2020 Stanford Engineering Fund Donor Impact Report

DONOR IMPACT REPORT

Photo: Nancy Rothstein

ENGINEERING CHANGE, FINDING HOPE. OCTOBER 2020

Engineering is a light in uncertain times.

Bright, focused, and leading the way.

Your support powers us forward. Thank you.

Photo: Tamer Shabani

01

Going back to school felt different this fall. The global pandemic has reshaped what it means to gather together: Our undergraduates are navigating a fully remote start to classes, and graduate students who returned to campus have mask-wearing and social-distancing precautions in place. But no matter where learning and research are taking place, the Stanford spirit is intact, and we remain committed to educating the next generation of engineering leaders.

A Stanford Engineering degree will always be a badge of distinction. We relentlessly pursue excellence in innovation and work to attract and superbly educate the best and brightest students from all backgrounds. We work to ensure that our curriculum explores the intersection of technology and ethics, investigates how culture shapes who becomes an engineer, and examines how diversity informs which problems get solved and the methods we use to do so. When engineers reflect the breadth of humanity, they can find better solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.

I am proud to share these stories of how our faculty and students are putting your generous support to work. I hope this report is a testimony to our determination to engineer for good. Though Stanford engineers are currently separated by cities, states, countries, and continents, together we are truly making a difference. Thank you for investing in this remarkable and resilient community.

Photo: Saul Bromberger

Jennifer Widom Frederick Emmons Terman Dean of the School of Engineering Fletcher Jones Professor in Computer Science and Professor of Electrical Engineering

02

In the Time of Coronavirus

Photo: iStock/mammuth

Since its founding in 1925, Stanford Engineering has focused on solving the problems of the world, driven by the desire to translate scientific and technological inquiry into compassionately useful tools. Your gifts to our annual fund build resources that are ready wherever and whenever we need them most. Your generosity means faculty and students can find innovations, sometimes in unexpected places, to help and heal us all.

Photos: Christophe Wu

03

In the Lab: Antibody Testing When COVID-19 testing shifted to evaluating patients for past exposure and possible immunity, a large Stanford team decided to build their own diagnostic test right on campus. Working around the clock for two weeks, they announced success in April.

In the Hospital: Predicting Need Will there be enough hospital beds and ventilators?

That question has haunted global leaders and hospital administrators since January. Sobering photos of patients lining the hospital hallways in China, then Italy, and then New York City have served as a warning for just how quickly the pandemic can move through a population.

This spring, a team of Stanford engineers and medical professionals created two novel computer tools that can tell local governments and hospitals whether they are about to be overwhelmed by COVID-19. One of the calculators provides county-by-county predictions of hospitalizations tied to the coronavirus. The other allows individual hospitals to predict their own shortages of intensive care beds, ventilators, staffing, and personal protection equipment. The entire group, which included nearly a dozen graduate students, held daily calls over Zoom with Stanford hospital personnel and then broke up into smaller teams to tackle specific pieces of the project.

“This wouldn’t have been possible without the students, who were exceptionally motivated by this opportunity to serve the community,” says Peter Glynn, the Thomas W. Ford Professor in the School of Engineering and one of the management science and engineering faculty involved.

“They went far beyond what you would hope students would do in supporting a project, and they did it all while working remotely.”

“We wanted to create our own tests so that we wouldn’t be beholden to the supply chain that affected diagnostic viral testing early in the pandemic,” says Jennifer Cochran, the Shriram Chair of the Department of Bioengineering.

While viral diagnostic tests rely on a respiratory swab, the Stanford test, led by Dr. Scott Boyd, associate professor of pathology, detects antibodies through a blood draw, searching for signs of previous infection in blood plasma. To avoid a shortage of reagents, the researchers developed their own, making the whole operation self-sufficient.

Thanks to the efforts of Cochran and her colleagues, Stanford now has enough inventory to support its own testing for at least six months or more. The test has so far been used in the Stanford Clinical Laboratory to evaluate samples from over 28,000 patients and healthcare workers.

“Stanford has interdisciplinary collaborations in its DNA. That’s just part of our culture,” says Cochran, of the group of physicians, scientists, and bioengineers. “At Stanford, it’s very natural for us to all come together, roll up our sleeves, and pitch in with our expertise to make something happen.”

04

In the Sewers: An Early Warning System In the hunt for better methods of detecting and tracking COVID-19, Stanford engineers are turning to wastewater for answers.

Scientists have used this sampling technique to track the spread of polio in countries such as Pakistan or salmonella outbreaks in Hawaii. Findings that show the novel coronavirus is shed in high levels in fecal samples make this a potential approach to tracking COVID-19 as well.

Rich or poor, nearly everyone passes a bowel movement daily. So, when the sewage reaches a wastewater treatment center hours later, it reflects an entire community’s health.

Leading the research at Stanford is professor of civil and environmental engineering Alexandria Boehm. Her collaborator is Krista Wigginton from the University of Michigan, who was on campus as a 2019-20 Shimizu Visiting Professor. Together they are part of a growing network of environmental engineers and virologists advancing this research in Australia, Brazil, Japan, Spain, Switzerland, and here in the United States.

“The diversity of people working with us on this project is astonishing,” says Boehm.

In March, Dutch researchers became the first to detect the genetic presence of COVID-19 in sewers, a discovery made six days before the first cases even appeared in hospitals in the Netherlands. By that time, the Stanford-Michigan duo had already applied for emergency funding from the National Science Foundation. To date, their group has collected more than 1,500 samples from 50 wastewater treatment sites across the country. They are testing for ribonucleic acid from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Her team hopes to have a functional forecasting tool by winter.

“Our aspiration is to create a tool where you can use the coronavirus concentrations in sewage to estimate the virus prevalence in a community,” says Boehm.

In the Lungs: Building a Simpler Ventilator Patients severely ill with COVID-19 often require ventilators to stay alive, and at the start of the outbreak these machines were in precariously short supply. As cases were rising worldwide, associate professor of bioengineering David Camarillo approached members of his lab: “The world is in need. We’re medical device researchers, and we’re nimble. What do you think of starting a new project?”

Photos: Christophe Wu

With everyone in enthusiastic agreement, his lab pivoted to developing a simple, low-cost, singleuse ventilator that can be quickly manufactured to meet current and future needs. The effort is now a multidisciplinary team of nearly 60 physicians, respiratory therapists, academics, and industry professionals all aiming for a design that relies primarily on off-the-shelf parts.

While the risk of a ventilator shortage seems to have passed in the United States, the need for a simpler, cheaper ventilator remains—particularly in countries with rising infection rates and fewer equipped hospitals. The project is currently identifying contract manufacturers and pursuing regulatory approval for emergency use.

06

In the Spirit of Innovation Though COVID-19 continues to grip the world’s attention, your generous gifts to Stanford Engineering enable many, many researchers to continue pursuing the leading edge in other areas, exploring the realm of what’s possible today to transform tomorrow. The School of Engineering’s vital role as educator also continues, with more than 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students expected to experience new approaches to learning in the coming year.

In the Fast Lane: Self-Charging Cars Three years ago, electrical engineering professor Shanhui Fan and Sid Assawaworrarit, a graduate student in his lab, built the first system that could wirelessly recharge objects in motion. However, the technology was too inefficient to be useful outside the lab. This April, they moved one step closer to enabling electric cars to recharge themselves wirelessly as they drive.

The two recently published a paper on the latest iteration of a technology that could one day be scaled up to power a car moving down the road. In the nearer term, the system could soon make it practical to wirelessly recharge robots as they move around in warehouses and on factory floors—eliminating downtime and enabling robots to work almost around the clock.

“This is a significant step toward a practical and efficient system for wirelessly recharging automobiles and robots, even when they are moving at high speeds,” says Fan. “We would have to scale up the power to recharge a moving car, but I don’t think that’s a serious roadblock.

For recharging robots, we’re already within the range of practical usefulness.”

07

In Zero Gravity: Inventing Super Materials “Graphene aerogel is something of a wonder material,” says Debbie Senesky, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics. She is directing a research team to design experiments that will use this new material to develop out-of-this-world products aboard the International Space Station.

Although aerogels were first invented in the 1930s, the material graphene is a relative newcomer, only discovered in 2004. Graphene is known for being incredibly light, strong, and electrically conductive, with intriguing potential applications. One idea is to use it for supercapacitors—devices that store large amounts of energy that can be released quickly—to, for example, replace batteries in cell phones. Another idea is to leverage graphene’s absorbency. It appears that graphene aerogel can soak up to 900 times its own weight in oil—a quality that could one day help it clean up oil spills in the ocean.

Researchers want to see how the material behaves in space. “With something so light, the effects of gravity can have a huge influence on its structure and maybe even the properties of the material,” says Jessica Frick, a postdoctoral researcher in Senesky’s lab. “We want to see what happens when we remove gravity.”

Photos: Christophe Wu

08

In the Curriculum: Weaving in Ethics As artificial intelligence has ever-greater influence on human behavior, Stanford computer science professors are deepening their approach to teaching ethics. What once may have been an elective is becoming essential to Stanford’s most popular degree.

“Whether it’s setting bail or placing ads on social media platforms, an algorithm is working in the background, which is why justice, equity, and other social concerns must be central to computer science rather than afterthoughts or omissions,” says Mehran Sahami, teaching professor and associate chair for education in Stanford’s Department of Computer Science.

Currently, all CS majors must take at least one Technology in Society course, many of which focus on ethical issues, and the department is expanding its offerings each quarter. A new initiative called Embedded EthiCS will soon knit ethical training into core classes using teaching modules. For example, a class that explores facial recognition technology would explore the moral ramifications of bias and privacy right alongside the technical content.

“It is the natural progression of what Stanford has been doing for 50 years,” says Sahami.

In the Classroom: Redesigning Courses

Photo: Chor Seng Tan

At age 22, mechanical engineer Sheri Sheppard started her career in the automotive industry, designing for General Motors and later Ford and Chrysler. Often, she was the first woman engineer the machinists had ever encountered, and she learned firsthand the risks of a monolithic culture.

Now as the Richard W. Weiland Professor in the School of Engineering, she can speak to her students directly about how to be trailblazers and how to navigate feeling out of place. She brings this perspective to CSRE 117: Expanding Engineering Limits: Culture, Diversity, and Equity, offered again this winter quarter. Core to the course is exploring the “peopleness” of engineering challenges, searching out angles from sociology, psychology, philosophy, and history, of which empathy is the first step. She is helping Stanford Engineering design better classes to attract and retain more diverse students, too.

“We have amazing, resilient students,” says Sheppard, who is now also part of a team using a surveyinformed, data-driven approach to continually improve virtual instruction for Stanford students.

Photo: Christophe Wu

THE POWER OF YOUR SUPPORT You gave back to Stanford Engineering. You joined over 3,286 alumni and friends from

28 countries in giving the gift of innovation.

More than 447 corporate matching gifts amplified your investment in new ideas. You said yes and together raised over $4,966,579 to help students transform how they learn, lead, and lean into the future.

ENGINEERING FOR GOOD, THANKS TO YOU Photo: Christophe Wu

We are resilient. We are resourceful.

We are makers and risk takers.

Together, we are Stanford Engineering.