A Milestone Year for the Center
Photos (clockwise from left): EcoWest data visualization tracking the Okanogan fire complex; walking from Stanford to the sea in April; Center director Bruce Cain at the Mexico-U.S. entrepreneurship innovation council in September; students on the summer 2015 Sophomore College course on energy in the southwest; postdoctoral scholar Katie Young introducing a panel at the Rural West Conference in March in Troutdale, Oregon
This year, the Bill Lane Center for the American West celebrates an important milestone: a decade of advancing scholarly and public understanding of the past, present and future of western North America. Over the past very busy ten years, the Center has become a nationally recognized hub for the interdisciplinary study of the American West.
Our achievements to date give us much to be proud of. We have encouraged historians, political scientists, hydrologists, engineers, and art historians from across Stanford and the West to collaborate on teaching and research about important western topics. Our undergraduate programming has cultivated the next generation of stewards and scholars of the West through innovative new courses and a variety of internship opportunities with organizations throughout the West. Our annual Sophomore College field course and American West classes are quite popular. We have broadened our public outreach by offering talks, film screenings and articles that speak to a wide range of audiences. On top of all of this, we look forward to introducing new initiatives in the coming year.
New Staff at the Bill Lane Center
On a more personal note, 2015 was a year of considerable Lane Center staff turnover. Kathy Zonana remains on campus but in a new role at the School of Medicine. Kathy Montgomery has retired to Bend, Oregon, and Chau Ho has begun a master’s degree of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan. We are grateful for their years of contributions to the Center and wish them the very best in their new endeavors.
We now have a new team in place and slightly modified organizational structure. Our new Associate Director for Finance and Administration, Jessica Dutro, joins the Center after nearly 15 years working in Stanford’s Office of the Controller. Our new Associate Director for Programming and Development, Preeti Hehmeyer, comes to Stanford after spending four years as a management consultant for local governments throughout the western United States. Researcher and social scientist Iris Hui is now our Associate Director for Academic Affairs. As a postdoctoral scholar, Iris had been running our American West scholars group for the past two years, and her responsibilities have now expanded to include oversight of all of our research projects, as well as our postdocs and dissertation scholars. Geoff McGhee continues as the Center’s Creative Director for Media and Communications albeit from his new base in Seattle, Washington.
Looking Forward: Undergraduate Education
As many of you know from our various communications over the years, we have carved out a distinctive niche in undergraduate education by developing interdisciplinary courses and promoting experiential education in the American West. Our courses and internships are well subscribed, but how can we do better? Some new opportunities will come from collaborations with other units at Stanford. For instance, the Haas Center for Public Service’s Cardinal Quarter initiative hopes to expand public service teaching/internship opportunities among Stanford undergraduates. We will explore tying our internship programs more closely to that effort. In Spring 2016, we will be inaugurating a one-unit class on Energy Internships in California in conjunction with the Precourt Institute for Energy. In addition, we plan to create an American West-themed dorm with a sequence of courses built on the foundation of our American West lecture class and additional educational trips throughout the region. We expect to have a preliminary plan by May when our Advisory Council meets and then to launch it in Fall 2017.
New Research and Public Service Initiatives
The Bill Lane Center has taken many steps in recent years to study issues and problems in the American West. Our annual State of the West conference with SIEPR brings scholars, public officials and members of the business sector to hear about and discuss economic and policy trends in western states. Our annual Eccles Family Rural West conference circulates to different states every year to learn about issues in rural areas. And in July, the Center hosted the inaugural Local Government Summer Institute. This week-long institute convened city managers, county executives, regional directors, and other senior local government officials from throughout the West. While at Stanford, these local executives had the opportunity to exchange and acquire tools for improving local government performance and ways of enhancing prospective analytical capacity to innovate and anticipate societal change.
This year, we also strengthened our focus on water and energy issues at the southern border, topics that will become more important due to the drought and mandated reductions in carbon emissions. In August, the Center and the Precourt Institute for Energy cosponsored a clean tech trade delegation aimed at accelerating clean energy investment and development in Mexico and California. In September, we co-hosted representatives from the U.S. State Department and the Mexico-US Entrepreneurship and Innovation Council. At this meeting, Stanford signed letters of intent to collaborate with the State of Baja California and the City of Tijuana to create some test-beds along the border for new technologies in energy and water and to undertake joint research. Finally, in October, we invited scholars from universities across Mexico to discuss the water-energy nexus issues along the California-Mexico border region. This workshop produced several concrete proposals that will allow us to test new technologies at small scale and to do research about how the border region is adapting to the climate and energy challenges both countries face.
Toward The Next Ten Years
As we look toward our second decade, the Center will develop a strategic plan over the next six months to guide our efforts. We welcome input from all of our friends and supporters. I extend my deepest thanks for your support of the Lane Center in its first decade, and look forward to our continued success in the years to come.
All the best,
Bruce E. Cain
