THE YEAR IN REVIEW
2010-2011
STANFORD
ENGINEERING
letter from the dean Heroes, Heavyweights, Upstarts & Startups: A Year in Review
on
Heroes: The Shoulders of Giants As the new home to the School of Engineering, the Huang Center is a gathering place for people, events and, perhaps more importantly, the exchange of ideas. But it is also a testament to our remarkable past. It is here that we pay tribute to the Engineering Heroes who best exemplify what it means to be a “Stanford Engineer,” those who have profoundly advanced the course of human, social and economic progress through engineering. The names and faces
of our heroes are displayed proudly throughout the building. Hewlett. Packard. Dolby. Durand. Litton. Knuth. Cerf. And, of course, Terman.
Heavyweights: Contenders for the Crown The Huang Center is not merely a memorial to things past, but a reminder of the past as inspiration. On our faculty today are professors of profound talent and reputation. To maintain our leadership and reputation, we attract and nurture the very best. They are Heavyweights in their fields, brilliant minds who rival any in the world, people who have made their names tackling the greatest challenges of our time— human health, renewable energy, climate change, efficient transportation, more powerful computers and safer buildings.
Upstarts: Future Perfect However, no great research university can succeed simply because of its past or even its present. There must be an eye on the future, on technologies dreamed of only in the minds of younger faculty whose names may be unfamiliar but whose work will someday inspire new generations of engineers. These are the Upstarts, the engineers whose next paper or technical innovation may catch the imagination of the world and change the way we live.
Startups: World by the Horns Last but not least, we have the Startups—the remarkable array of companies that trace their roots to the Stanford School of Engineering. Entrepreneurialism is the distinguishing feature of Stanford Engineering. Stanford engineers partner with innovators in medicine, business, architecture and design to extend our work into promising new areas to create things no one dared to dream before. The result of all this history and promise is a unique place known as the Stanford University School of Engineering. Our collective product is a brighter future. We have only just begun to fulfill the promise of science and technology and the economic engine they fuel. There are great discoveries to be made and new applications still to imagine. Sincerely, James Plummer, dean
JOHN TODD
October 5, 2010, just as the new school year began, we dedicated the brand-new Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center. It was a day to celebrate decades of leadership by the School of Engineering and its graduates, but it was also a moment for reflecting on all that Stanford Engineering was and is, and looking ahead at all that it will become. For nearly a century, Stanford has been at the forefront of the engineering revolution in every sector of the profession. Stanford Engineering has helped people the world over live healthier, happier, easier, more efficient and more connected lives. In the truest sense, we have changed the world. As I look back over the year since we opened the Huang Center, I have come to understand this legacy in four respects that I like to think of as Heroes, Heavyweights, Upstarts and Startups—the past, present and future of Stanford Engineering.
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Heroes’ Welcome Donald Knuth leads the first class of eight Stanford Engineering Heroes. Plus: Cerf and Litton. H E A V Y W E I G H T S
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Devil in the Details Russ Altman mines data to root out a dangerous drug interaction. Plus: Luthy, Cui and McIntyre. U P S T A R T S
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Can You Hear Us Now? Stanford engineers devise two-way WiFi and explore the mobilesocial computing future. Plus: Smolke, Bao and Vuckovic. S TA R T U P S
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Sitting on Top of the World Skybox Imaging looks look to change our perspective on business data. Plus: Instagram is an insta-hit. Stanford Engineering alumni have generated
2.2
million new jobs
A Letter from the Dean
and
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$1.6 trillion annual
3
revenues worldwide.
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Alumni Demographics Where we live
Spotlight: Bioengineering Two schools, one future
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A Day in the Life A picture speaks volumes Faculty News • • • •
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Awards & Honors Newly Appointed & Emeritus In Memoriam Distinctions
Financials • About the School • Financials • Alumni Breakdowns
Brainstorm COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY JOEL SIMON
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ENGINEERING S TA N F O R D S C H O O L O F E N G I N E E R I N G JEN-HSUN HUANG ENGINEERING CENTER 475 VIA ORTEGA S TA N F O R D , C A 9 4 3 0 5 - 4 1 2 1 engineering.stanford.edu PUBLISHER
James Plummer, Dean EDITOR- IN- C H IEF
Laura Breyfogle EXEC U T IV E EDITOR
Jamie Beckett C REAT IV E DIREC TOR/MANAGING EDITOR
Andrew Myers W RIT ERS
Andrew Myers Krista Conger Louis Bergeron Sandeep Ravindran S OC IAL MEDIA/ W EB MANAGER
Staci Baird PH OTO EDITOR
Steve Stanghellini ART AND DES IGN
Susan Scandrett COPY EDITOR
Heidi Beck PRINT ER
R.R. Donnelly S C H O O L O F E N G I N E E R I N G A D M I N I S T R AT I O N
James Plummer Dean Curtis Frank Sr. Assoc. Dean, Faculty and Academics Brad Osgood Sr. Assoc. Dean, Student Affairs Laura Breyfogle Sr. Assoc. Dean, External Relations Clare Hansen-Shinnerl Sr. Assoc. Dean, Administration D E PA RTM E N T C H A I R S
Charbel Farhat Aeronautics and Astronautics Russ Altman Bioengineering Eric Shaqfeh Chemical Engineering Stephen Monismith Civil and Environmental Engineering Jennifer Widom Computer Science Mark Horowitz Electrical Engineering Peter Glynn Management Science & Engineering
Friedrich Prinz Mechanical Engineering Margot Gerritsen Director, Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering 2 S T A N F O R D
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TIM IM G GRIFFITH GRIFFI RIFFI IIFFI FFI TH F H
Robert Sinclair Materials Science and Engineering
A L U M N I
Western Canada 119 Seattle 1,331
F A C T S
Central Canada 39
Ontario 140
Washington 372
Eastern Canada 70
Portland 899
Northern California 19,897
New England Upstate 463 New York 251
Minnesota 296
Oregon 135
Nevada 253
Nebraska, Dakotas, Iowa 134
Montana, Wyoming 99
Idaho 180
Utah 223
Michigan 409
Philadelphia 344
Ohio, Kent, W Penn 568
Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana 996
Colorado 1,060
Oklahoma, Arkansas 82
New Mexico 335
Phoenix 408 Tucson 127
El Paso, West Texas 61 Mexico 303
Alaska 86
Southern States 922
Dallas/ Fort Worth 387
South Texas, Austin, San Antonio 508
NY City, Conn, N NJ 1,972 Wash DC, Maryland, N VA 1,373
Missouri, Kansas 227 Southern California 4,388
Boston 1,117
Georgia 320 Houston 431 Florida 372 Miami 180
Alumni Demographics
Hawaii 298
The Rest of the World California Breakdown South Bay
7,301
Peninsula
5,524
San Francisco
3,223
East Bay
2,246
Los Angeles
2,051
San Diego
873
Orange County
805
Sacramento/Stockton
738
Monterey Peninsula
343
Napa, Sonoma
316
Santa Barbara, Ventura
268
So. California General
161
Northern California
144
BakersďŹ eld, SLO
142
Fresno, Madera, Visalia
88
Tracy, Modesto
62
INFORMATION GRAPHIC BY JEFF BERLIN
Italy
48
Switzerland
110
Australia
120
Germany
129
England
242
Korea
275
Hong Kong
325
Middle East & Africa
356
Taiwan
376
Singapore
473
South & Central America
520
France
560
Japan
616
Other Europe
649
Other Asia
723
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DEPARTMENT SPOTLIGHT: BIOENGINEERING When the Department of Bioengineering formed in 2003 it was envisioned as a collaboration among scientists, engineers and physicians. But one question lingered: In what school should Stanford’s newest department reside, the School of Engineering or the School of Medicine? So, the deans of the two worldrenowned schools did what reasonable people do— they shared. Bioengineers are a new class of scientists who use the tools and the know-how of engineering to solve medical problems and design solutions to disease, abnormalities and injury. Bioengineers apply biology, chemistry and physics to study biological systems—to measure, analyze, fabricate and control these systems—in ways never before imagined. Bioengineers have moved us to the cusp of a new era of significant advances in human health based on engineering biology to build new molecules, cells and tissues. Entire new industries will develop from the field and the changes will be similar in scale and scope to those wrought by the information technology revolution.
The Common Thread: Stanford
Below: An artist rendering of the new Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering Building that will open in 2014.
That much of this is happening at Stanford University is no coincidence. The Department of Bioengineering has the enviable opportunity to leverage the depth and breadth of Stanford University’s knowledge and the might of Silicon Valley’s high-tech communities. Here, the next big breakthroughs are literally just around the corner. The proximity of Stanford’s exceptional schools of engineering and medicine, located just steps from one another, is a rarity among the nation’s
top universities. Such proximity makes it possible for students to attend hospital rounds, take engineering classes, conduct research in bioscience labs, and work side-by-side with students and faculty in other disciplines in the course of a given day. The nearness of Silicon Valley and its remarkable entrepreneurial spirit, business acumen and its funding sources provide a further—many say unbeatable—edge to the researchers of Stanford Bioengineering.
Building Excellence The department has quickly risen in the rankings and it now figures among the top ten such programs in the country. The department is training engineers and biomedical scientists at all levels—undergraduate and graduate students, and post-doctoral fellows. The undergraduate program, launched only in 2010, provides an opportunity to develop an entirely new curriculum that takes advantage of the strengths of the schools of engineering, humanities and sciences, and medicine to attract and educate a new generation of exceptional students just beginning to chart their careers. T R A N S F O R M I N G H U M A N H E A LT H Video: Listen to bioengineers describe their work and what makes Stanford such a special place.
To watch the video, scan the QR code or go to http://bit.ly/uCJpNz
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Bioengineers measure, analyze, fabricate and control biological systems in ways never
RENDERINGS COURTESY BOORA ARCHITECTS: HTTP://WWW.BOORA.COM/
before imagined.
When complete the Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering Building will be a state-of-the-art center for interdisciplinary collaboration. S T A N F O R D
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A Day in the Life “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” —Carl Sagan, American Author/Scientist
PHOTOGRAPH BY TIM GRIFFITH
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heroes’
LINDA CICERO/STANFORD NEWS SERVICE
welcome
Don Knuth was a college student in the 1950s when he answered the call for a job programming an IBM Type 650 computer, the first computer he had ever seen. “Fortuity” hardly does the meeting justice. Knuth was born to program computers. It was as if computers had been awaiting him. Some 50 years later, Knuth is a celebFifty years after coming to Stanford, rity of sorts, toasted as one of eight in an inaugural class of Donald Knuth finds himself toasted Stanford Engineering Heroes. Knuth is a giant of computer as one of eight in the first class science. In 1999, American Scientist magazine prepared a list of of Stanford Engineering Heroes. the best physical science books of the previous 100 years. There in the list of monographs—beside the likes of Einstein, Pauling, Dirac, Mandelbrot, Russell, von Neumann and Feynman—was Don Knuth. His multi-volume, yet-unfinished magnum opus The Art of Computer Programming has sold more than a million copies. Thus fame has come to Don Knuth. Acolytes recognize him on the street, pointing and whispering his name. They email him questions as if to an oracle, unaware perhaps that Knuth unburdened himself of email in 1990, too busy to answer the near-constant flow. Silvered men, far closer to 70 than 17, corner him, albeit gently. They produce photos of fleeting
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that Tchaikovsky would have loved combinatorial mathematics if he had lived a century later.”
encounters. Knuth kindly accedes to their designs on his time, chatting politely as if with an old friend.
Labor of love The Art of Computer Programming has been a lifelong labor of love for Knuth. He began writing in 1962. The fi rst volume was published in 1968. A second followed a year later, and a third in 1973. He was well into the fourth volume by 1977, and working on new editions of the first two, when he took a detour. The second edition of The Art of Computer Programming had been typeset using a new photo-optical process. To this son of a typesetter, the results underwhelmed. His book was not beautiful. Knuth set about fixing the problem. His solutions— two programs known as TeX and METAFONT— would redefi ne the field of digital typography. He planned for a year’s work; it took a decade. When he finished, he simply gave the works away. Returning to The Art of Computer Programming in the late 1980s, Knuth pressed on. He is now wrapping up volume four. He hopes to complete three more.
Art and artifice When asked to explain the word “art” in the title of his book, the professor grows reflective. Why not call it, simply: Computer Programming? “In one way ‘art’ is like ‘artificial,’ meaning it is not found in nature but made by human beings,” he says. “There also are elements of fine art—of the ineffable—in there, too. The very best computer programs rise to
the level of art. They are beautiful.” This insistence on the unquantifiable in his work has much to do with Knuth’s love of music. His first dream was to be a musician. In music, as with mathematics, he sees patterns and order and symmetry. “I’m convinced that Tchaikovsky would have loved combinatorial mathematics if he had lived a century later,” he says. And why did he come to Stanford? Knuth chalks it up to the fact that Stanford was a world leader in computer science even then, under George Forsythe, the man he credits with virtually inventing the field.
Possibilities Freedom also played a big role in his decision, he says: “I knew I wouldn’t have to fight to keep the department going as with smaller departments at other schools. This is where the best people were and where I could do what I did best.” And what if computers had not become what they have to our society and our culture, where would he be now? Knuth pauses to turn over the possibilities in his head. After a moment, he says, “I figure I would have been a computer scientist anyway. For me it has always been about solving interesting and challenging questions.” Flowing from the lips of a man who spent a lifetime on a quest to write a solitary work, the same man who embraced a decade-long detour only to give the work away, it comes as no surprise. Hero indeed.
Left: A sample page from Knuth’s TeX. Above: Don Knuth at home in his study where he does his writing. Lower left: A display of Knuth’s books at the Huang Engineering Center.
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LEFT: TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD; RIGHT PAGE: (CERF) JOSE MERCADO/STANFORD NEWS SERVICE; (LITTON) COURTESY: LITTON FAMILY
“I’m convinced
assistantship in the lab funded by a $1,000 grant from Litton. “I think he is the best-qualified man that one could conceivably hope to find,” wrote Terman. During WWII, Litton helped Raytheon develop the magnetron, a microwave-generating electron tube that greatly enhanced the range of radar at a time when the U.S. very much needed a defensive edge. In the years following the war, large defense contracts helped Litton Industries grow to rival the great companies of the East Coast and lay the technological foundation for the revolution that would transform Silicon Valley in succeeding decades. s FACTS & FIGURES
A Father Knows
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While teaching at Stanford in the 1970s, Vint Cerf helped develop data transfer protocols that to this day govern Internet traffic. He has since become known as “a father of the Internet.” Today, Cerf waxes philosophical about how something that began as way to connect a few universities has become an “Internet of things” including myriad connected household devices like the temperature control system on his wine cellar, which he manages with a smartphone. Recognized as one of the inaugural class of Stanford Engineering Heroes, the self-effacing former professor spent a day with engineering students and later spoke before a packed house at the NVIDIA Auditorium. Cerf’s latest vision for the Internet? He calls it the Interplanetary Internet, a way to communicate across the vast distances of space. The Magician Charles Litton was born in the Bay Area and graduated with degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering from Stanford in the mid-1920s. In the heyday of radio, Litton was a magician of glass vacuum tube manufacture. He designed and built the first practical glass-blowing lathe, using it to mass-produce tubes and other glass-based radio components. In 1932, he founded Litton Industries. In 1936, at Fred Terman’s request, Litton volunteered to help Stanford create a tube research lab. Terman later wrote to Litton of one “Dave Packard” who had accepted an
◆
$2.56 A HEXADECIMAL DOLLAR The amount Don Knuth once paid those who found typos in his manuscripts
◆
{
90%
Share of Stanford undergrads who take at least one computer science course
60 for a
Instructions Per Second
1954 IBM 650 (0.06 kIPS)
2 billion Instructions Per Second
for an
iPhone 4 (2000 MIPS)
Top left: Vint Cerf during his Stanford days. Bottom left: Charles Litton. S T A N F O R D
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DEVIL
in the
DETAILS Data mining helps unearth a potentially deadly interaction of two popular drugs he work of today’s engineers transcends traditional concepts of engineering. Researchers led by Stanford bioengineer Russ Altman, MD, PhD, used data mining, a technique once downplayed by the medical establishment, to sniff out a potentially harmful side eff ect when two popular drugs are used in combination. They were able to identify a heretofore unknown side effect—a dangerous spike in blood glucose levels—that occurs when the antidepressant Paxil and the cholesterol-lowering medication Pravachol are used together. The researchers estimate as many as 1 million patients could be helped by the discovery. It’s not uncommon for medications to have effects in combination, but because most drugs are approved in isolation, such interactions can be difficult or impossible to spot.
T
Gleaning
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HERSEY
Data mining is a technique more common to computer science and statistics. It involves combing through massive amounts of data to glean interesting patterns. In medicine, as this case shows, it can reveal dangerous side effects not readily apparent to physicians treating an individual patient. “These kinds of drug interactions are almost certainly occurring all of the time, but, because they are not part of the approval process by the Food and Drug Administration, we can only learn about them after the drugs are on the market,” says Altman.
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Likely suspects
Above: Altman is chair of the bioengineering department and an expert in pharmacogenomics, the use of genetics to predict drug response. 14 S T A N F O R D
In all, the team identified four pairs of drugs that appeared likely to cause such symptoms, but only if used in combination. They then focused on the most prescribed of the drugs. “Between 13 and 15 million people in this country have prescriptions for Paxil and Pravachol,” says Altman. “We predict that between 500,000 and 1 million people are taking them simultaneously.” With likely drug candidates identified, the researchers looked for corroborating evidence in the sophisticated electronic medical records maintained E N G I N E E R I N G
at the three participating universities: Stanford, Harvard and Vanderbilt.
Significant numbers The numbers proved convincing, if not astounding. People with fasting blood glucose levels above 126 mg/dl are considered diabetic; a level of 100 to 125 mg/dl is considered pre-diabetic. Among the 135 non-diabetic people taking both drugs, the research-
“The information is there to change health-care practice in a meaningful, substantial way.” ers calculated an average glucose increase of 19 mg/ dl. Perhaps even more worrisome: Among the 104 diabetic patients in the secondary study, there was a dramatic spike of 48 mg/dl when both drugs were prescribed. “These are significant numbers,” says Altman. “Understanding and mitigating the effect this pair of medications has on blood sugar could allow a person with diabetes to better control his or her glucose levels, or even prevent someone who is prediabetic from crossing that threshold into fullblown diabetes.”
PHOTO: ANNE KNUDSEN
“Physicians tend to think of electronic medical records in terms of better tracking data about single patients, but there’s utility in looking at broader population effects. The information is there to change health-care practice in a meaningful, substantial way,” says Altman. To arrive at their discovery, researchers first examined the Adverse Event Reporting System, or AERS, a database of voluntarily reported negative medical events maintained by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Altman and his colleagues identified random pairs of drugs that caused diabetes-related symptoms by looking for individual drugs with side effects reminiscent of diabetes, such as high blood sugar, fever and fatigue.
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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ROD SEARCEY; JOEL SIMON; LINDA CICERO/STANFORD NEWS SERVICE
flow into the ocean. A suitable quantity of fresh water is the biggest hurdle, but Cui thinks storm runoff and gray water could be used. “We need to study waste water,” he says. “If we can use waste water, this will sell.” If he succeeds, a power plant operating on a small stream flowing at 50 cubic meters per second could produce enough electricity to power 100,000 homes.
Re-thinking Urban Water From shortages driven by growing population, climate change and crumbling infrastructure to dealing with growing waste, water will soon become the predominant environmental concern for America’s urban centers. To help meet these challenges, the National Science Foundation awarded $18.5 million to establish an Engineering Research Center (ERC) headed by Stanford to develop new, sustainable ways to address America’s looming water crisis. “Urban water is a monumental challenge and it deserves concerted effort on the grandest scale,” says Stanford’s Richard Luthy, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, who will lead the ERC. The ERC team will include researchers at four U.S. universities who will develop new strategies for replacing infrastructure, new technologies for water management and treatment, and new ways to recover energy and water. Rivers of Energy If engineer Yi Cui has his way, as much as 2 terawatts of electricity— almost 13 percent of the world’s daily usage—could be produced by a new sort of electrical power plant that employs nanotechnology and the difference in salinity between fresh and saltwater to generate electrical current. Such power stations are really massive rechargeable batteries and could be built wherever freshwater rivers
A Solar-powered Water Splitter Splitting water into pure oxygen and cleanburning hydrogen fuel has long been the Holy Grail for clean-energy advocates as a method of large-scale energy storage, but the technical challenges are daunting and have, so far, prevented advances. Now, a Stanford team, led by materials science engineer Paul McIntyre and chemist Christopher Chidsey, devised a robust silicon-based solar electrode that shows remarkable endurance in the highly corrosive environment inherent in the process of splitting water. The researchers coated the delicate silicon with an ultra-thin, flawless layer of transparent titanium dioxide that lets the light through, yet protects the electrode from corrosive oxygen created in the reaction. Their success might just push a promising technology one step closer to practical application, and the world one step closer to a clean-energy future. s
JUST THE FACTS
400 936
Energy consumed in all forms by the human race per year (Quadrillion BTUs)
Solar energy hitting the face of Earth every hour (Quadrillion BTUs)
Top left: Richard Luthy is a foremost expert in water quality. Bottom left: Yi Cui is a materials science engineer whose work ranges from batteries and solar cells to nanoscience. Above: Paul McIntyre is an expert in atomic layer deposition.
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can you hear us now From wireless that can hear and talk at the same time to rethinking our mobile-social future, engineers at Stanford are reshaping the communications of tomorrow.
“The textbooks say you can’t do it,” says Philip Levis of his latest work. “Our system completely upends long-held assumptions about wireless network design.” In radio communication, the axiom is that traffic flows in only one direction on a single frequency. It is either incoming or outgoing. Cell phone networks may seem like an exception, but they get past the problem by using
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multiple frequencies and expensive workarounds that require careful planning.
A whisper above a shout
Below from left to right: Philip Levis, Jung Il Choi, Sachin Katti, Mayank Jain. Kannan Srinivasan (not pictured). Opposite
Refinements Levis and his collaborators have since refined their work, and the latest iteration improves greatly on the original. It uses a well-known device, a balance-unbalance circuit—called a balun in the trade—in a novel way. The balun circuit copies and inverts the outgoing signal— it turns it upside down. The two exact-opposite waves cancel each other, like matter and antimatter. What remains is the all-important, weaker incoming signal. Yet, as with many things engineering, this cancellation is easier said than done. Wireless receivers transmit across a range of frequen-
JOHN TODD
page: Monica Lam
Philip Levis and Sachin Katti, both assistant professors of computer science and of electrical engineering, led a team, including electrical engineering doctoral candidates Jung Il Choi, Mayank Jain and Kannan Srinivasan, to do what others said couldn’t be done: create a wireless radio that can send and receive simultaneously on the same frequency. The consequences, particularly for WiFi networks, could be profound. “When a radio transmits, its own transmission is millions, billions of times stronger than anything else it might hear [from another radio],” Levis says. “It’s like trying to hear a whisper while you yourself are shouting.” The solution is surprisingly simple. “One researcher even went so far as to say something so obvious must have already been tried,” says
Levis. But work it did. Like our brains, the new radio filters out the sound of its own voice so that weaker incoming signals can be heard. At MobiCom 2010, an international gathering of the world’s top experts in mobile networking, the Stanford team won best demonstration.
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cies known as a bandwidth. Bandwidth is like a piano chord, set of notes sounded simultaneously. The team’s earlier version was most effective only on the root note of the chord and grew progressively less effective the farther from the root things got. Balun cancellation, however, works for the most part across the entire bandwidth. In effect, it cancels the whole chord. “It’s not perfect yet, but we can now cancel enough of the outgoing signal to make the system to work for WiFi-like devices that are at the
heart of wireless local area networks today,” says Levis. The most obvious advantage of sending and receiving signals simultaneously is that it instantly doubles the amount of information you can transmit, Levis says. That could mean faster, less congested home and office networks, or transmission of larger files, such as video and hi-fidelity music. It could also mean routers able to transmit packets as they are being received, rather than storing and forwarding in sequence, as is now the case.
Content Still King Although Levis’s clever device might herald a new age of faster data connections, the real question turns not so much to how big can we make the pipe, but what are we going to fill it with? Increasingly, the answer to that question seems to be social media. The advent of social media in the last decade has been the defining feature of our increasingly connected world. While tremendously powerful technological tools like smartphones and tablet computers have blossomed, the real revolution is not in their technical prowess, their speed or their connectedness; it is in how we choose to use them. And that has overwhelmingly been to communicate with other human beings. In a different lab in the same building as Levis, Professor Monica Lam leads a team of computer science graduate students who are redefining how mobile technologies will shape the coming decade. They are devising a more powerful, more connected and more private mobile-social future.
JOEL SIMON
Marriage They call their lab MobiSocial—the Stanford Mobile and Social Computing Laboratory. It is a glimpse into the future of social computing. They are asking the most fundamental questions about this rapidly burgeoning field: Can social be done better? Can it be even more social and more fun? Can it be more open? Can it be more secure? And, if so, how? While these questions seem obvious now, they weren’t as the technologies were entrenching themselves. “Social media are all fantastic ideas and transformative uses of technology,” says Monica Lam, professor of computer science and faculty director of MobiSocial. “But people have rushed into these proprietary playgrounds seemingly
unconcerned about the consequences.” The MobiSocial Lab is working to create a new class of mobile and social computing technology, enabling all the positive aspects of social media— from e-commerce to closely knit social circles— while safeguarding consumers’ interests. Michael Fischer, a doctoral student in computer science working on a social sharing app known as Mr. Privacy, sees things in terms of consumer options. “The real promise of MobiSocial is innovation. Closed networks limit creativity and, ultimately, the user’s choices,” he says.
Partyware Imagine attending a party where anyone can share music to a mutual jukebox and vote on S T A N F O R D
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the playlist—call it the first crowd-sourced DJ. Other apps might allow the sharing of videos on a big-screen TV. The MobiSocial app Junction, for instance, makes it easy to create apps to swap links and photos, to collaboratively create notes and drawings, and to play games with anyone we meet, all without wires and at the click of a button. The technology is built on near-field communication (NFC), but the folks at MobiSocial have dubbed it something much more fun: partyware. There is also the aforementioned Mr. Privacy. People love to share articles, music, video and photos with their friends. But that freedom comes with a certain price: The service provider often owns the content posted to its servers. It may be searched, analyzed and used by advertisers. Mr. Privacy lets friends share content, but using a more private technology based on email.
“Engineering is like spinning straw into gold: You never know what the future holds.”
Engineered Molecule Detects Disease Imagine if finding cancer were as easy as looking for green glowing cells. Better yet, imagine convincing those cancer cells to commit suicide, leaving the healthy cells unscathed. In a paper published in Science, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering Christina Smolke describes just such biological “devices” that can sense disease and regulate cell behavior by adjusting their own functions according to the cell’s internal signals. “We encode a level of intelligence that allows our device to assess whether the cell is diseased. If yes, then it can specifically activate therapeutic effects within that cell.”
“Mr. Privacy’s use of email is key,” says Lam. “It is the most widely adopted social communication technology and it’s an open standard – meaning you can share information, links and conversations with friends outside of proprietary networks.” MobiSocial also has produced a Facebook app called SocialFlow that allows users to organize and manage their many social subgroups.
Straw into gold “No one has just one monolithic social network,” says Diana MacLean, a doctoral student working on SocialFlow. “We have work colleagues, family, college friends, high school friends and so forth. Sometimes you want everyone to see something, sometimes you don’t. SocialFlow helps narrow and define those subgroups,” MacLean says. Asked what applications might we expect next from MobiSocial, Lam pauses to think and responds: “Engineering is like spinning straw into gold: You never know what the future will hold, but it’s the funnest thing to do!” 20 S T A N F O R D
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Super Skin Goes Solar Stanford chemical engineer Zhenan Bao has developed an ultrasensitive electronic skin that can detect chemicals and DNA, or the weight of a butterfly touching down. Bao calls it “super skin.” It’s solar-powered, chemi-
cally and biologically aware, touch-sensitive and now stretchable up to 30 percent beyond its original length. It could lead to novel applications in clothing, robotics, prosthetics and more. “We can basically incorporate any function we desire,” says Bao. A Fast, Efficient Nano-laser In the push toward ever-smaller and ever-faster data transmission technology, a team of Stanford electrical engineers led by Associate Professor Jelena Vuckovic has produced a nanoscale laser that is much faster and vastly more efficient than anything available today. T h e i n n o va t i o n could lead to devices that may one day transform data communications. The device is 10 times faster than today’s technology, hundreds of times more efficient, and so thin that 1,000 could be stacked in the thickness of a playing card. “Best of all,” says Vuckovic, “we can improve upon those numbers.” s
G R O W T H
O F
572,000 40% The number of new twitter accounts opened on a single day: March 12, 2011 (Twitter)
The share of mobile-phone-owning U.S. adults with a smartphone (Neilsen)
982 million Expected smartphone sales in 2015 (IDC)
1
The number of mobile devices per capita worldwide in 2015 (Cisco)
FA C E B O O K
Users in millions 700
LEFT PAGE: ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HERSEY; TOP & BOTTOM: LINDA CICERO/STANFORD NEWS SERVICE. THIS PAGE: VUCKOVIC: ROD SEARCEY; (PHOTO IN PHONE) JOEL SIMON
600 500 400 300 200 Top left: Christina Smolke is a pioneer in synthetic biolo-
100
gy. Bottom left: Chemical engineer Zhenan Bao and her solar skin. Top center:
0
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
Electrical engineer Jelena
2010
Vuckovic. Inset in phone: Monica Lam and the MobiSocial Lab team. S T A N F O R D
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22 S T A N F O R D
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S TA R T U P S
Sitting on of the Top
World
By marrying microsatellite technology, high-resolution imagery and Internetscale computing, Skybox Imaging hopes to change how the world does business.
Have you ever seen a demonstration of augmented reality? A person holds up a smartphone to view a street scene through the phone’s camera. Using locationfinding, the accelerometer and sophisticated algorithms, the smartphone matches the shapes and locations of buildings and other landmarks to calculate the user’s exact physical location and uses that knowledge to serve up
ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HERSEY
helpful data about the scene.
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P A G E
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Pull Quote 1 Left Occae sunto
reiumquis arum aborita placcat iissin remodis
Berkenstock: “Those classes taught me that a Stanford engineer with drive and a vision can get funded and have the opportunity to build a business. The university is the single best combination of lifestyle and learning in the country.”
The phone might overlay the name and phone number of the restaurant up on the right. An arrow denotes the closest public restroom. A video history of that old movie house plays in a window. Now imagine you are an executive in Silicon Valley. You look upon a similar image, only your camera is not a phone, but a network of sophisticated, lightweight microsatellites hovering high above. And the information displayed is not where to pick up a quick bite or see a movie, but an array of insightful, real-time business-critical data points. You see where your parts shipments are in transit. You can track when that container ship will arrive with your newest product. You can see where idled trailer trucks and rail cars are that will transport those products to market all across the nation. It is all before you in real-time. It is an unprecedented vantage on the world. Welcome to Skybox Imaging, a startup that started up at Stanford Engineering.
Changing landscapes
Top: Skybox is the brainchild of Dan Berkenstock, conceived while a graduate student at Stanford. Top right: An image of San Francisco showing what Skybox data might look like. 24 S T A N F O R D
“Skybox could one day enable every consumer, every business or every government agency across the world to enjoy an unprecedented transparency into daily activity to better inform their lives and operations,” says Dan Berkenstock, co-founder and executive vice president of Skybox. The idea behind Skybox dates to when Berkenstock was a graduate student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford. He had an idea of marrying microsatellite technology, highresolution imagery and Internet-scale computing to change how the world does business. He and cofounders Julian Mann, John Fenwick and Ching-Yu Hu envisioned a transformative shift on the scale of GPS, perhaps even the Internet itself. One day, an environmental specialist approached him with the idea of using satellite imagery to monitor groves of trees and agricultural projects, but
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there was one hitch: There were not enough satellites in orbit to provide daily, weekly or even monthly monitoring of vast tracts of Earth at resolution high enough for such a project. The schedule of existing satellites was simply not regular enough for the sort of product Berkenstock and his colleagues had in mind. “GPS would have never taken off if you could only get a signal once every several days. Timeliness really was the key to unlocking a new information economy around satellite imager y,” Berkenstock says.
Changing equations The only viable solution, Berkenstock knew, was to use a substantial number of satellites, a prohibitively expensive option. So if he could not change the number of satellites available, he did the next best thing: He changed the cost equation. Skybox will soon launch its first microsatellite, a lightweight and much less expensive alternative to the behemoths of the past. Another will follow a year after that. “We’ll have many more before we’re done,” says Berkenstock. Skybox uses commercial off-the-shelf electronics, applies proprietary know-how and marries it all to Internet-scale data integration and satellite imagery. It’s like a box seat on the world.
A nod to Stanford Skybox has closed several rounds of venture funding, including an $18 million infusion in the summer of 2011. It is a success story bred from the vision of Stanford engineers Dan Berkenstock and Julian Mann and the hard work of many who are making that vision a reality. At its core, however, Skybox is Stanford through and through. No less than 17 of the company’s top employees are graduates of Stanford, including the vice president of engineering, vice president of satellite
RICH CIRMINELLO. OPPOSITE PAGE: TOP: COURTESY: SKYBOX IMAGING; PORTRAIT: ROBYN TWOMEY; ICON: JOHN HERSEY
eaturibusam
S TA R T U P S
systems, chief engineer, vice president of products and marketing, director of product management and vice president of product development. From his days at Stanford, Berkenstock recalls engineering professors Stephen Boyd and Juan Alonso as key to charting his professional career. Likewise, there were classes in management science and engineering and Mark Leslie’s courses at the Graduate School of Business that taught him about
new ventures. Leslie, in fact, serves on the Skybox board of directors. “Those classes taught me that a Stanford engineer with drive and a vision can get funded and have the opportunity to build a business,” Berkenstock says. “The university is the single best combination of lifestyle and learning in the country. The ecosystem here, the advisors, the access to capital and talent are unparalleled.”
INSTAGRAM INSTA-HIT On the day Instagram was first available, in October 2010, 25,000 people downloaded the app. In the year since, the number has surpassed 11 million and the app is consistently listed among the top-10 free apps on Apple’s iTunes. Using Instagram, smartphone owners snap pictures with their iPhones and then select among 15 filters that stylize the photos. Suddenly, boring, run-of-themill phone pictures look vastly different—better than they should.
Instagram still has fewer than ten employees, but CEO Kevin Systrom and co-founder Mike Krieger are dreaming big. The two met at Stanford Engineering. After graduation, they chose professional tracks familiar to their classmates. Systrom opted for Google and Krieger for Meebo. A few years later, they developed a check-in app, but were intrigued that their beta testers seemed to enjoy swapping photos more than checking in. That idea and $7 million in funding and Instagram was on its way. s
10,900 companies created by Stanford Engineering alumni over the decades
As of N November 2011, has the application app downloaded been d over 11 million times.
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F A C U LT Y
FACULTY HONORS
Zhenan Bao (ChemE) • Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering Fellow, American Chemical Society (ACS)
»
Arthur Bryson (AA, Emeritus) • Tycho Brahe Award, Institute of Navigation (ION) John Cioffi (EE, Emeritus) • Computing and Telecommunications Innovation Award, The Economist Gregory Deierlein (CEE) • Breakthrough Award, Popular Mechanics Karl Deisseroth (BioE) • Member, Institute of Medicine • Ludwig von Sallman Clinician-Scientist Award, AVRO Foundation for Eye Research
»
Robert Dutton (EE) • Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Aristotle Award Kathleen Eisenhardt (MS&E) • Honorary Doctorate, Aalto University, Finland Shanhui Fan (EE) • Fellow, IEEE
Abbas El Gamal (EE) • Claude E. Shannon Award, IEEE
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Kenneth Goodson (ME) • Fellow, ASME James Harris (EE) • Member, National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Sigfried Hecker (MS&E) • Leo Szilard Lectureship Award, American Physical Society (APS)
Mark Horowitz (EE, CS) • Faculty Researcher Award, Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA)
»
Gianluca Iaccarino (ME) • Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers Thomas Jaramillo (ChemE) • Annual Merit Award, Hydrogen and Fuel Cells Program, U.S. Department of Energy
Charbel Farhat (AA, ME) • Fellow, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) • Lifetime Achievement Award, Computers and Information in Engineering Division, ASME • Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques (Knight of the National Order of Merit), France
26 S T A N F O R D
»
Martin Hellman (EE, Emeritus) • National inventors Hall of Fame
Scott Delp (BioE, ME) • Borelli Award, American Society of Biomechanics (ASB) Alexander Dunn (ChemE) • New Innovator Award, National Institutes of Health (NIH)
»
James Gibbons (EE) • Founders Medal, IEEE
Thomas Kailath (EE, Emeritus) • Eta Kappa Nu Karapetoff Award, IEEE • Honorary Doctorate, Israel Institute of Technology Scott Klemmer (CS) • Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize
A
S
AND AWARDS
Donald Knuth (CS, Emeritus) • BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies • Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) Faraday Medal Daphne Koller (CS) • Member, National Academy of Engineering (NAE) • “Top 10 Most Important People in 2010,” Newsweek • “100 Game Changers for 2010,” The Huffington Post
Balaji Prabhakar (EE, CS) • Fellow, IEEE Stephen Quake (BioE) • Raymond & Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics • Promega Biotechnology Research Award, American Society for Microbiology (ASM)
»
Bernard Roth (ME) • Robotics and Automation Award, IEEE
» Kincho Law (CEE) • Computing in Civil Engineering Award, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)
J. Kenneth Salisbury, Jr. (CS) • Inaba Technical Award for Innovation Leading to Production, IEEE
Thomas Lee (EE) • Ho-Am Prize in Engineering
Juan Santiago (ME) • Fellow, American Physical Society
Larry Leifer (ME) • Honorary Fellow, Design Society Fei-Fei Li (CS) • Sloan Research Fellow
»
Eric Shaqfeh (ChemE) • Bingham Medal, Society of Rheology
Parviz Moin (ME) • Member, National Academy of Sciences (NAS)
» Nick McKeown (EE, CS) • Member, National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Arogyaswami Paulraj (EE, Emeritus) • Alexander Graham Bell Medal, IEEE
Sebastian Thrun (CS, EE) • Intelligent Transportation Systems Society, Outstanding Researcher Award, IEEE • Feigenbaum Prize, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Jelena Vuckovic (EE) • Humboldt Research Award Terry Winograd (CS) • Lifetime Research Award, Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
»
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F A C U LT Y
NEWLY APPOINTED EMERITUS FACULTY Robert Gray EE (2011)
Channing Robertson ChemE (2011)
Umran Inan EE (2011)
Kenneth Waldron ME (2011)
Jean-Claude Latombe CS (2011)
Bruce Wooley EE (2011)
Martin Reinhard CEE (2011)
IN MEMORIAM
» Robert Carlson (1939 - 2011) Donald Dunn (1925 - 2011) • (MS&E, Emeritus)
Rudolph Sher (1923 - 2011) • (ME, Emeritus)
»
»
• (MS&E, Emeritus)
John Linvill (1919 - 2011) • (EE, Emeritus)
» Robert Helliwell (1920 - 2011) • (EE, Emeritus)
Stig Hagstrom (1932 - 2011) • (MSE, Emeritus)
James Jucker (1936 - 2011) • (MS&E, Emeritus)
Anthony Siegman (1931 - 2011) • (EE, Emeritus)
»
FACULTY DISTINCTIONS American Academy of Arts & Sciences
33
Academie des Sciences (Paris)
1
National Academy of Engineering
82
Academie Sinica (Republic of China)
1
National Academy of Sciences
18
Norwegian Academy of Sciences
1
National Institute of Medicine
6
Charles Stark Draper Prize (NAE)
1
National Medal of Science
8
Marconi Prize
1
National Medal of Technology
4
Medal with Purple Ribbon (Japan)
1
Nobel Prize
1
Turing Award (ACM)
3
Kyoto Prize
2
Academy Award (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
3
NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program Awardees
42
NSF Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists & Engineers (PECASE)
15
Royal Society of London 28 S T A N F O R D
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3
*Includes emeritus PHOTOS: COURTESY STANFORD ENGINEERING, ROD SEARCEY, VINCE TARRY, LINDA CICERO / STANFORD NEWS SERVICE, COURTESY STANFORD ENGINEERING, JOEL SIMON (2), JEFF SHAW, ROD SEARCEY, COURTESY STANFORD ENGINEERING (3), MCCARTHY: CHUCK PAINTER / STANFORD NEWS SERVICE, COURTESY STANFORD ENGINEERING. ILLUSTRATION BORDERS BY JOHN HERSEY.
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“… every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.”
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John McCarthy (1927 - 2011) (CS, Emeritus)
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F A C T S
&
F I N A N C I A L S
ABOUT THE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING Founded in 1925, the Stanford School of Engineering is the intellectual home of more than 240 faculty members and 4,000 students. More than a quarter of all Stanford students are enrolled in the School of Engineering. Stanford Engineering is organized around nine departments: • Aeronautics and Astronautics • Bioengineering • Chemical Engineering • Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Engineering Physics
The Stanford
• Energy Resources Engineering
School of
• Science, Technology and Society
Engineering is
The school confers the degrees of Bachelor of Science (BS), Master of Science (MS), Engineer and PhD, and operates over 80 laboratories, centers and affiliate programs.
• Computer Science • Electrical Engineering • Management Science and Engineering • Materials Science and Engineering • Mechanical Engineering
Stanford Engineering houses several institutions that embody the trend toward teaching and research that cut across academic boundaries:
the intellectual home of more than 240 faculty members and 4,000 students
• The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design encourages
the practice of “design thinking” to drive innovation. • The Woods Institute for the Environment promotes
• Architectural Design Program • Institute for Computational & Mathematical
Engineering (ICME) • Stanford Design Program 30 S T A N F O R D
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an environmentally sound and sustainable world. • The Precourt Energy Efficiency Center and the
Global Climate and Energy Project support research and teaching focused on achieving a sustainable and secure energy future. • The Stanford Technology Ventures Program teach-
es entrepreneurship skills, conducts research and offers global technology outreach.
Top: Students study in the natural light provided by an atrium in the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center.
TIM GRIFFITH
In addition to departmental programs and the IndividuallyDesigned Major, several engineering-related interdisciplinary programs are available:
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F I N A N C I A L S
FINANCIAL INFORMATION In the fiscal year that began September 1, 2010 and closed August 31, 2011, the School of Engineering began to rebound from the economic downturn of previous years. Overall revenues and expenditures were higher, and gifts to the school and the market value of the school’s endowed funds showed significant increases. Revenues earned by the School of Engineering for indirect cost
CONSOLIDATED EXPENSES BY CATEGORY: Research & Technical Salaries
recovery and tuition exceed the amount allocated to the school by the university, which is included under “University Funds.” In 20102011, the total research volume of the school, both direct and indirect, was $142,268,752. There also was an additional $32,669,446 in direct and indirect costs attributed to School of Engineering faculty research projects managed outside the School of Engineering.
CONSOLIDATED SOURCES OF FUNDING: Faculty Salaries $55,887,321
Gifts
Grants & Contracts
$21,049,900
$122,049,440
$16,475,917
Staff Salaries
TOTAL
$35,365,586
$280,935,204
Endowment Income
TOTAL $280,935,204
$47,527,435
Equipment & Supplies
Student Aid
Other
$77,996,673
$95,209,707
$27,964,752
TOP FEDERAL SOURCES OF RESEARCH FUNDING
University Funds $62,343,676
GIFTS AND AFFILIATES FEES TO ENGINEERING (FY11)
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Total expenditures by agency in millions (rounded) Defense
$46.4
Gifts
$58,524,000
National Institutes of Health
$32.2
Living Individuals
$27,430,000
National Science Foundation
$23.8
Corporations
$13,164,000
Other Federal
$17.0
Foundations & Associations $17,900,000
Energy
$14.5
Bequests
$30,000
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
$4.5
Affiliates Revenues
$17,521,000
TOTAL FEDERAL
$138.5
TOTAL
$76,045,000
TOTAL NON-FEDERAL
$32.0
INFORMATION GRAPHICS BY JEFF BERLIN
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F A C T S
& S FL IUNGA N C I A L S
ALUMNI BY GENDER
ALUMNI BY GEOGRAPHY (AS OF FALL 2011)
Women
California
8,422
24,795
Rest of U.S. (includes U.S. Territories) 16,729
TOTAL
TOTAL
53,296
53,296
Men 44,874
Unknown (no mailing address)
Rest of World 6,157
5,615
ALUMNI BY DEPARTMENT (AS OF FALL 2011) Electrical Engineering
Bioengineering
13,584
129
General Engineering
Management Science & Engineering
3,788
8,857 TOTAL 54,145*
Computer Science 6,012
Materials Science & Engineering 1,679
Aeronautics & Astronautics
Mechanical Engineering
2,682
8,251
Civil & Environmental Engineering
Chemical Engineering
7,265
1,898
*Note: There are some alumni with degrees from multiple engineering departments, so the sum of all alumni by department is higher than the total number of Stanford Engineering alumni.
Japan
657
France
608
Singapore
505
Taiwan
416
Canada
377
Hong Kong
353
Mexico
314
India
296
Republic of Korea 288 United Kingdom
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CREDIT TK
TOP TEN FOREIGN COUNTRIES
CREDIT TK WILLIAM MERCER MCLEOD
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Stanford University School of Engineering 475 Via Ortega Stanford, CA 94305-4121
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