators.
“It’s such an honor and it feels so wonderful to have Stanford’s support,” Ronald said in response to receiving the award. “I’m grateful to be nominated and to the presidential group for selecting me. It really is exciting.”
For more information
The Office of the President partnered with the Haas Center for Public Service and the Stanford Alumni Association to create the award in 2021. Stanford invited the university community to nominate living alumni, from recent graduates to those with established careers in public service.
A committee of alumni, faculty, and staff reached a strong consensus for each of this year’s award winners.
The award joins other university awards conferred during Commencement honoring faculty, students, and staff, including the Kenneth M. Cuthbertson Award for Exceptional Service, the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Awards for Exceptional Contributions to Undergraduate Education, and the Walter J. Gores Faculty Awards for Excellence in Teaching.
Writer
Chelcey Adami