<h4 style="text-align: left;"><em>Science & community meet in the work of the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative </em></h4> In the earthquake-prone San Francisco Bay Area, thousands of people live in so-called “soft-story” buildings: older, usually with parking on the ground floor and apartments above, and lacking strength to withstand a major earthquake. Such buildings are easy for a trained eye to spot and can usually be retrofitted. Yet social and policy challenges keep solutions at bay. The tenants and owners are often of modest means. Many don’t know their buildings are vulnerable or, if they do, how to best make fixes. It’s politically risky for cities to mandate costly retrofits. In March 2015, Stanford undergraduate and graduate students confronted the challenge in a <a href="http://urbanst164.stanford.edu" target="_blank">Sustainable Cities</a> class taught by <a href="http://urbanstudies.stanford.edu" target="_blank">urban studies</a> lecturer Deland Chan, ’07, MA ’07. Students mapped soft-story buildings in the Bay Area city of Oakland, where about 22,000 residential units fall into the category. They surveyed tenants as to what rent increases they would be willing to pay to make their dwellings safer. Their input and analysis informed the city’s thinking and helped to create interactive tools such as a Soft Story Map to guide policy efforts. <blockquote>This class set me on a pathway of exploration into how change is made in cities, where I can see myself contributing in these processes of change, and what change is most needed. – Jack Lundquist, '17</blockquote> The class was part of the <a href="http://web.stanford.edu/group/urbanresilience/cgi-bin/wordpress/" target="_blank">Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative</a>, a multidisciplinary network focused on research and design of technologies to improve communities’ resilience to natural disasters. Resilience is a term planners, engineers and scientists use to describe the ability of systems, including cities, to rebound from crises. Their focus comes as more of the world’s people live in flood- or quake-prone areas whose vulnerability puts swelling populations at risk. Members of the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative work not just to study disaster risk but also to build people’s capacity to respond to it. Working at the intersection of natural sciences, statistics, engineering and policy, they create tools that communities, cities and nations can use to protect themselves against disaster and respond effectively when it comes. "There is a lot of work that the earthquake engineering community and the public planners have to do as a team," said PhD candidate Luis Ceferino, who was part of the Oakland project. "For a long time, we have known about the vulnerable behavior of the soft story buildings in the earthquake-engineering community, but it is very recently that we have implemented policies for making these buildings less vulnerable." Ceferino and others involved in the Urban Resilience Initiative aim for cities to adopt and refine disaster mitigation policies with the help of the link between engineering communities and policy makers. Anne Sanquini’s Stanford dissertation research measured the effectiveness of a short film in building support for school retrofitting in Nepal. In fact, Sanquini, PhD ’15, <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/2015/05/22/nepal-quake-buildings-052215/" target="_blank">was in Nepal, screening her film for local researchers, when the 7.6 earthquake hit</a> in April 2015. In the week that followed, researchers from Stanford’s John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Research Center <a href="https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/how-do-you-recover-after-deadly-earthquake" target="_blank">developed a cloud-based computing model</a> to estimate the quake’s impact on the region. David Lallemant, PhD ’15, spent a month and a half in Nepal, working with the World Bank and the United Nations Shelter Cluster to support response and recovery efforts. Lallemant co-led the housing sector assessment for the joint U.N./World Bank/European Union post-disaster needs assessment requested by the Nepali government. Several other Stanford graduate students curated a data clearinghouse related to earthquake impacts. Led by the <a href="http://blume.stanford.edu/">Blume Earthquake Engineering Research Center</a>, Stanford has a long history of research and service to reduce the impact of earthquakes worldwide. After a 7.8 earthquake struck Ecuador in April 2016, Associate Professor of civil and environmental engineering Eduardo Miranda and his students, including Ceferino, <a href="https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/eduardo-miranda-surveying-damage-caused-ecuador-s-earthquake" target="_blank">conducted assessments of damaged hospitals</a>, examining both structural design and operational response. Their research aims to support more resilient emergency health services after disruptive events. Working with the Natural Capital Project, a consortium whose Stanford participants are primarily housed in the Department of Biology and the Woods Institute for the Environment, members of the Stanford Urban Resilience Initiative are developing new ways to assess the benefits of ecosystems in reducing disaster's impact. One ongoing project explores how nature can mitigate the impact of urban floods. Upcoming projects include: <ul> <li> A two-day “disaster art-a-thon” at Stanford in fall 2016. Engineers, scientists and local artists will come together to find novel ways to communicate about hazards, risk and disasters, and to have fun while doing it.</li> <li>A fall 2016 course in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, <em>Disaster Risk and International Development. </em></li> <li>Training for Stanford graduate engineering students to rapidly evaluate buildings for safety after an earthquake.</li> <li>Work on enhancing post-disaster damage assessments through crowdsourced image analysis using the volunteer Humanitarian OpenStreetMaps team. From satellite imagery, volunteers extract data on damaged buildings and roads for more efficient use by disaster response teams on the ground.</li> </ul> "I was surprised by how challenging it is to implement policy," said Jack Lundquist, '17, who received an <a href="https://haas.stanford.edu/students/cardinal-quarter/fellowship-opportunities/meet-undergraduate-fellows/previous-undergraduate" target="_blank">undergraduate fellowship</a> from Stanford's <a href="https://haas.stanford.edu" target="_blank">Haas Center for Public Service</a> to work on the Resilient Oakland project. Lundquist was energized, however, rather than intimidated by the task. "An exposure to the hurdles – political, bureaucratic, economic, social – so early in the trajectory of my career was incredibly valuable because it got me thinking more realistically about how I want to create change in society," he said. "Ultimately, I am committed to encouraging more sustainable, affordable, resilient and vibrant communities in the Bay Area."
<h4 style="text-align: center;"><em>Faster water filter is Stanford, SLAC team’s latest creation</em></h4> Providing clean water is one of the most pressing challenges in the developing world. It takes expensive infrastructure to purify a municipal water supply, hours of household labor to boil or chemically treat impure water, or even longer to put water in a plastic bottle and wait for the sun’s ultraviolet rays to disinfect it. Now, researchers at Stanford and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory <a href="https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2016-08-15-slac-stanford-gadget-grabs-more-solar-energy-disinfect-water-faster.aspx" target="_blank">have developed a nanostructured water filter</a> half the size of a postage stamp that can disinfect water in minutes by harnessing more of the sun’s power to trigger microbe-killing chemical reactions. In lab tests, the little filter dropped into about an ounce of water killed more than 99.999 percent of bacteria in 20 minutes without further human effort. “We just dropped it into the water and put everything under the sun, and the sun did all the work,” Chong Liu, lead author of the report in in <a href="http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2016.138.html" target="_blank"><em>Nature Nanotechnology</em></a>, told SLAC. Liu is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Stanford associate professor of materials science and engineering <a href="https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/yi-cui-nano-materials-can-help-improve-everything-batteries-face-masks" target="_blank">Yi Cui</a>, an investigator with the <a href="http://simes.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences at SLAC (SIMES)</a>. The device exploits how the properties of its material change when milled at nanoscale. It’s made with molybdenum disulfide, a common industrial lubricant. When fabricated into ridges just a few atoms thick, topped with copper and exposed to light, molybdenum disulfide triggers the formation of hydrogen peroxide and other chemicals that kill bacteria. By reacting to visible light — 50 percent of the sun’s energy — rather than just the 4 percent of solar energy that is ultraviolet rays, the new filter works many times faster than other solar purification methods. Because it is made of inexpensive materials, its creators believe it holds promise for the developing world. As a graduate student in Cui’s lab in 2015, Liu worked on a similar project to create a <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/2015/02/18/filter-air-pollution-021815/" target="_blank">low-cost, highly efficient air filter</a> from nanospun polyacrylonitrile (PAN), a material commonly used to make surgical gloves. Spun at nanoscale, PAN develops properties that attract and trap particles of a size most dangerous to human lungs. These are only two of the many innovations Cui’s lab has developed to apply nanotechnology to environmental challenges. Since 2010, members of the group have published more than 30 papers each year on concepts ranging from pollution filters to renewable energy to ultra-efficient batteries. Next steps for the water filter are to lab-test it on more bacteria and on viruses, and then to field-test it in naturally polluted water, including in developing countries. “Nanotechnology is bringing very exciting opportunities – new ideas, new materials, new devices, new mechanisms for treating water,” Cui <a href="https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/yi-cui-nano-materials-can-help-improve-everything-batteries-face-masks" target="_blank">told Stanford Engineering</a>. “This has become some of the key research guiding my group.”
<h4><i>Volunteers aid the complex job of hosting Stanford's international students</i></h4> Soon after Urmila John’s son Melind John ’94 headed to Stanford, she joined Stanford’s <a href="http://stanfordparentsclub.worldsecuresystems.com/" target="_blank">Parents’ Club</a>. She wanted to learn more about the school her son had chosen over several others, why he so passionately felt, as he told his mother, that he “belonged to the campus” the moment he saw it. A Parents’ Club friend got John into volunteering for Stanford, notably for the <a href="http://ccisstanfordu.org/" target="_blank">Community Committee for International Students</a> (CCIS), a longstanding volunteer group closely linked to Stanford’s <a href="https://bechtel.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Bechtel International Center</a> and key to the center’s opening in 1963. The committee’s mission resonated with John because she, too, had come to the United States as a young foreign student knowing nobody. “As a foreigner, I wanted these kids to feel comfortable,” John said. Raised in Mumbai, she attended a U.S. MBA program and eventually settled in the Bay Area. John’s voluntarism for the university forged a deep Stanford connection of her own. She volunteered with CCIS for 15 years, helping expand Stanford’s global reach by acclimating its international students to American life. Stanford has always had foreign students, and their numbers climbed after World War II. In 1954, Stanford enrolled 324 international students and postdoctoral scholars. By 1967, there were 1,013; by 1989, there were 2,477. Stanford’s first foreign student adviser came aboard in 1948 and the CCIS formed five years later. “There are very few universities in this country that still have such a vibrant, active community volunteer organization,” John Pearson,<span class="tx"> Bechtel Center </span><span class="tx">director from 1988 to June 2016,</span> <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/international-students-at/id385664533?i=109873543&mt=2" target="_blank">told the Stanford Historical Society</a>. The CCIS was active in making sure there was an international center at Stanford, Pearson said, through advocacy, engagement and funding. Today, one-third of Stanford’s 9,000 graduate students come from outside the United States, as do about 9 percent of its undergrads and more than 2,000 of its postdocs and visiting scholars. Meanwhile, the tracking requirements for foreign students and scholars that the U.S. government imposes on universities have soared. While Bechtel Center staffers help these visitors navigate the bureaucracy and maintain their legal status, hundreds of volunteers like John help them improve their spoken English, perform unfamiliar tasks such as buying used cars, and otherwise adjust to the United States. John joined the CCIS’ English in Action program, in which volunteers meet weekly with an international student or spouse for an English-language chat. “Over coffee once a week at Tressider: I figured it was a small thing to do,” John said. “I meant to talk to them about their majors and so on. To help them with their English pronunciation.” Instead, John found something much deeper. She said, “The relationships I made with students greatly enriched my life.” She invited them to Thanksgiving and Fourth of July dinners, walked with them through life crises, advised them on how to obtain credit or to buy a car. Some students became almost like family to her. “Urmila’s care and time spent on me was not just a chance for me to feel a new culture and environment but also built personal trust and spiritual guidance, especially while I was struggling,” said Yong Lee, MS ’04, who came to Stanford from South Korea and has remained in touch with her for 12 years. [caption id="attachment_2583" align="alignleft" width="226"]<img class="size-medium wp-image-2583" src="http://125.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/john-pearson-226x300.jpg" alt="John Pearson was director of the Bechtel International Center from 1988 to June 2016. During that time, Stanford's international student and scholar presence more than doubled. " width="226" height="300" /> John Pearson, shown in 1990s photo, was director of the Bechtel International Center from 1988 to his retirement in June 2016. During that time, Stanford's international student and scholar presence more than doubled.[/caption] In return, Urmila said, “I learned from the students. I grew with them. I learned about new fields from talking with them about their studies. “I got their perspective on history. I learned how world events are taught and viewed differently in Japan or China or Brazil.” Urmila also worked with students’ spouses, who face their own challenges. Many are highly credentialed professionals in their own countries, but few have the legal right to work in the United States. One young woman broke down and cried after one conversation, John said. She said she had been in Palo Alto for a year and no American had spent an hour with her, just talking in English. “It’s not easy to make friends in America,” John said. “You can live in an apartment and it doesn’t mean someone is going to come knocking on your door to say hi.” For spouses, CCIS offers the <a href="http://ccisstanfordu.org/programs/ProfLiaison.htm" target="_blank">Professional Liaison Program</a>, which pairs them with a U.S. practitioner in their own fields for mentoring and guidance, and the <a href="http://ccisstanfordu.org/programs/SpouseEd.htm" target="_blank">Spouse Education Fund</a> for cultural enrichment through Stanford Continuing Studies and similar classes. Among its many programs, CCIS also runs classes for students’ families at the Bechtel Center in various languages and cuisines. It offers homestays for new arrivals and their families, as well as coffee hours, book clubs and preschool play groups during the year. After 15 years, Urmila stopped working with international students. Saying goodbye to each student had become too emotionally painful for her, as if she were parting with family. She continues to be active in Parents’ Club, for local elementary schools and as a hostess at the university president’s annual reception for Stanford graduates at the Lou Henry House, the official residence. “Stanford is wonderful,” John said. “I have to go by what the students think. I’ve never met one yet who didn’t like it. "And it feels wonderful to be around the students. They rejuvenate me. “If I stay home, I’ll hibernate. With them, I grow.” Listen to longtime Bechtel International Center director John Pearson’s <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/international-students-at/id385664533?i=109873543&mt=2" target="_blank">podcast</a> from the Stanford Historical Society on international students at Stanford. Read <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_r1zy3kp6x5VnlYLUlfVC0xOEU/view" target="_blank">edited highlights</a> of Pearson’s podcast. Learn more about the <a href="http://ccisstanfordu.org/" target="_blank">Community Committee for International Students</a>, including a <a href="http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/141807/CCIS-History" target="_blank">detailed history</a>.
<blockquote><i>“The most important thing to remember about Africa is there is no one Africa.”</i> <i> – History Professor Richard Roberts, Faculty Director, Stanford Center for African Studies</i></blockquote> <i></i>Stanford’s <a href="https://africanstudies.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Center for African Studies</a> is simultaneously a place of rigor and one of support and acceptance. It’s a <a href="https://vimeo.com/156339334" target="_blank">home</a>, says Associate Director Laura Hubbard – a spiritual and intellectual home where great talents meet, uniqueness is nurtured and futures become real. <a href="https://sgs.stanford.edu/news/celebrating-50-vibrant-years-african-studies-stanford-0">For 50 years</a>, the interdisciplinary center has fostered research and teaching on all aspects of Africa, from biomedical research to language study. A center of <a href="https://sgs.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Stanford Global Studies</a>, it offers an undergraduate certificate and minor, an MA degree, a graduate certificate and a joint JD/MA degree with Stanford Law School. Alumni include National Security Advisor Susan Rice, ’86; Jendayi Frazer, ’85, MA ’89, PhD ’94, former U.S. ambassador to South Africa and assistant secretary of state for African affairs; and Omphemetse Mooki, ’92, the first black South African Rhodes Scholar. <blockquote><i>“From the beginning, I felt loved, and I loved the presence that I felt in this place. It’s my home away from home.”</i> <i> – Claus Omolo, ’18</i></blockquote> To the center’s academic interdisciplinarity is added its goal of welcoming Stanford students and scholars who share an interest in Africa, whatever their discipline. The social and intellectual mix makes the Center for African Studies an especially lively and diverse place. “Other places sometimes ask us, ‘How do you guys do that?’” Atheel Elmalik, ’15, <a href="http://www.stanforddaily.com/2016/02/07/center-for-african-studies-celebrates-50th-anniversary/" target="_blank">told the <i>Stanford Daily</i></a>. “It’s so much work — it’s caring on a very deep level about people not just as intellectuals, but about their personal lives, about how their personal [and] political lives intersect.” <blockquote><i>“It’s also the one place on campus that I've been able to have those brave conversations that are quite hard to have outside of this space.”</i> <i> – Tebello Qhotsokoane, ’16</i></blockquote> The center’s weekly Africa Table brings people together over lunch for guest speakers, faculty research and student capstone projects. An African Cultural Show led by student groups has been a tradition since the 1960s. On average, the center hosts 120 events a year. The center facilitates undergraduate research and service projects in Africa, often in synergy with the Bing Overseas Study Program’s <a href="http://africanstudies.stanford.edu/content/cape-town" target="_blank">Cape Town campus</a>. Read more about the center’s 50-year impact <a href="https://sgs.stanford.edu/news/celebrating-50-vibrant-years-african-studies-stanford-0" target="_blank">here</a>. <em>Photographer Alex Nana-Sinkam, '13, MA '14, captured the essence of the Center for African Studies community during a November 2015 event anticipating the center's 50th anniversary. Nana-Sinkam's images, including those in this slideshow, will be on exhibit at the center through 2016. A book with her images and reflections from the center community is forthcoming in September 2016.</em>
<h4 style="text-align: center;"><i>To be safe on the road, say Stanford engineers, the algorithms that run them must sometimes break the law</i></h4> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubdnxoob9AY The technology of self-driving cars is advancing fast. Autonomous vehicles built at Stanford can already drive competitive race laps and navigate roads. Yet making them safe in real-world traffic, with its infinitely shifting variables, is another story. That’s where engineering meets ethics and where Stanford postdoctoral scholar <a href="http://selinapan.info/" target="_blank">Selina Pan</a> comes in. Pan, an engineer in the <a href="http://ddl.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Dynamic Design Lab at Stanford</a>, is working to teach ethics to autonomous vehicles. To be safe on the road, human drivers sometimes intuitively break the law. When a motorist sees an obstacle in the road ahead, for example, she may avoid it by swerving across the double yellow line into the opposing lane. A self-driving car, however, would require an algorithm that overrides instructions to follow traffic laws. What should the car be programmed to do? It can come to a dead stop before the obstacle. It can veer across the yellow line. Or it can minimize its trespass into the oncoming lane by skirting the obstacle as closely as it can. If the choice is not clear, engineers are put in the position of ethicists. They must make programming decisions that attempt to literally steer the car through ambiguous straits. “We need to somehow translate social behavior, ethical behavior, into what happens once the vehicle finally takes full control,” Pan said. “People often say the technology is solved, but I don’t quite believe that,” <span class="tx">mechanical </span><span class="tx">engineering Professor </span>Chris Gerdes, director of the Dynamic Design Lab and the <a href="http://revs.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Revs Program at Stanford</a>, <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-07/a-stanford-professor-s-quest-to-fix-driverless-cars-major-flaw" target="_blank">told Bloomberg.com</a>. “There’s a lot of context, a lot of subtle, but important things yet to be solved.” Watch Pan and doctoral candidate Sarah Thornton <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/2016/08/01/teach-autonomous-cars-drive-like-humans/" target="_blank">work on the problem</a> with X-1, a student-built autonomous vehicle in the Revs Program at Stanford. Watch Gerdes, Pan and others talk about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ToiZ-jrJgg&list=PLrswyj_XFqQyh41lk125QLONsZYOYrP7x" target="_blank">programming ethics in self-driving cars</a>.
<h4 style="text-align: center;"><i>Undelivered on opening day, her words still resonate</i><i> </i></h4> When Stanford University opened on Oct. 1, 1891, both founders prepared remarks for the opening ceremony. Leland Stanford, accustomed to public life as a railroad president, U.S. senator and former governor of California, read a <a href="https://sdr.stanford.edu/uploads/qm/411/yg/8385/qm411yg8385/content/sc0033a_s6_b07_f07.pdf" target="_blank">2,000-word talk</a> that touched on the role of education in society, the dignity of labor and the inefficiency of Europe’s standing armies. His wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, remained silent. She later wrote on the much shorter speech that she left undelivered that “I did not have the courage on the opening day of the University so important in our lives.” She did not elaborate on the failure of her “courage.” She might have feared becoming overcome with emotion, since, as her text points out, “the project was born from a great sorrow,” the untimely death of the couple’s only child. Then, too, it was unusual for a woman in the 19th century, even an influential and accomplished one, to speak before a public crowd. But Jane Stanford had worthwhile things to say. Unlike her husband, who wrote with a rhetorical flourish and could sound impersonal, Mrs. Stanford used the occasion to advise the new students how to live their dreams. She counseled them how to behave toward one another. <blockquote><i>For a while you will be obliged to practice great patience. You have gathered together from different parts of the United States, strangers to each other, and everything is at present unorganized. It will take you some time to accustom yourselves to your new surroundings and to the different elements you will come in contact with; consequently we are desirous that you be tolerant until all of the machinery is in good working order.</i></blockquote> She exhorted “the young men to treat the young ladies who have entered this Institution with the greatest deference.” <blockquote><i>We have started you on the same equality and we hope for the best results.</i></blockquote> Because Stanford was then tuition-free, and had accepted a great many students from modest backgrounds, she also sought respect for the students who “will have nothing but the work of their hands to sustain them in future." <blockquote>I feel that they have had not that encouragement and cheer they should receive from those who have had superior advantages and larger means.</blockquote> She was already thinking of the transformational impact Stanford graduates would make. <blockquote><i>Each example of a good student will have an undying influence.</i><i> </i></blockquote> In the 125 years since then, Stanford students and scholars have created entire new fields of endeavor and changed society in ways Jane Stanford probably could not have imagined. Yet she seemingly summed up their accomplishments in one wise line: <blockquote><i>There is only one failure for you and that is not to be true to the best you know.</i></blockquote> Read <a href="https://sdr.stanford.edu/uploads/rr/050/nb/1367/rr050nb1367/content/sc0033b_s5_b2_f04.pdf" target="_blank">Jane Stanford’s typescript of her undelivered speech</a>, with notes in her own hand. Learn <a href="http://janestanford.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">more about Jane Stanford</a> and how she sustained Stanford University in its challenging early years.
<h4><em>$1 microscope, $5 lab kit leverage basic materials for social good</em></h4> <blockquote>It’s important to bring open-ended tools for discovery to a broad spectrum of users without dumbing down the tools. —Manu Prakash</blockquote> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBjIYB5Yk2I One challenge to providing health care in the developing world is the cost of technical equipment such as microscopes to help diagnose disease. This same cost hinders science education, depriving millions of young people in developing countries the chance to improve themselves and their communities. Bioengineering Assistant Professor <a href="https://profiles.stanford.edu/manu-prakash" target="_blank">Manu Prakash</a> rose to the challenge by devising a <a href="http://scopeblog.stanford.edu/2016/07/06/microscopy-for-all-stanford-bioengineer-shares-his-pocket-sized-vision-with-kids-of-the-world/" target="_blank">microscope made mostly of paper</a> that costs less than $1. The Foldscope, as it is known, replaces the precision-engineered lens housing that is a traditional microscope’s costliest component with a paper assembly like an old-fashioned slide rule. The pattern is printed, cut and folded from a single sheet. <strong>Microscopy for all</strong> Using inexpensive lenses, the Foldscope can magnify 2,000 times, enough for significant health care and educational applications. Clinics in Tanzania and Ghana have used the Foldscope to diagnose schistosomiasis and malaria. Thousands of children around the globe have made their own Foldscopes to learn science. The Foldscope exemplifies Stanford creativity in devising solutions to basic problems. Prakash is affiliated with <a href="https://biox.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Stanford Bio-X</a>, which encourages interdisciplinary research connected to biology and medicine, and with the Stanford <a href="https://woods.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Woods Institute for the Environment</a>. His research interests include leveraging the qualities of basic substances, such as water and paper. The Foldscope and other products of Prakash’s lab marry his affiliations and interests to yield low-cost tools for health care and environmental protection. He calls it “frugal science.” <strong>Wedding old and new technologies</strong> "The things that you make for kids to explore science are also exactly the kind of things that you need in the field because they need to be robust and they need to be highly versatile," Prakash explains. With graduate student George Korir, Prakash developed a hand-cranked chemistry tool that <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/chemistry-award-prakash-040814.html" target="_blank">uses 19th-century paper punch-tape technology to power a microfluidics chip</a>. Unlike comparable devices, this $5 tool doesn’t need electricity or batteries, and so is ideal for tasks like testing water quality in the developing world. Prakash and his students also devised a <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/2015/06/08/computer-water-drops-060815/" target="_blank">computer that operates on water droplets</a>. Unlike other computer mechanisms, the droplets process both information and physical materials simultaneously. For this reason, Prakash believes the device holds potential for chemical and biological research. <blockquote>When you go out in the field you feel like, ‘If I’m not making a product, then I'm not getting out to people in even the smallest possible way.’ —Manu Prakash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNQToOEFNmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5WodTppevo </blockquote>
<h4><strong><em>Students realize Jane Stanford’s hope that they use their schooling for good</em></strong></h4> Rising junior Harrison Phillips juggles Cardinal football practices, Stanford coursework and a hefty plate of public service that includes tutoring, weekly help at a homeless shelter and frequent sessions at a mentoring nonprofit group for at-risk kids. Phillips calls himself “<a href="http://news.stanford.edu/2016/07/20/stanford-football-player-dedicated-studies-sports-inspiring-kids/" target="_blank">passionate about serving</a>.” He joins and enriches a tradition of service that has distinguished Stanford for 125 years. Today, Stanford students are encouraged to view service not just as a positive activity but as a critical part of self-fashioning. They become thinkers, learners and <a href="http://125.stanford.edu/sirum/" target="_blank">founders for social good</a>. They’re supported in this path by <a href="https://haas.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Cardinal Service</a>, a university-wide initiative to elevate and expand service as a distinctive feature of a Stanford education. Its hub is the <a href="https://haas.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Haas Center for Public Service</a>, home to dozens of initiatives that range from <a href="http://125.stanford.edu/63000-meals/" target="_blank">one-time events</a> to <a href="http://125.stanford.edu/cssocial-good/" target="_blank">quarter-long courses</a> to long-term mentorships and career placements. Financial support helps to ensure that all Stanford undergraduates can participate. More than 1,000 Stanford undergraduates take part in Haas Center programs every year. <blockquote><i>I’ve learned so much more from public service than I can ever give back. I would not be who I am today without my public service experiences paving the way.</i> <i>– </i><i>Vy Tran ’16</i></blockquote> University co-founder Jane Stanford wrote in 1901 that she intended a Stanford education to equip its recipients for a life of service. While aspects of the new campus seemed luxurious – <a href="http://125.stanford.edu/lagunita/" target="_blank">Lagunita</a>, beautiful foothills, plentiful sports fields – they coexisted from the start with her intent that students use their experience for the public good. The year after Jane Stanford’s death, Stanford students rushed to San Francisco to aid victims of the 1906 earthquake and fire. For decades, they supported the convalescent home for children that occupied the Stanfords’ former Palo Alto residence. In 1964, Stanford <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_r1zy3kp6x5S3Y2QVRhV2VQUXM/view" target="_blank">sent one of the three largest contingents of university volunteers</a> to the Freedom Summer civil rights project in the U.S. South. In the 1980s, support for student service efforts became a featured objective in Stanford’s Centennial Campaign. <blockquote><i>As Stanford students, we have been provided skills and potentials which can be put at the immediate disposal of deprived communities.</i> <i>– </i><i>Hillary Shockley '72</i></blockquote> Stanford’s Public Service Center opened in 1985. Four years later, it became the Haas Center for Public Service with a $5 million gift from the Haas family of San Francisco. Today, Stanford students choose from a dizzying range of service options. <a href="https://haas.stanford.edu/students/cardinal-courses" target="_blank">More than 100 courses</a> each year couple academic learning with social and environmental issues. More than 125 <a href="https://haas.stanford.edu/students/cardinal-commitment" target="_blank">service groups and programs</a> channel students’ volunteer energy. <a href="https://haas.stanford.edu/students/cardinal-quarter" target="_blank">Cardinal Quarter</a> offers funded full-time placements in nonprofit organizations. Residence in <a href="https://resed.stanford.edu/residences/find-house/branner-hall" target="_blank">Branner Hall</a>, Stanford’s public-service dorm, allows undergrads to integrate service into daily life. <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/2016/07/20/public-service-at-stanford/" target="_blank">Read more about the many ways</a> Stanford helps students learn about themselves and the world through the lens of service.
<h4 style="text-align: center;"><em>Stanford students view Little Bighorn through Sioux art</em></h4> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xA943A8K-0 <blockquote><i>I came to understand not only how this historical turning point in the Sioux Wars shaped the identity of the American West but also how the battle changed my own identity.</i> <i>–Sarah Sadlier ’16, co-instructor, </i>The Art and Artifacts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn</blockquote> When Stanford undergraduates study U.S. history, reading books is often just the start. They may also visit the sites, role-play the characters, study the art that participants made and, in one memorable instance in 2015-16, help to put that art and its context on display for the public to see. For several years, Political Science Prof. Scott Sagan has taken groups of Stanford sophomores to the site of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana. There, Sioux fighters routed Gen. George Armstrong Custer and his 7th U.S. Cavalry in 1876. In January 2016, Sagan and the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford partnered to bring one Sioux combatant’s distinguished art of that battle to <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/features/2016/red-horse/" target="_blank">its first major exhibition since the battle’s centennial in 1976</a>. They inspired a host of complementary resources including a student-led class whose co-instructor, <a href="https://history.stanford.edu/news/sarah-sadlier-receives-2015-gilder-lehrman-history-scholar-award">Sarah Sadlier</a> ’16, had had an ancestor at the fateful event. <a href="https://museum.stanford.edu/news_room/red-horse.htm" target="_blank"><i>Red Horse: Drawings of the Battle of the Little Bighorn</i></a><i> </i>exhibited 12 drawings from the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives by Red Horse, a Minneconjou Lakota Sioux who fought against Custer in 1876. The works are ledger drawings, a genre developed by Native American artists who had often taken part in some of the West’s most storied battles. Their drawings are rare indigenous documents of 19th-century American history. They also give shape to the horrors of war. <blockquote><i>Seeing these drawings by Red Horse helps us understand the face of battle … in ways mere words can’t truly express.</i> <i>–Political Science Prof. Scott Sagan</i></blockquote> <a href="https://undergrad.stanford.edu/opportunities-research/awards-and-graduation-honors/deans%E2%80%99-award-winners/2015-deans-award-winners" target="_blank">Sadlier</a> had taken Sagan’s class as a sophomore in 2013, and it <a href="http://web.stanford.edu/dept/libcommdev/wredenprize/wreden2015/Sarah_Sadlier_Wreden_Prize_Submission.pdf" target="_blank">helped guide the direction of her studies at Stanford</a>. Sadlier is Minneconjou, and her ancestor John “Big Leggins” Bruguier was an interpreter for Sitting Bull and present in the Little Bighorn camp the day the fighting began. For the exhibition, Sadlier traveled to the Smithsonian to do research on Red Horse. With Isabella Shey Robbins ’17, she also co-taught Native American Studies 76SI: <i>The Art and Artifacts of the Battle of the Little Bighorn </i>in fall 2015. The course culminated in a <a href="http://events.stanford.edu/events/566/56679/" target="_blank">student-curated art exhibition</a> that explored contemporary indigenous perspectives on the battle. Sadlier called the entire experience “a once-in-a-lifetime chance.” It exemplifies Stanford’s diversity, its resources and its deep commitment to collaboration and experiental learning. “Interdisciplinary learning takes into account all the perspectives that are so necessary when you create an exhibit about someone’s voice,” Sadlier said. “Because if we can’t hear all voices, then we can’t hear one voice.” Read <a href="http://web.stanford.edu/dept/libcommdev/wredenprize/wreden2015/Sarah_Sadlier_Wreden_Prize_Submission.pdf" target="_blank">Sadlier’s prizewinning essay</a> on how her Sophomore College trip to the Little Bighorn shaped her life. In this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xA943A8K-0" target="_blank">video</a>, see Red Horse’s drawings and hear Sagan, Sadlier and others respond to them.
<h4>Stanford scholars pursue a complex region's preservation, development and understanding</h4> <blockquote><i>No prestigious university is doing what Stanford is doing. ... I am so proud of that. I have been a direct witness of the enormous effort that the center has done these past 50 years to enrich the study of Latin America.</i> <i>—Alejandro Toledo MA ’72 MA ’74 PhD ’93, president of Peru 2001-06</i></blockquote> For more than 50 years, Stanford’s interdisciplinary <a href="http://las.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">Center for Latin American Studies</a> has shaped future heads of state, diplomats and leaders in government, business and civil society. It began in the Cold War era, when the U.S. government helped to fund global studies centers in hope of promoting democracy and stability. Today, as knowledge grows both of the world’s challenges and humanity’s potential to solve them, the Center for Latin American Studies <a href="https://sgs.stanford.edu/news/celebrating-50-years-latin-american-studies-stanford" target="_blank">frames its mission far more broadly</a>. Its more than 60 affiliated scholars work on questions of access to economic, social and environmental resources, from water to health care to credit. They work on preservation, development and understanding of a huge region that is nuclear weapons free and lacking interstate conflict, but that is nonetheless plagued by challenges such as poverty, corruption and transnational organized crime. “The complexity of the Latin American region is formidable,” says <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/2016/07/27/big-animals-go-extinct-benefits-offer-humans-stanford-scientists-find/" target="_blank">ecologist and center director Rodolfo Dirzo</a>. Dirzo studies, among other topics, the biological diversity of Latin American ecosystems and the deep knowledge of the indigenous peoples who live there. Political scientist Beatriz Magaloni works to <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2016/06/02/stanford-projectzen-trust-mexico/" target="_blank">improve police accountability in Mexico and other Latin American countries</a>. Ecologist William Durham explores how ecotourism can create <a href="https://woods.stanford.edu/about/woods-faculty/william-durham" target="_blank">synergies between local economies and environmental protection</a> in Costa Rica. The center offers a master's degree and an undergraduate specialization within the Global Studes minor. Its affiliated Bing Overseas Study Program in Santiago, Chile, which includes summer options, opens the overseas study experience to Stanford student-athletes and others whose academic-year schedules preclude their participation. Scholars from throughout Latin America and Iberia teach at Stanford through programs such as the center’s Tinker Visiting Professorship. Public talks at the center’s Bolívar House showcase topics from Cuban architecture to the rise of the Brazilian middle class. The center’s outreach programs include science enrichment for K-12 and community college teachers in the Bay Area. Its distance-learning courses allow students nationwide to study Latin American languages that are rarely taught but vital to cultural understanding. Learn more about the Center for Latin American Studies in this <a href="https://vimeo.com/144286502" target="_blank">video</a>.
<h4><em>Stanford student invention helps users read emotional cues</em></h4> <blockquote>On the one side, I’m a nerd at heart and love building stuff. On the other side, I thrive from seeing other people succeed. If I can combine those two, I’m happy. — Catalin Voss</blockquote> More than 70 million children worldwide are diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, a condition that hinders reading facial expressions or making eye contact and thus makes forming social bonds extremely difficult. Behavioral therapy can help people with autism learn cues that others grasp easily, but many families can’t get as many sessions as they would like, when and where they would like them. Stanford student Catalin Voss’s <a href="http://autismglass.stanford.edu" target="_blank">Autism Glass</a> aims to give users a learning aid for wherever they go. Voss, ’16, MS ’16, developed a tool built on Google Glass that reads facial expressions, interprets them in real time for the wearer and transmits data to a parent or health care worker. Autism Glass combines artificial intelligence and gaze tracking to help people with autism interpret emotional cues. It also helps parents and caregivers track their progress. A pilot study in the Stanford University School of Medicine found that children who wore Autism Glass increased their eye contact with others, a vital step in social interactions. A <a href="http://autismglass.stanford.edu" target="_blank">larger clinical study</a> is under way in the <a href="http://wall-lab.stanford.edu" target="_blank">Wall Lab</a> in the school’s Department of Pediatrics. Principal investigator Dennis Wall is an associate professor of pediatrics and of biomedical data science. For his invention, Voss, who majored in computer science, was <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/2016/07/15/stanford-seniors-thesis-projects-garner-university-medals/review/" target="_blank">awarded the David M. Kennedy Prize</a> for the best senior honors thesis in engineering and applied sciences, written under the direction of Professor Emeritus Terry Winograd. Voss also received the national <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/thedish/2016/04/13/catalin-voss-wins-lemelson-mit-student-prize/" target="_blank">Lemelson-MIT Student Prize</a> for technology-based health care inventions. “I’m lucky to get to work on projects and problems I care about, without being too tied to a salary just yet,” Voss said. “My paycheck comes in the form of emails from parents that describe in vivid detail how we changed their lives, how their children make more eye contact, maintain conversation longer and engage in more social interactions.” It’s a long way from Voss’s childhood near Heidelberg, Germany, when his goal was merely “to shake hands with someone who had ‘Stanford’ on their resume.” Since his early teens, Voss has been an inspiring mobile-app developer. When he was 14, his instructional podcast on iPhone programming became the No. 1 iTunes download in Germany. At 15, he was developing mobile payment apps for Sunnyvale’s PayNearMe. Yet he <a href="http://epicenter.stanford.edu/story/catalin-voss-stanford-university" target="_blank">longed for a community of like minds</a>, a community that was both entrepreneurial and smart. Stanford fit the bill. As a freshman, Voss became an Innovator in Residence at StartX, Stanford’s student startup accelerator. Meeting “people who are energetic and have that entrepreneurial spirit,” he said at the time, “leaves me hoping to create something on my own.” He began working on emotion recognition and face tracking, with an eye toward using it to make mobile content more interactive. During his freshman year, he founded the computer vision startup Sension around this idea and began working with Stanford postdoctoral scholar <a href="http://wall-lab.stanford.edu/people/nick/" target="_blank">Nick Haber</a>, who now co-leads the Autism Glass Project with Voss at Stanford. GAIA System Solutions, a Toyota company, acquired Sension and its technology in 2015 to develop products in the automotive and health care space. Autism Glass began as a Sension side project. “We realized we were developing lightweight face-tracking technology that could work on a low-power Android phone, so we ported it to Google Glass,” Voss said. “The idea came to mind then.” Voss has a cousin with autism, he said, “so I had some background on the challenges that kids with autism face.” Working with Dennis Wall at the School of Medicine convinced Voss of a need for mobile, affordable and scalable therapeutic aids. “I began to realize how big the bottleneck for autism therapy really is,” Voss said. “The number of behavioral therapists that can provide care to these kids is far outstripped by the number of children in need.” Moreover, he said, families can easily exhaust their covered benefits for the therapy. In summer 2016, the <a href="http://autismglass.stanford.edu" target="_blank">Autism Glass Project</a> is working to make a case for clinical reimbursement for the device. In the Wall Lab study, 100 children and their families will use Autism Glass at home for four months. Voss <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-glass-takes-top-student-health-tech-prize-slide-show1/" target="_blank">hopes eventually to augment his software</a> to recognize subtle conversational expressions and give more complex social cues. “On the one side, I’m a nerd at heart and love building stuff,” he said. “On the other side, I thrive from seeing other people succeed. “If I can combine those two, I’m happy.”
<h4><em>Stanford bioengineer uniquely reveals the brain's connections</em></h4> As a psychiatrist, Karl Deisseroth is troubled by the imprecision of many current treatments for mental illness. As a bioengineer, Deisseroth works to create more precise tools. The field he pioneered, optogenetics, confronts a core problem long faced by brain researchers – their inability to map or control brain activity in sufficiently minute detail. Optogenetics uses light to control neural physiology and behavior in living brains by introducing light-sensitive proteins into individual nerve cells. Another technique Deisseroth developed, CLARITY, allows scientists for the first time to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-NMfp13Uug" target="_blank">map all the connections within the brain</a> and explore how that wiring goes awry in disease states. In 2015, Deisseroth, a professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, received a $3 million Breakthrough Prize for his contributions to optogenetics. It is the latest in a string of honors recognizing Deisseroth’s work toward illuminating some of humanity’s most baffling ailments – autism, intractable depression, schizophrenia. “The suffering of the mentally ill and the mysteries of the brain are so deep that, to make progress, we need to take big risks and blind leaps,” Deisseroth <a href="http://news.stanford.edu/2015/11/08/breakthrough-prize-winners-110815/" target="_blank">said on receiving the award</a>. “The members of my lab have taken a leap: borrowing genes from microbes to control the brain.” In optogenetics, researchers insert genes for light-sensitive proteins into specific nerve cells of laboratory animals. Those proteins either activate or inhibit nerve signals when they detect pulses of laser light transmitted by an optical fiber implanted in the animal’s brain. Scientists observe the effects on the animal’s behavior and deduce the role played by particular nerve cells, relays and circuits. Deisseroth explains optogenetics in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8bPbHuOZXg In this video, he explains how CLARITY renders a brain entirely clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3bSx4TBs6M