THE YEAR IN REVIEW
2011-2012
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Big Challenges, Big Ideas: A Year in Review School of Engineering in perspective. Engineers at Stanford are forging ahead in all these areas. In environmental sustainability, Stanford engineers are working to ensure fresh water resources for the nation. In pursuing clean energy, they are coaxing microbes to make better biofuels. In human health, our scientists are training computers to evaluate cancers and turning DNA into a form of rewritable digital data storage. At the nanoscale, they are illuminating physics at the thresholds of matter and devising faster, more e�cient data communications systems. In information technology, they are redefining networking infrastructure. Often these advances come from surprising places that demonstrate Stanford’s emphasis on interdisciplinary research – in but one example, researchers in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics developed a cost-e�ective touchscreen Braille writer for the blind. In short, the faculty and students of Stanford Engineering are doing great things. In hindsight, I am struck not just by the tremendous breadth and depth of the accomplishments of Stanford Engineering’s faculty and students, but most profoundly by the potential impact of their work. Great engineering is where big challenges are met with even bigger ideas. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the Stanford School of Engineering. We hope you enjoy reading about our big ideas from the past year and that you continue to take pride in all that Stanford Engineering has come to represent. Sincerely, James D. “Jim” Plummer, dean
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Dean gets asked many questions, but the most frequent has to be: what is Stanford Engineering’s secret? What has made the school so successful, not just in recent decades but over its 87-year history? There are many things I could point to – our world-class faculty, the quality of our students, our technical facilities and our proximity to Silicon Valley all come to mind. The secret, in truth, is all of the above and yet none at the same time. To me, the true essence of Stanford Engineering is ideas – namely, big ideas. Stanford is not afraid to look at the profound technical challenges of our time – environmental sustainability, clean energy, human health, information technology and innovation at the nanoscale – and to pursue bold solutions to them. Our research is aimed at the heart of problems that will need to be solved if humankind is to continue to flourish on Earth. In these four contexts, it is possible to look back at 2011-2012 and to put the accomplishments of the
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Hope is rising that solutions to our environmental challenges are close at hand.
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Fantastic Voyages
Engineers are pushing the technological boundaries in human health.
Illuminating the Nano
Engineers are transforming technology at the smallest of scales. I N F O R M AT I O N
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Building on a legacy of innovation, Stanford is reshaping information technology. STANFORD ALUMNI CREATE
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Letter from the Dean
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Spotlight: Chemical Engineering Surging toward the future
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A Day in the Life A pristine environment Faculty News • • • •
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Awards & Honors Newly Appointed & Emeritus In Memoriam New Heroes
Financials • About the School • Financials • Alumni Statistics
Endnote COVER PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOE FLETCHER
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Stanford | 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 | J E N � H S U N H U A N G E N G I N E E R I N G C E N T E R | � � � V I A O RT E G A | S TA N F O R D, C A � � � � � � � � � �
James Plummer, Dean
EDITOR�IN�CHIEF
SC HOOL OF ENGINEERING ADMINISTRATION
Stephen Monismith Civil and Environmental Engineering
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
James Plummer Dean
Jennifer Widom Computer Science
MANAGING EDITOR/CREATIVE DIRECTION
Curtis Frank Sr. Assoc. Dean, Faculty and Academics
Abbas El Gamal Electrical Engineering
WRITERS
Brad Osgood Sr. Assoc. Dean, Student A�airs
Peter Glynn Management Science & Engineering
Laura Breyfogle Sr. Assoc. Dean, External Relations
Robert Sinclair Materials Science and Engineering
Clare Hansen-Shinnerl Sr. Assoc. Dean, Administration
Friedrich Prinz Mechanical Engineering
DEPARTMENT C HAIRS
Margot Gerritsen Director, Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering
Laura Breyfogle Jamie Beckett
Andrew Myers Andrew Myers Mark Shwartz Glen Martin Max McClure Jamie Beckett
SOCIAL MEDIA/WEB MANAGER
Staci Baird
PHOTO EDITOR
Charbel Farhat Aeronautics and Astronautics
CREATIVE DIRECTOR/DESIGN
Norbert Pelc Bioengineering
Steve Stanghellini Susan Scandrett COPY EDITOR
Heidi Beck
PRINTER R.R. Donnelly � E N G I N E E R I N G . S T A N F O R D . E D U
Eric Shaqfeh Chemical Engineering
CO NTRIB UTOR S
Tim Bower, Thomas Broening, Linda Cicero, Joe Fletcher, Norbert von der Groeben, Mark Allen Miller, Joel Simon, Michael Sugrue, John Todd
JOE FLETCHER
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S P O T L I G H T
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING: SURGING TOWARD THE FUTURE Life. Energy. Environment. This triumvirate of engineering priorities is perhaps unmatched in both its scale and its importance to ensuring quality of life for all inhabitants of planet Earth. At the heart of all three is chemical engineering. Countless industries depend on the synthesis and processing of chemicals and materials – on chemical engineering – for their very existence. The chemical and energy industries are obvious examples, but evidence abounds in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, electronic device fabrication and materials, medical applications and biology, water purification, environmental engineering and more. In many ways, growing population and the challenges of a new century have produced in the field of chemical engineering a shift in focus from the e�cient manufacturing of chemicals for industry to exploring the key environmental and biological questions of the day. From artificial photosynthesis to producing fuel with microbes to exploring the chemical processes in living organisms, chemical engineers are leading new discoveries every day. In this regard, Stanford Engineering is no exception. Fifty-two years after its founding, the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford – known as ChemE – has entered a period of dynamic expansion organized along three distinct lines of strategic focus – the chem-
istry of life, the chemistry of energy and the chemistry of the environment. By shaping the department around these priorities, it is possible to understand the extensive impact chemical engineering has upon the everyday lives of billions of people across the planet. Chemical engineering holds the key to a healthier, cleaner and more efficient world, and a better tomorrow for all humans. Among its major initiatives, the chemical engineering department at Stanford is looking forward to a gleaming new home in the Biological and Chemical Engineering Building, the fourth and final building in the Science and Engineering Quad (SEQ). The building, set to open in 2014, will offer state-of-the-art teaching labs, ample office space and convenient social areas intended to foster the sort of vibrant intersection of people and ideas that is the hallmark of Stanford Engineering. Each day at Stanford, chemical engineers are engineering the future and, in the process, reshaping their field and the way we live on planet Earth. ▲
Chemical engineers are engineering the future, reshaping the field and the way we live on planet Earth.
Stanford chemical engineers perform cutting-edge research in a world-class setting. The new Biological and Chemical Engineering Building (below) is set to
PHOTOS: JOHN TODD ���; ARCHITECTURAL RENDERING: BOORA ARCHITECTS
open in 2014.
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In a “cleanroom” at the Stanford Nano Center, a researcher reaches to open an evaporator. She wears a “bunny suit” to trap particles of dust and hair. The diameter of a human hair is 1000 times the size of the typical nanoscale device. A single strand of hair or particle of dust would render the device unusable. In the background, the yellow windows are a telltale sign of a lithographic area. The windows are coated with foil, giving them a jaundiced hue. The foil blocks light that would otherwise expose the lightsensitive lithographic materials. The School of Engineering shares the Stanford Nano Center and the Stanford Nanocharacterization Laboratory with several other schools under the aegis of the Dean of Research.
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Dr. Richard Luthy stands over Calera Creek, once a barren quarry in Pacifica, California, now restored with highly treated wastewater. � E N G I N E E R I N G . S T A N F O R D . E D U
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In the last decade, the challenges of replacing finite and harmful fossil fuels with clean and renewable options, combined with the vice grip of dwindling water and rising population, have dramatically reshaped engineering in the energy and environmental fields. Stanford Engineering is creatively and aggressively pursuing solutions to these challenges on a number of fronts through cuttingedge applied science. ďż˝
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SEWAGE TREATMENT PLANTS generally rate low on anyone’s list of preferred recreation sites, and rightly so. The architecture emphasizes utility over aesthetics, and the aroma is – well, pungent to say the least.
The sewage plant of the future could resemble a large urban park: a verdant complex of ponds, marshes, woodlands and pathways teeming with wildlife. At the East Bay Municipal Utility District (below), a model wastewater facility is the first in the nation to sell excess electricity back to the grid. Top right: Purple pipes pump recycled water in Palo Alto, California. Bottom right: Luthy and team examine soil samples
will also generate reclaimed ammonia and phosphorous, which can be used for fertilizers. It will yield methane, which can be burned to generate electricity. And perhaps most significantly, it will reclaim water, turning a waste product into a valuable resource.” Luthy is the project leader of a $20 million, five-year National Science Foundation grant to the Stanford School of Engineering and three other universities to create the Engineering Research Center for Re-inventing the Nation’s Urban Water Infrastructure. They call it ReNUWIt (renuwit.org). ReNUWIt’s mission: identify new ways to supply urban water and treat wastewater with greater e�ciency. Resource recovery and environmental mitigation are the foremost goals. One of the thorniest problems, Luthy and his colleagues say, is the current water infrastructure. Existing water supply and treatment systems are, well, old and big. In the best of all possible worlds, he says, these antiquated systems would be ripped up and replaced,
LAKE MEAD BY JAMES ARNOTT
from San Francisco Bay.
But Richard Luthy, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering, foresees a day when you may well visit a treatment plant to walk the dog, watch birds – even have a picnic. Indeed, he says the sewage plant of the not-too-terribly-distant future could resemble a large urban park: a verdant complex of ponds, marshes, woodlands and pathways teeming with wildlife. “It will provide multiple benefits, and recreation will certainly be one of them,” says Luthy. “But it
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LEFT: COURTESY OF EAST BAY MUNICIPAL UTILITY DISTRICT; TOP: COURTESY OF RICHARD LUTHY BY HEATHER BISCHEL; JOEL SIMON
but that is virtually impossible. The expense would be far too great – and their wholesale replacement is infeasible and impractical from the public policy perspective. New technologies that save water, energy and money must therefore be embedded intelligently into existing systems. “The emphasis now is on saving, or even generating, energy and reclaiming water, rather than moving wastewater from homes and dumping treated water into the ocean or a river as expeditiously as possible,” says Luthy. One way to incorporate new technology is to decentralize current systems by establishing small “neighborhood” plants to reclaim water from sewage, he says. THE WATER CAPTURED at these satellite facilities could be treated and recycled for irrigation or other non-potable uses, while the residual solids would be sent back to extract nitrogen and phosphorous for fertilizer, siphon o� methane for fuel and generate compost for soil amendment. “You’d burn the methane to generate electricity that could power the treatment plants,” observes Luthy. Anaerobic bioreactors would replace energyintensive aerobic systems to treat waste. “Ultimately, you could have treatment systems that are energyneutral – or even energy-positive – while reclaiming water,” he adds. Another possibility is to address wastewater at the point of use. “Think in terms of a small, robust unit that could treat gray water right in the home or neighborhood,” says Luthy. ReNUWIt researchers are exploring another mode of water treatment and reclamation. They believe that strategically managed wetlands, engineered groundwater replenishment systems, and innovative storm water basins can augment local urban water supplies – e�ciently and with low environmental impact. “[ReNUWIt] wants to be able to define these processes so we can scale them up – so ultimately, we can use them for large cities,” Luthy says. “These will be natural systems, but make no mistake – they’ll also be engineered systems.” Other ReNUWIt initiatives include establishing storm water infiltration basins in San Francisco East Bay communities, and designing test beds that employ mussels and clams as living filtration systems to remove particles from water. “Our water treatment systems are at the end of their design life,” Luthy observes. “We need new infrastructure – and it has to be financially, environmentally, and socially sustainable.” In all its projects, ReNUWIt’s overriding goal is to make maximum use of a diminishing resource in an energy-e�cient and environmentally sound fashion. � S T A N F O R D
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Welcome to the Microbial Zoo
By human standards, a methanogen leads an extreme life. It cannot grow in the presence of oxygen. Instead, it dines on atmospheric carbon dioxide and electrons it borrows from hydrogen. In turn, it excretes pure methane, the key ingredient in natural gas. This process intrigues clean-energy engineers, including Alfred Spormann, a professor of chemical engineering and of civil and environmental engineering. As part of the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford, Spormann and colleagues from the Pennsylvania State University are raising colonies of methanogens in hopes of converting electricity into methane gas on a grand scale. Their goal is to create massive microbial factories that will one day transform clean electricity generated by solar, wind or nuclear sources into renewable methane fuel and other valuable chemical compounds for industry. “Most of today’s methane is derived from natural gas, a fossil fuel. Our microbial approach would eliminate the need for using fossil resources,” says Spormann.
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From a renewable energy and environmental standpoint, the chemical equation at play is a beautiful thing. The methanogens extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and combine it with electrons generated by emissions-free sources. The result is a storable fuel: methane. Then, when the methane is burned, the carbon dioxide simply returns to the atmosphere. “The whole microbial process is carbon-neutral,” Spormann says. Methane-producing microbes could help solve one of the biggest challenges of large-scale renewable energy: where to store surplus energy generated by solar and wind farms for use in times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. “Right now there is no good way to store electricity,” Spormann says. Batteries are unwieldy, expensive and often made of toxic chemicals. “If we can engineer methanogens to produce methane at scale, it will be a game changer.” Methane could fuel airplanes, ships, vehicles and more, but the work is not without its challenges. “Microbial communities are complex,” Spormann says. “Oxygen-consuming bacteria can help stabilize the community by preventing the build-up of oxygen gas, which methanogens cannot tolerate. Other microbes compete with methanogens for electrons. We want to identify the composition of di�erent communities and see how they evolve together over time.” To accomplish that goal, Spormann has been feeding electricity to laboratory cultures consisting of mixed strains of microbes – his “microbial zoo” – looking for
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Professor Alfred Spormann.
struck – electrical current is transferred from one coil to the next, without contact and without wires. Electrified coils in the road could theoretically transmit power to coils in cars traveling above. To demonstrate feasibility of their vision, Fan and his colleagues devised a system that could Associate professor Shanhui Fan (center), transfer 10 kilowatts post-doc Zongfu Yu (right ) and of electric power at a grad student Aaswath Raman (left) distance of 6.5 feet – enough to charge a car moving at highway speeds. The secret involves bending the coils at 90-degree angles. Fan and his colleagues recently filed for a patent. The next step is to test the device in the laboratory and eventually try it out in real driving conditions. Fellow Stanford Engineering professor Mike Lepech, in civil and environmental engineering, is working on the challenges of integrating these systems into existing highways. “We have the opportunity to rethink how electric power is delivered to our cars, homes and work,” Fan says. “Our work is a step in that direction.” ▲
the perfect combination that can coexist at scale. “There might be organisms that are perfect for making chemicals like acetate or methane, but haven’t been identified yet,” Spormann says. “We need to tap into the unknown, novel organisms that are out there.” �
PORTRAIT: LINDA CICERO / STANFORD NEWS SERVICE; ISTOCK
Down the Wireless Highway
Someday, we may drive electrified highways that wirelessly charge our cars and trucks as they cruise down the road. A Stanford team of researchers has designed a high-efficiency charging system that can wirelessly transmit electric currents large enough to make such a system a reality. “Our vision is that you’ll be able to drive onto any highway and charge your car,” says Shanhui Fan, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Stanford. “Large-scale deployment would involve revamping the entire highway system and could even have applications beyond transportation.” A charge-as-you-drive system would overcome the limitations in driving range and charging time for current plug-in electric cars. “You could potentially drive for an unlimited amount of time,” says Richard Sassoon, managing director of the Stanford Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), which funded the research. “You could actually have more energy stored in your battery at the end of your trip than you started with.” The wireless power transfer is based on magnetic resonance coupling. When two copper coils are tuned to resonate at the same natural frequency – like two wine glasses vibrating in unison when a specific note is
.007%
Share of the world’s water that is fresh and available Source: USGS
Top right: Electric vehicles may one day travel highways that recharge them as they drive. Bottom left: Certain carbondioxide-eating bacteria excrete valuable methane that can fuel power plants.
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More than ever before, engineers are applying their problem-solving skills to challenges in human health and medicine.
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IF SOMEDAY YOUR doctor turns to you and says, “Take two surgeons and call me in the morning,” you may have Ada Poon to thank. Poon is an assistant professor of electrical engineering developing a new class of medical devices that can be implanted or injected into the human body and powered wirelessly from outside the body using electromagnetic radio waves. No batteries to wear out. No power cables needed. “Such devices could revolutionize medical technology,” says Poon. “Applications include everything from diagnostics to minimally invasive surgeries.” Some of these new machines, like heart probes, cochlear implants, pacemakers and drug pumps, would be stationary within the body. Others, like her recent creations, could travel through the bloodstream to deliver drugs, perform �
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Below: Assistant Professor Ada Poon (right), Daniel Pivonka (left) and Anatoly Yakovlev (center) have developed a wirelessly powered device that can swim through the bloodstream. Near right: The device is just a few millimeters across. Far right: Artist’s rendering of a future version inside the body. Below right: Professor Daphne Koller has trained computers to evaluate
problem in the wrong way. In their models, they assumed that human muscle, fat and bone were generally good conductors of electricity. Poon chose instead to think of tissue as a dielectric – not a conductor at all, but an insulator governed by a di�erent set of equations. When Poon recalculated, she made a surprising discovery: radio waves travel much farther in human tissue than anyone thought. “We realized that the optimal frequency for wireless powering is actually around 1 gigahertz,” says Poon. “That’s about 100 times higher than anticipated.” The revelation meant that antennas could be 100 times smaller. In Poon’s latest device, the antenna is just 2 millimeters square, small enough to travel through large arteries. “There is considerable room for improvement before such devices are ready for medical applications,” says Poon, “but for the first time in decades the possibility seems closer than ever.” �
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breast cancer tumors.
analyses and perhaps even zap blood clots or remove plaque from sclerotic arteries. The concept of implantable medical devices is not really novel, but what has been a challenge is powering them. They require batteries, which are large and heavy and must be replaced periodically. Fully half the volume of most implantable devices is battery. Poon’s implanted device picks up the radio signal through an antenna of coiled wire, which generates electricity through electromagnetic induction. For 50 years, scientists have dreamed of wirelessly powered devices, but they ran up against mathematics. According to the mathematical models, high-frequency radio waves dissipate too quickly in human tissue, fading exponentially as they travel deeper into the body. Low frequency waves – according to the models – travel farther, but require antennas that are too large to be practical in the body. Poon realized that scientists were approaching the
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The Learned Machine Since 1928, breast cancer characteristics have been evaluated and categorized by pathologists looking through a microscope. They examine and score the cancers according to a scale developed eight decades ago. The scores help doctors assess the type and severity of the cancer, and to calculate the patient’s prognosis and course of treatment. Daphne Koller, an associate professor of computer science, and pathologists at the Stanford School of Medicine have for the first time trained computers to analyze microscopic images of breast cancers with greater prognostic accuracy than humans. To do this, Koller’s computers pore over images of tissue samples from patients whose prognosis is known. Time and time again, the computer measures and compares various structures of the tumors and surrounding tissues, and tries to predict patient survival. Those predictions are compared against the known patient data. Then, depending upon how accurate they are, the computers adapt. It is essentially trial and error, but at a much accelerated rate. Gradually, the computers figure out what tumor structures best predict survival. “The computer learns,” says Koller. Pathologists have been trained to look at and evaluate specific cellular structures of known clinical importance, which get incorporated into the grade, explains Andrew Beck, MD, a doctoral candidate in biomedical informatics who worked with Koller on the research. But tumors contain innumerable additional features whose clinical significance has not previously been evaluated. “The computer strips away that bias and looks at
thousands of factors to determine which matter most in predicting survival,” says Koller. Their model is called Computational Pathologist, or C-Path. It assesses not three or four or even a handful of structures, but 6,642 cellular factors. In the end, C-Path yields results that are a statistically significant improvement over human-based evaluation.
In a discovery that may prove even more valuable than improved prognoses, C-Path identified structural features in cancers that matter as much or more than those on which pathologists have traditionally relied. The computers confirm, for instance, � S T A N F O R D
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that the characteristics of the outermost cancer cells of a tumor – the epithelia – are predictive of outcome. This was as expected, but somewhat to the researchers’ surprise, the computers found that the healthy cells immediately surrounding the cancer, known as the stroma, are just as predictive of outcome, and perhaps more so. The research is a glimpse into the future of pathology in which humans and computers collaborate to improve results. “If we can teach computers to predict survival, why not courses of treatment or drug therapies a given patient might respond to best? Or even to look at samples of non-malignant cells to predict which will turn cancerous?” says Koller. “This is personalized medicine.” �
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Totally RAD
“One of the coolest places for computing,” says professor Drew Endy, a bioengineer, “is within biological systems.” Endy, his postdoctoral scholar Jerome Bonnet, and graduate student Pakpoom Subsoontorn have discovered a way to reapply natural enzymes to flip specific sequences of DNA in bacteria back and forth at will – creating a method for repeatedly encoding, storing and erasing digital data within a living cell. In practical terms, the three bioengineers devised the genetic equivalent of a binary digit – a “bit” in data parlance. “If the DNA section points in one direction, it’s a zero. If it points the other way, it’s a one,” Subsoontorn explains. The team calls it a “recombinase addressable data” module, or RAD for short. With one bit down, Endy’s goal is to get to eight bits – or a “byte” – of programmable genetic data storage. With such a tool, researchers might count how many times a cell divides, perhaps someday providing us the ability to turn o� cells before they turn cancerous. “Looking ahead, we’re most interested in creating more scalable and reliable biological bits as soon as possible,” Endy says. �
Modeling a Whole Cell
Persevering for 12 years and drawing upon data from more than 900 scientific papers, Markus Covert, assistant professor of bioengineering, has created the world’s first computer model of an entire living organism that accounts for every molecular interaction that takes place in the cell’s life cycle. Covert’s subject is Mycoplasma genitalium, a pathogen with the smallest genome of any free-living organism – just 525 genes. (E. coli, a more traditional laboratory bacterium, has 4,288 genes by comparison.) Even at this small scale, the data that the Stanford researchers incorporate is enormous. They model individual biological processes in 28 separate “modules,” each governed by its own algorithm, making use of more than 1,900 experimentally determined parameters.
Covert’s aim is to supplement, not replace, the era of one-dimensional biological experiments that knock out single genes just to see what happens. “Many of the issues we’re interested in aren’t singlegene problems,” he says. “They’re the complex result of hundreds or thousands of genes interacting.” “The goal,” says Covert’s collaborator, graduate student Jonathan Karr, “is to understand biology itself.”▲
Far left: A sample of breast cancer micrographs like those evaluated by C-Path. Near left: Assistant Professor Drew Endy and team have created a form of rewritable digital data storage inside DNA. Above: Assistant Professor Markus Covert has created the world’s first whole-cell computer model.
1,200,000 Pages of text to record the human genome
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Assistant Professor Jennifer Dionne and a team of researchers explained why stained glass produces such vivid colors, with profound implications for nanotechnology. Dr. Richard Luthy at Calera Creek degraded streams being restored by wastewater. The site was once a barren rock quarry. �� E N G I N E E R I N G . S T A N F O R D . E D U
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Stanford continues to push the boundaries of engineering at the nanoscale. These e�orts hold the promise of faster, more e�cient electronics, more precise medical treatments and even those ideas once thought the realm of science fiction, including the potential to make things invisible. THE YEAR WAS FILLED with great stories,
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like the one that made the cover of Nature when Stanford engineers discovered plasmons at the very smallest limits of matter. �
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glass is illuminated, nanoparticles of metal in the glass resonate and they scatter specific colors of light.
Below: San Francisco artist Kate Nichols is using Jen Dionne’s plasmon research in her art. RIght: Associate Professor Jelena Vuckovic is making strides in nanoscale communications systems.
Plasmons may sound like a George Lucas-inspired alien species, but to engineers working at the nanoscale they are a powerful key to new technologies that could sear away cancers cells, improve photon absorption in solar cells and make catalysis more e�cient. Plasmons occur when light strikes metal, causing electricity to course across the surface of the metal like ripples on a pond and scatter light as it goes. In the very tiniest metal particles, plasmons had been shrouded in mystery until a research team led by Jennifer Dionne, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, proved them to the world. Previously, no one could say for certain whether plasmon resonances even existed at such scales and yet, all the while, they have been right before our eyes. “When stained glass is illuminated, nanoparticles of metal in the glass resonate and they scatter specific colors of light. What color depends on the shape and size of the particles,” says Dionne. The problem has been one of mathematics. As particles near about 10 nanometers in diameter, just a few atoms across, traditional physics breaks down. A nanoparticle of silver responds to photons and electrons in ways profoundly different from a larger chunk of silver. Some scientists once believed that plasmons at these scales ran out of space and vanished – that they essentially got confined out of existence, as if wrapped in some sort of nanoscale straitjacket. The Stanford team, however, achieved the first direct observation of plasmon resonances in particles as small as just a few atoms across, 1 nanometer in diameter. Perhaps just as significantly, they created a relatively elegant mathematical model to describe the systems. The discovery opens up engineering possibilities at a new, ever-tinier threshold of matter. It clears new avenues of nanotechnology entering the 100- to
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10,000-atom scale, smaller than ever before possible. “Because they were poorly understood,” adds Jonathan Scholl, a doctoral candidate in Dionne’s lab and first author of the Nature paper, “plasmon resonances in quantum-sized metal nanoparticles have gone largely unutilized in engineering.” The research could lead to novel, ultra-small, super-e�cient electronic or photonic devices that use the excitation and detection of plasmons in tiny particles to improve catalysis, quantum optics, bio-imaging, therapeutics and many other fields, say the researchers. �
Lightning in a Bottle For those working to redesign the computer, two of the key engineering parameters are surely speed and e�ciency. They are holy grails of chip design. A team at Stanford Engineering achieved both when it demonstrated an ultrafast nanoscale light-emitting diode (LED) that is orders-ofmagnitude lower in power consumption than today’s laser-based systems and yet able to transmit data at the impressive rate of 10 billion bits per second. It is a major step forward in on-chip data transmission, the researchers say. “Low-power, electrically controlled light sources are vital for more efficient optical systems for the computer industry,” says Jelena Vuckovic, an associate professor of electrical engineering and leader of the lab where the breakthrough was produced. The new device includes a bit of engineering ingenuity, too. Existing devices are actually two devices in one, a laser coupled with an external modulator to turn it on and o�.
TOP: JOEL SIMON; BOTTOM: COURTESY KATE NICHOLS
When stained
Left: Vuckovic’s latest device uses 2,000 times less energy than today’s comparable systems. Below: Associate Professor Mark Brongersma is engineering invisible devices.
TOP: JAN PETYKIEWICZ / SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING; BOTTOM: LINDA CICERO / STANFORD NEWS SERVICE
Both devices require electricity. Vuckovic’s diode combines both functions into one, drastically reducing energy consumption. In tech-speak, the new LED transmits data, on average, at 0.25 femto-joules per bit of data. By comparison, even today’s “low power” device needs about 500 femto-joules to transmit the same bit. “This makes our device some 2,000 times more energy e�cient than the best devices in use today,” says Gary Shambat, lead author of the study and a doctoral candidate in Vuckovic’s lab. �
Now You See Me, Now You Don’t It may not be intuitive, but a coating of reflective metal can actually make something less visible. That principle was in full force when engineers at Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated a lightdetecting device that is also invisible. It is a device that can “see without being seen.” The Stanford researchers used a relatively new concept known as plasmonic cloaking for the first time to render the device invisible. At the heart of the system are silicon nanowires covered by a thin cap of gold. By carefully designing their device – by tuning the geometries, as they say – the engineers have created a “plasmonic cloak” to make the device disappear. The light waves in the metal and semiconductor create a separation of positive and negative charges in the materials – a dipole moment, in technical terms. The key is to create a dipole in the gold cap that is equal in strength but opposite in sign to the dipole in the silicon wire. When the equally strong positive and negative dipoles meet, they cancel each other and
the system becomes invisible. “We found that a carefully engineered gold shell dramatically alters the optical response of the silicon nanowire,” says Pengyu Fan, a doctoral candidate in materials science and engineering. He works in the lab of Mark Brongersma, an associate professor and senior researcher on the project. Using this effect, light absorption in the wire is maintained, but the scattering of light drops by some 100 times due to the cloaking e�ect. “It’s invisible,” continues Fan. “It can detect light without being seen.” “It’s counter-intuitive, but you can cover a semiconductor with metal – even one as reflective as gold – and light still gets through to the silicon,” says Brongersma. �
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Graphene with a Twist
Now, in a paper published in the journal ACS Nano, two materials engineers at Stanford have described how they have engineered piezoelectricity into graphene, extending for the first time such fine physical control to the nanoscale. “We can create physical deformations in graphene that are directly proportional to the electrical field applied. This represents a fundamentally new way to control electronics at the nanoscale,” says Evan Reed, head of the Materials Computation and Theory Group at Stanford and senior author of the study. This phenomenon brings new dimension to the concept of “straintronics” – nanoelectronics based in piezoelectric materials – because of the way the electrical field strains, or deforms, the lattice of carbon making up graphene, causing it to change shape in predictable and useful ways. “Piezoelectric graphene could provide an unparalleled degree of electrical, optical or mechanical control
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In what became known as the “Scotch tape technique,” researchers first extracted graphene with a piece of adhesive in 2004. Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb, hexagonal pattern. It looks like chicken wire. Graphene is a wonder material. It is a 100-times-better conductor of electricity than silicon. It is stronger than diamond. And at just one atom thick, it is so thin as to be essentially a twodimensional material. Such promising physics have made graphene the most studied substance of the last decade, particularly in nanotechnology. Yet, while graphene is many things, it is not piezoelectric. Piezoelectricity is the property of some materials to produce electric charge when twisted, bent or squeezed. Perhaps more importantly, piezoelectricity is reversible. When an electric field is applied, piezoelectric materials change shape, yielding a remarkable level of engineering control.
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for applications ranging from touchscreens to nanoscale transistors,” says Mitchell Ong, a post-doctoral scholar in Reed’s lab and first author of the paper. Though they predicted the results, the s t re n g t h o f t h e i r material surprised both engineers. “We thought the piezoelectric effect would be present, but relatively small. Yet, we were able to achieve piezoelectric levels comparable to traditional three-dimensional materials,” says Reed. “It was pretty significant.” While the early results in creating piezoelectric graphene are encouraging, the researchers believe that their technique might further be used to engineer piezoelectricity in nanotubes and other nanomaterials with applications ranging from electronics, photonics, and energy harvesting to chemical sensing and high-frequency acoustics.
“We’re already looking at new piezoelectric devices based on other 2D and low-dimensional materials, hoping they might open new and dramatic possibilities in nanotechnology,” says Reed. ▲
100,000 Width of a human hair in nanometers
Assistant Professor Evan Reed (far left) and post-doc Mitchell Ong (inset left) successfully engineered piezoelectric graphene (illustration, top right) to create a super-thin material that produces electricity when bent or twisted.
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From apps to neetw working, Stanford engineers are reshapi r ing information teechnology. gy
Information technology has the power to transform lives, bringing people closer together and putting valuable data, news and information within arm’s reach of virtually every person on the planet. Stanford Engineering’s role in the rise of the information technology age is legendary. Stanford continues to be the standard-bearer for the field. The year was another of advances and innovations, beginning with the development of a creative and low-cost device to help blind people developed by a small team during a summer course in high-speed computing.
AS ADVISORS TO the program in which undergraduates from across the country come to Stanford Engineering to learn the secrets of creating killer apps, Assistant Professor �
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Adrian Lew and then-doctoral candidate Sohan Dharmaraja faced a challenge: building a device that could decipher Braille code into readable, editable text for the non-blind. “Originally, we thought we would create a character-recognition application that used a smartphone camera to transform pages of Braille into readable text,” says Dharmaraja. But discussions with the Stanford Office of Accessible Education – dedicated to helping blind and visually impaired students negotiate the world of higher learning – prompted them to take a di�erent approach. “The killer app was not a reader, but a writer,” says Dharmaraja. “Imagine being blind in a classroom – how would you take notes or jot down someone’s phone number?” says Lew. “These are real challenges blind people grapple with every day.” It is not that devices that write Braille do not exist, but they are essentially specialized laptops that cost, in some cases, $6,000 or more – all for a device of limited functionality, not an infinitely customizable tool like a tablet computer, which sells for a tenth the price. “So, we developed a touchscreen Braille writer,”
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says Dharmaraja. Braille is a relatively simple code. Each character is formed by variations of six raised dots arranged in a 2-by-3 matrix. The blind read by feeling the dots with their fingertips. A modern Braille writer looks like a laptop with no monitor and just eight keys – six to create the character, plus a carriage return and a delete key. Duplicating the Braille keypad seemed simple
“The killer app was not a reader but a writer. Imagine being blind in a classroom – how would you take notes or jot down someone’s phone number?”
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enough to Lew and Dharmaraja, but for the blind, finding virtual keys on a uniformly smooth glass panel proved a challenge. The two researchers, and the undergrad they were advising, Adam Duran, arrived at a clever and elegant solution. They did not create virtual keys that the fingertips must find; they made keys that find the fingertips. The user simply touches eight fingertips to the glass and the keys orient themselves to the fingers. If the user becomes disoriented, a reset is as easy as lifting all eight fingers o� the glass and putting them down again. Lew and Dharmaraja spent the better part of the last year applying for patents, perfecting and
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Far left: Assistant Professor Adrian Lew and colleagues developed a low-cost touchscreen Braille writer. Near left and below: Consulting professor Guru Parulkar and Professor Nick McKeown are tipping the IP world on its ear with open-source networking.
adding features to their app and creating an application programming interface that will allow other applications to integrate their virtual Braille keypad. Soon, their app will be on the market. �
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A Clean Slate Until VMware bought the little-known networking startup Nicira in July 2012, the terms “open networking” and “software-defined networking” had likely escaped the purview of all but the most hardened data managers. The purchase – and its $1.3 billion price tag – turned heads and provided a clear signal that the networking industry was in the midst of a dramatic shift. Nicira traces its origins to Stanford in 2003, when then-grad student Martin Casado was charged with re-imagining how networking might work if started from scratch, if the Internet were a clean slate. Over the next several years, Casado published a series of papers that redefined networking, and in 2007 he cofounded Nicira. He is now the company’s chief technology o�cer. For decades, the vast arrays of routers and switches that deliver massive amounts of data to their intended recipients have been locked down by their manufacturers, with little or no room for customization. Networking has stagnated, remaining stubbornly expensive, complex and di�cult to manage – virtually unchanged for decades. Then, the Nicira sale made headlines. For those in tune with the industry, there had been hints of things to come earlier in the year when the team at Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley behind software-defined networking announced
that 12 of the world’s foremost networking companies had founded the Open Networking Research Center (ONRC), a collaborative research effort to explore software-defined networking (SDN) and provide the real-world networking hardware – �
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routers and switches – necessary to transform the industry. The center’s co-sponsors are a virtual who’s-who of networking: Cable Labs, Cisco, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, Intel, Juniper, NEC, NTT Docomo, Texas Instruments and, of course, VMware. Under SDN, network engineers who were once little more than traffic managers are free to innovate and add capability, all while simplifying their systems and lowering costs. The shift promises to do for networking what the personal computer did for home computing in the 1980s – namely, democratize it. “SDN is a complete reimagining of networking,” says Nick McKeown, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford and Casado’s one-time academic advisor. “We’re lifting it out of a proprietary, black-box paradigm that has
The shift to software-defined networking promises to do for networking what the personal computer did for home computing in the 1980s – namely, democratize it.
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Period of Transition
Stanford’s Department of Computer Science virtually invented computer science as an academic discipline in the United States. It boasts a curriculum that has made Stanford a leader and the department one of the top programs in the world. Nonetheless, about five years ago, the department decided to re-invent itself for a new century. Oversight of the e�ort fell to Associate Chair for Education Mehran Sahami, and a committee of his fellow faculty members. Three years later, computer science is the number one undergraduate major in the entire university – a first for an engineering discipline. Things were not always so rosy. “Undergraduate computer science enrollment had been on a roller coaster, rising high with the dotcom boom in the late 90s and then plummeting,” says Sahami, who is a former research scientist at Google and now the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. On the bright side, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was projecting three jobs for every newly minted computer science graduate during the decade 2008-2018. “We needed to make the major more attractive, to show that computer science isn’t just sitting in a cube all day. Computer science is about having real impact
LEFT: COURTESY SPENCER BROWN; TOP: NORBERT VON DER GROEBEN
dominated networking for years and looking at a future characterized by open interfaces and opensource software.” Guru Parulkar, a consulting professor of electrical engineering, is executive director of the ONRC. “The Open Networking Research Center will become a factory of ideas that turns the concept of open-source networking into the reality of practical tools and applications that will soon transform the industry,” he says.�
Bottom left: While at
RIGHT: COURTESY JENNIFER WIDOM; FAR RIGHT: TIM GRIFFITH
especially in appreciating the incredible potential and reach of CS. That meant revising our curriculum to update and coalesce the fundamentals, and to highlight the synergy of computer science and other fields,” says Professor Jennifer Widom, chair of the department. In re-imagining the curriculum, Sahami wanted to provide students with more flexibility. The previous core curriculum, which had become monolithic and inflexible, was pared to just six core courses – three with a theoretical focus and three with an emphasis on programming and systems. These courses provide a foundation that is built upon in a series of “tracks,” in which students can focus on their area of greatest personal interest. The set of tracks includes artificial intelligence, systems, theory, graphics, human-computer interaction, and several others. Additionally, students can extend their studies through the choice of two to four electives, including course options in fields other than computer science with the approval of their advisor. In the final analysis, however, the proof has been in the classroom. “We were surprised at the level of interest and the speed at which the community responded,” says Sahami. “Today, more than 90 percent of all Stanford undergrads take at least one computer science course. It’s pretty astounding.” ▲
in the world,” the professor explains. The goal was to cast a wider net, to allow computer science majors to see how their skills could be directly applied in a variety of applications. Likewise, the department wanted to draw in students from other disciplines to see the impact of computer science on their fields and, perhaps, to encourage some of them to consider computer science for their major area of study. “Virtually every field is touched by computer science in some way,” says Sahami. “In medicine and biology, computational methods are used to analyze DNA, predict treatment outcomes and model drugs at a molecular level. In environmental sciences, there is need for climate modeling. In investing ting and finance, algorithmic approaches are widely used.” ed.” Even in fields once consididered far afield from computer ter science – the arts, for instance nce – computers have come to play an important role. “We want to educate our students in modern commputer science, in modern ern software engineering, and nd
Stanford, Nicira CIO Martin Casado wrote a series of papers that redefined networking from the ground up. Near left: Associate Professor Mehran Sahami led the re-imagining of the computer science curriculum. Below: Computer science chair, Jennifer Widom.
642
Exabytes of data trafficked yearly on the Internet Source: CISCO, 2013 est.
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F A C U LT Y
FACULTY HONORS
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Dave Barnett (ME, MS&E) • A. Cemal Eringen Medal, Society of Engineering Science Kwabena Boahen (BioE) • NIH Transformational Research Award Sigrid Close (AA) • CAREER Award, National Science Foundation Mark Cutkosky (ME) • IEEE Fellow
» Karl Deisseroth (BioE)
• W. Alden Spencer Lecture and Award Kathleen Eisenhardt (MS&E) • Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research
Chuck Eesley (MS&E) • International Young Scientist Research Fund award, National Natural Science Foundation of China Ellerbee (EE) » Audrey • Young Investigator Research Award, U.S. Air Force
Charbel Farhat (AA, ME) • International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM) Award Gerald Fuller (ChemE) • Corresponding Member, Russian and International Engineering Academy Bernd Girod (EE) • Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society Peter Glynn (MS&E) • Member, National Academy of Engineering Joe Goodman (EE, Emeritus) • Inductee, Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame
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Leo Guibas (CS) • IEEE Fellow Je� Heer (CS) • Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow Martin Hellman (EE, Emeritus) • RSA Conference Lifetime Achievement Award John L. Hennessy (EE, CS) IEEE Medal of Honor Thomas Jaramillo (ChemE) • Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)
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Tom Kailath (EE, Emeritus) • EURASIP Athanasios Papoulis Award Tom Kenny (ME) • IEEE Sensors Council Technical Achievement award Pierre Khuri-Yakub (EE) • Rayleigh Award, IEEE Ultrasonics Society Don Knuth (CS, Emeritus) • Member, American Philosophical Society
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Helmut Krawinkler (CEE) • Member, National Academy of Engineering Jean-Claude Latombe (CS, Emeritus) • Pioneer in Robotics and Automation Award, IEEE
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AND AWARDS
Sanjiva Lele (AA, ME) • Best Paper award, AIAA Fluids Dynamics Technical Committee Leskovec (CS) » Jure • Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows Adrian Lew (ME) • Young Investigator Award, International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM) Chris Manning (CS) • Fellow, Association for Computational Linguistics
» Ed McCluskey, (EE, CS, Emeritus) • John von Neumann Medal, IEEE Yoshio Nishi (EE) • Fellow International, Japan Society for Applied Physics Brad Parkinson (AA, Emeritus) • Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy Arogyaswami Paulraj (EE,Emeritus) • Foreign Fellow, National Academy of Sciences, India • PAN IIT Alumni Technology Leadership Award John Pauly (EE) • Gold Medal, International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine Norbert Pelc (BioE) • Member, National Academy of Engineering Stephen Quake (BioE) • Lemelson-MIT Prize for Inventors
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Eric Roberts (CS) • Taylor L. Booth Education Award, IEEE Computer Society Mendel Rosenblum (CS, EE) Computer Entrepreneur Award, IEEE Bernard Roth (ME) • Robotics and Automation Award, IEEE • Egleston Medal for Distinguished Engineering Achievement
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Tim Roughgarden (CS) • Goedel Prize in theoretical computer science Amin Saberi (MS&E) • FOCS (Foundations of Computer Science) Best Paper Award Mehran Sahami (CS) • One of “The Best 300 Professors” in the nation, Princeton Review
Krishna Saraswat (EE) • Professor LKM Foundation Distinguished Alumnus Award • SIA University Researcher Award Krishna Shenoy (EE) • NIH Transformational Research Award Sheri Sheppard (ME) • Ralph Coats Roe Award, American Society of Engineering Education
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Jim Spilker (AA, Consulting) • Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy Je� Ullman (CS, Emeritus) • Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Bruce Wooley (EE, Emeritus) • SIA University Researcher Award
NEWLY APPOINTED EMERITUS FACULTY Donald Cox • EE (2012) Robert MacCormack • AA (2012) Terry Winograd • CS (2012)
ILLUSTR ATIONS BY M ARK ALLEN MILLER
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IN MEMORIAM Michel Boudart (1924-2012) • ChemE, Emeritus
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Helmut Krawinkler (1940-2012) • CEE, Emeritus
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Thomas Cover (1938-2012) • EE
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Elliott Levinthal (1922-2012) • ME, Emeritus
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Gene Franklin (1927-2012) • EE, Emeritus
HEROES
Ted Maiman Laser pioneer
Morris Chang Semiconductor executive
Craig Barrett Former Intel CEO/Chair
George Danzig Linear programStephen Timoshenko ming authority Andy Applied mechanics Bechtolsheim expert Inventor, SUN workstation
Brad Parkinson Cal Quate GPS pioneer Inventor, atomic force microscope
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ABOUT THE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING The Stanford School of Engineering has been at the forefront of innovation for nearly a century, turning big ideas into solutions that have improved people’s lives across the globe. The school’s mission is twofold: to educate the next generation of engineering leaders and to pursue research that tackles the world’s toughest problems. By collaborating across disciplines with colleagues in fields like medicine, science, business and the humanities, Stanford engineers are finding better ways to create efficient energy sources, diagnose and treat diseases, ensure clean water, enhance global communication and unleash human creativity.
STANFORD ENGINEERING AT A GLANCE: • Nearly 4,500 students • More than 245�faculty members • 130 national and international academy
and society members
• Eight Top 10 National Research Council
department rankings
• Three No. 1 department rankings
STANFORD ENGINEERING IS ORGANIZED AROUND NINE DEPARTMENTS: • Aeronautics and Astronautics • Bioengineering • Chemical Engineering • Civil and Environmental Engineering • Computer Science • Electrical Engineering • Management Science and Engineering • Materials Science and Engineering • Mechanical Engineering
JOE FLETCHER
The School of Engineering is home to more than 90 departmental laboratories, centers, and a�liates programs, touching on academic areas that range from medicine and business to linguistics and physics. S T A N F O R D
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FINANCIAL INFORMATION In the fiscal year that began September 1, 2011 and closed August 31, 2012, the School of Engineering’s consolidated budget totaled $361.3 million, up 8.3% from the previous year. The charts below show the school’s largest expense categories (minus indirect costs) and the sources of funds used to support these expenses. Revenues earned by the university from school activities, such as indirect costs and tuition, exceed the amount the university in turn allo-
cates to the school. These revenues are included in “University Funds” category. The school’s total research volume was $181.71 million, which reflects contracts from government, corporate and nonprofit sources. Cash received from gifts and fees associated with industrial a�liate memberships totaled $69.5 million, which support research and teaching, additions to the endowment for faculty and graduate student support, and capital projects.
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ALUMNI BY GENDER Women �,���
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ALUMNI BY DEPARTMENT �AS OF ��.��.�����
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Materials Science & Engineering
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*Note: Some alumni have degrees from multiple departments, so the sum of alumni broken down by department is higher than the total number of Stanford Engineering alumni. INFORMATION GRAPHICS BY JEFF BERLIN
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H SE LR UO GE S
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