2022 Stanford Engineering Donor Impact Report

TOGETHER WE’RE ENGINEERING POSSIBILITIES

DONOR IMPACT REPORT 2022

Driven by curiosity and drawn to solutions.

Thanks to you, Stanford engineers can focus on expanding what’s possible.

Photo: Christophe Wu Front and inside cover photos: Christophe Wu

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Photo: Saul Bromberger

“Friends like you make it possible for Stanford Engineering students, faculty, and researchers to innovate, take risks, and work toward a better future. As one of a small community of donors, you’re a vital part of our legacy. Your generosity has a direct impact on our success, and I am grateful for your commitment to Stanford Engineering. Thank you for all the ways you help us create lasting, purposeful impact on the world around us.”

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

Photo: Christophe Wu

YOU HELP US TAKE ACTION. Your gifts to the Engineering Fund go toward solving critical issues facing humanity. Most often, the best ideas come from the synergy of engineers and friends working together. Thank you for being part of our community, and thank you for your trust.

Photo: Christophe Wu

ENGINEERING FOR THE WORLD

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Making Lives Better My parents, who are both doctors, instilled in me a love of biology. It was my father, an orthopedic surgeon, who inadvertently introduced me to mechanical engineering, as he described joint repairs to me. I knew I didn’t want the responsibility of having someone’s life in my hands, but I thought I might be good at building things.

When I was an undergraduate student in India, there was a major problem with milk vendors adulterating their product with melamine, which was causing infant deformities, growth problems, and death. The lab where I worked was trying to develop a cheap test that could be used by parents at home to determine if milk was safe to drink. I managed to build something that worked, and cost 10 cents. It won an award and left me feeling the same kind of satisfaction that I’d witnessed in my parents for so long.

Phosphorus deposition (red)

Collagen-1 deposition

Osteogenic differentiation

Faster stress relaxation

Mesenchymal Stem Cells undergo osteogenesis and form a bone-like matrix only when cultured within fast relaxing alginate hydrogels.

Photo: Courtesy of Chaudhuri Lab

Photo: Prarthana Narayanan

Our engineers are searching for ways to improve the health of our society and planet. Their hope is to discover transformative ideas that can reach around the globe.

Dhiraj Indana, MS ’19, PhD candidate, Mechanical Engineering

Now I’m interested in regenerative medicine. At the Chaudhuri Lab at Stanford, I take stem cells and put them in different hydrogel environments to see how they respond. The eventual goal is to understand how to make our cells grow our own tissues—ideally by taking a small tissue sample from a patient to grow a particular organ, or part of an organ. We’re still in the early stages, but this fundamental research could revolutionize medicine.

If you’d ask me to define an engineer, I’d simply say it’s someone who helps make our lives better.

It could be by building trains, building electronics, or building organs for human health, like our lab is trying to do. All that’s required is to be interested in what you’re doing, and to have a curious mind.

Linking Piped Water to Equality A glass of water is likely only a few steps away for you. For most rural families in sub-Saharan Africa, their nearest water source is at least a 10-minute walk away. Carrying that water home, in containers that on average weigh 40 pounds each, is a chore that overwhelmingly falls on the shoulders of women and girls.

Globally, about 844 million people live without safe, accessible water. For the last 15 years, Professor Jenna Davis’ research, spanning more than a dozen countries, has examined how freshwater resources contribute to human well-being.

Last year she published research that documented the full value of bringing water taps closer to families in rural Zambia. The study spanned more than 400 families in four villages, and her research team found that households provided with piped water spent 80 percent less time fetching water.

By cutting the distance to the nearest tap from 200 meters to only 15 meters, the water fetchers had more time to work, study, grow larger gardens to feed their families, and, frankly, rest—sleep deprivation being a mark against mental health and caregiving. When water was closer, 64 percent of respondents reported feeling happier, 47 percent reported that their families were healthier, and 22 percent reported being less worried.

Photo: Charles Nambasi | Pixabay

Photo: V. Davis

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Jenna Davis, Associate Dean for Integrative Initiatives, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Higgins-Magid Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

“Switching from the village borehole to piped supply saved almost 200 hours of fetching time per year for a typical household,” she says.

“This is a substantial benefit, most of which accrued to women and girls,” says Davis, senior author of the study published in Social Science & Medicine.

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Preventing Wildfire California’s ecology is a predictable tinderbox. In fact, 84 percent of the state’s wildfires ignite in places already known to be high risk, such as along roadsides or beneath powerlines. What if firefighters could zero in on those trouble spots for prevention?

Photo: Nicki Appel

Photo: John Towner | Unsplash

Pursuing this goal, Assistant Professor Eric Appel and his graduate student Anthony Yu, PhD ’20, designed a dramatically longer-lasting fire retardant—a gel that can be applied once annually to ward off wildfire.

As a hydrogel expert, Appel is familiar with getting chemical compounds to stay in the right place at the right time—whether it is a diabetes injection, a COVID vaccine, or a wildfire retardant.

The research duo focused on ammonium polyphosphate, a U.S. Forest Service-approved fire retardant that has been in use for over 70 years.

Upward of 100 million gallons of it are applied annually in firebreaks across the United States.

Environmental safety was paramount, so Appel collaborated closely with Stanford Professor Craig Criddle, who studies wastewater and could advise them on the microbiological impact of the chemicals.

They selected only ingredients that are biodegradable and nontoxic, using additives commonly found in food, drugs, cosmetics, and fertilizers.

They ended up changing only 1 percent of the standard fire-retardant formulas—what Appel calls the performance-enhancing additives. “But that 1 percent is not the footnote, it’s the whole point,” he says.

Appel then teamed up with his brother-in-law, Jesse Acosta, a former fire prevention forester for the State of Hawaii and adjunct professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, to commercialize the gel technology. The new formulation, Phos-Chek Fortify®, improves how well the fire retardant adheres to plants by over 80 percent, and—crucially—allows the compound to harden on vegetation. Instead of washing off with even

Eric Appel, Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and, by courtesy, of Pediatrics (Endocrinology) and of Bioengineering; Center Fellow, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment

mild weather after a day, it stays in place for months, providing protection against wildfires until the heavy winter rains that signal the end of the fire season.

“A common misconception is that we would have to treat vast swaths of wilderness,” says Appel. “That’s not the case—the idea is that treating only 20 feet along the most at-risk roads could prevent a large proportion of fires throughout the state.”

In 2020, Appel and Acosta’s venture, LaderaTech, was acquired and the technology is now available globally.

Last year, the gel received regulatory approval for use on U.S. federal and state lands, and has since been used extensively to fight blazes in South Lake Tahoe, as well as in Australia, Spain, and Portugal.

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APPLYING UNEXPECTED SOLUTIONS Aiming for the Stars Mary Cooper has her eyes on space, with all of its possibilities and unknowns. But her ultimate goal is to open up new frontiers here on Earth.

Photo: Al Powers

Your support allows our faculty and students to soar to new heights and adapt to change.

During her time as a Stanford undergrad, Cooper served as an ambassador for Mission: AstroAccess, a nonprofit paving the way for disabled astronauts. In 2021, she became part of the first all-disabled crew to experience zero gravity.

The nonprofit asks intriguing questions: “In zero gravity, what is standing up? What is lying down? What does it mean to be unable to walk if no one there is walking? How does this shift our understanding of disability?”

“We had a couple of wheelchair users,” recalls Cooper of her cumulative 15 minutes of weightlessness in the parabolic flight. “Seeing them stand up, take a step, and maneuver ... some of them haven’t done it in years. That was really emotional to see.

That alone made the entire flight for me.”

Mary Cooper, ’22, MS ’23, Aeronautics and Astronautics

Cooper was born with a rare disease that required her left leg to be amputated below the knee, and she grew up tinkering with her specialized prosthetics— optimized for everything from CrossFit to high heels.

An accomplished athlete, she surfed competitively in high school, and at Stanford, she was a varsity women’s rower, the only para-athlete in the Pac-12 last year.

When it came time to choose an academic focus at Stanford, engineering was a natural fit.

“To me, my disability is part of the reason I study engineering here at Stanford,” Cooper says. “Duct taping toes when they fell off, whatever it might be, was always leading me toward a problem-solving mindset.”

Cooper grew up with an interest in aviation thanks to her father, a Coast Guard helicopter pilot, and has long dreamed of space. NASA has never selected an astronaut with a disability before, but she hopes to change that.

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Shape-Shifting Space Missions How do we squeeze more science out of each spacecraft? This is the question that propels Assistant Professor Maria Sakovsky forward.

Looking up at the clutter of satellites in Earth’s orbit, clearly conducting more missions isn’t the right answer.

Far better, she says, is to maximize the usefulness of each mission. This is why a major focus of her research is reconfigurable satellites. Her lab is designing more flexible, adaptable spacecraft—like the Swiss army knife of the skies.

What if a satellite’s solar panels could bend toward the sunshine to maximize power conversion, the way sunflowers in a field do? How might a rover be equipped to adapt to surprising obstacles and opportunities when it lands on a distant planet?

“I’m excited to see my work applied in future space exploration missions and to see what we learn,” she says. “The universe is a fascinating place and we’ve not even scratched the surface.”

Photo: Micaela Go

Her lab uses geometry and paper-thin materials, only 0.1 or 0.2 millimeters thick, to create shapes that are both easily manipulated and strong. Sakovsky, who joined the tenure track at Stanford in January 2022, had a chance to design a new Introductory Seminar, AA114Q: Large Space Structures, that relates closely to her research. She says teaching students is one of the most rewarding parts of her day, wherever the science may lead.

Photo: NASA | Unsplash

Maria Sakovsky, Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Examples of Sakovsky’s research shapes

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GIVING BACK Donors to Stanford Engineering strengthen our future research and innovation. Here is one team of alumni who honored the call to be generous, starting in the workplace.

Saying Thank You ME218: Smart Product Design is a course with a storied history, originally begun at Stanford in the 1970s. For three decades, Professor Ed Carryer has been at the helm of the four-quarter series that teaches students how to build products that integrate 8-, 16-, and 32-bit microprocessors—nearly ubiquitous these days. Even a microwave has a chip with code written on it.

“It’s mechanical. It’s motors. It’s sensors. It’s the intelligence,” says Dan Santos, MS ’04, PhD ’07, an alumnus of the hands-on mechatronics course. “The class is just a little peephole into this world that is product development, but it does give you a taste of a real-world experience. Things are going to go wrong.”

“In a lot of cases, very wrong,” says Larry Miller, MS ’04, which is entirely the point of the trial-by-fire groupbased class.

He says that to meet another 218er, as alumni affectionately call each other, is an instant point of connection, forged in late nights in the Smart Product Design Lab. “It’s a bond you have with someone you’ve never met.”

For Santos and Miller, as well as classmates Dave Bim-Merle, MS ’04, and Miguel Piedrahita, MS ’05, the course turned into a calling. The four alumni cofounded their consultancy firm 219 Design in 2004.

Today their portfolio for more than 100 clients includes a dizzying assortment of projects across sectors, from medical robotics to solar-powered scooters to foodallergen sensors.

“We have a company that we started 18 years ago now. We have 21 employees and none of it would have happened if it wasn’t for that class and Ed. The work we do is exactly an extension of what we did in this class,” says Santos.

Cofounders of 219 Design

Dan Santos, MS ’04, PhD ’07

Dave Bim-Merle, MS ’04

Larry Miller, MS ’04

Miguel Piedrahita, MS ’04

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Photos: Courtesy of 219 Design

The 219 Design team

“It feels good to help out Ed in any way we can,” says Santos. “That is worth its weight in gold in my opinion.”

Over the years, their support to the course has been incremental and varied. They’ve given time, talent, treasures, and—apt for a group of mechanical engineers—tools. They began by donating access for ME218 students to use their company laser cutter.

As these machines became more widely available at Stanford Engineering, the design firm pivoted to instead making an annual expendable gift in honor of Ed Carryer.

For 14 years running, the 219 Design cofounders have been guest lecturers in ME218, and after a pandemic hiatus, this fall they again hosted a networking BBQ at their Mountain View headquarters, a gathering that typically draws 150 to 200 alumni and friends, from recent grads seeking jobs to retirees.

Photo: Courtesy of Ed Carryer

Their business name, 219 Design, was even inspired by the course: ME218, plus one. So he says making a corporate gift back to the class felt like a natural step.

Student teams built tele-operated hover crafts at the ME218c final show. From left to right: Alex Cain, Margaret Coad, Michael Lin, and Aaron Manheim.

“We try to give back to the 218 community, but it’s giving to us, even now,” says Miller, who says countless business leads have come from the ME218 alumni network. “We’re so pleased to be working with the people who are coming out of that environment.”

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EDUCATING TOMORROW’S LEADERS Grasping the Future What keeps robots from doing useful things for us?

“If we had to pick one thing, it would be the sense of touch,” says Assistant Professor Monroe Kennedy III.

Photo: Christophe Wu

Studying engineering is as much about learning to think and ask questions like an engineer as it is about understanding the technical material.

For example, passing someone a glass of water is an easy skill for most adults: having the depth perception to measure the distance from hand to hand, the dexterity to hold the cup (not crush it), and the correct timing to release it.

Replicating this polite gesture in a robot, however, is surprisingly hard to do. Yet Kennedy is quickly closing the gap. In March 2022, he and collaborators debuted a new tactile sensor that enables a robot’s fingers to accurately model surfaces in high resolution, giving the robot a better sense of the object that it’s holding and improving its dexterity. This year his team at Stanford’s Assistive Robotics and Manipulation Laboratory (ARMLab) completed the design for a soft robotic finger almost as sensitive and stabilizing as the digits on a human hand.

Bianca Aumann, MS ’23, is a member of the ARMLab. “This work is personal to me,” she says. “My grandmother has Alzheimer’s disease and relies on live-in nurses who couldn’t come to work when COVID hit. A robotic assistant could be so helpful in assisting disabled people with things like getting dressed or getting in and out of bed.”

As the number of aging adults in the United States is projected to hit nearly 90 million by 2050, perhaps the

Monroe Kennedy III, Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and, by courtesy, of Computer Science

future will hold robotic aides who can pass us a glass of water with just the right gentle touch.

Photo: Ananya Navale, ’25

“To me, part of being an engineer is solving problems that advance the future and improve the Bianca Aumann, MS ’23, Mechanical lives of everyone, Engineering whether it’s on a local or a global scale,” says Aumann.

Designing for Diversity Assistant Professor Monroe Kennedy III says his vision for more rapidly advancing robotics to better serve communities depends on broader views. In 2020, he co-founded Black in Robotics, a nonprofit dedicated to enhancing diversity, inclusion, and equity in robotics.

“You need people from different backgrounds, different cultures, people who think differently, to see a problem from all different types of perspectives, in order to generate solutions that are as far-reaching as possible,” he says.

Bianca Aumann, MS ’23, credits her mother as a role model. “She studied computer science and hearing her stories made me know that even if I was in the minority as a woman, I could pursue studies or a career in STEM.”

Organizing for Good Save the world or pay off student loans? Professor Pamela Hinds shares that Stanford students sometimes approach her saying they feel torn between moral obligation and financial practicality. She’s hoping to show them a third way where they aren’t forced to choose either/or.

In her course MS&E188: Organizing for Good, students learn what they, as future employees, can do to contribute to a company’s efforts to do good, no matter where their career paths take them.

“There’s this tension that students feel about this life choice that they’re making,” says Hinds. “I wanted to develop a course that helped them to see it isn’t a black-and-white choice, that they could really have both.”

In the class, students learn from business cases that illustrate corporate social responsibility and employee activism. They hear from leaders of B Corporations certified to uphold higher social and environmental business practices.

They also learn how to interrogate a business’s values, to see through empty verbiage to a true commitment to action. Monica Tavassoli, BS/MS ’24, who took the class her junior year, explains it this way: “A company’s action toward good speaks much louder than a nice paragraph on their website’s values page.”

Photo: Courtesy of Stanford Engineering

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Pamela Hinds, Fortinet Founders Chair and Professor of Management Science and Engineering

“Each individual and organization has a responsibility by virtue of existing to do no harm, and to, in fact, leave the world a better place,” says Hinds.

Photo: Christophe Wu

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ENGINEERING BETTER HEALTH The human body is an engineering marvel, replete with miracles, mishaps, and compelling reasons for medicine to merge with fields like materials science and chemistry to heal us.

Photo: Courtesy of Stanford Engineering

Regenerating Joints Bone, skin, and even the liver all have the capacity to heal and rejuvenate, thanks to their renewing supply of blood.

Cartilage is different, with no blood supply or nerves to repair itself. Cartilage injuries are usually “a one-way street,” as bioengineer Fan Yang puts it. Orthopedic surgeons can use metal implants and plastic spacers to repair and replace joints and cartilage, but wouldn’t it be better to regrow that cushioning tissue?

Yang has been pursuing this holy grail of tissue engineering for 20 years. She says the field arose from a critical, unmet medical need. Most people will need replacement cartilage at some point in their lives, whether it is for young athletes who suffer ligament injuries or for older adults with late-stage arthritis.

Into humans? Not yet—but they get closer each year.

Right now, her lab is focused on hydrogels to create the ideal environment for growing cartilage and other body tissues from stem cells. These gel-like, watercontaining polymers can be dissolved into a solution, creating a liquid, and then through a stimulus—usually light or a chemical reaction—be turned into a solid.

Yang’s team is studying hydrogels formed into a special shape they call “microribbons”—like fettucine pasta that measures only a few nanometers across.

Her hope is that clinicians could one day inject these biomaterials into wound sites to stimulate regrowth.

The microribbon hydrogels are also useful for studying cancer cells in three-dimensional laboratory settings more similar to how the pathology grows in the human body, rather than inside of flat, plastic petri dishes.

Yang hopes that one day these better cancer models will yield better cancer medicines.

Photo: Cara Shelton | Unsplash

“In my lab, we are very passionate about this,” says Yang. “We can build beautiful cartilage. We can even transfer it successfully into animals.”

Fan Yang, Associate Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery and of Bioengineering

Photo: Doug Peck

Building a Heart

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Assistant Professor Mark Skylar-Scott is focused on one of the most common forms of congenital birth defects in the United States: pediatric heart disease.

Thousands of young patients with inborn heart disorders must cope with their disease for a lifetime.

“To have a truly curative solution, you’ll need to somehow replace damaged or malformed tissue,” says Skylar-Scott. His lab is working incrementally toward a three-dimensional printed heart—living cardiac tissues, bespoke for a child.

Mark A. Skylar-Scott, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering

This is no easy task. The heart contains 10 billion cells and over two dozen cell types that synchronize and beat in perfect rhythm.

His team is using advanced 3D printing techniques to construct heart tissue, he explains, trying to bridge between cells in a dish and human organs in a patient.

To accelerate this painstaking process when the target is in the billions of cells (“If you do the math, that doesn’t pan out too nicely for a scalable process…”), his lab is experimenting with printing “organoids,” or dense clumps of cells. This allows them to print a larger number of cells simultaneously, defining the outlines of an organ with broader strokes.

Of course, unlike plastic filament that consumer 3D printers can heat up and squeeze into myriad shapes, cells are alive. They’re soft, squishy, imperfect, and frustratingly fragile.

Skylar-Scott is quick to note that printing a functional chamber to graft onto an existing heart is still a ways off.

“Scale-up is going to be the challenge of our generation,” says Skylar-Scott.

Photo: Doug Peck

Constructing a synthetic version of the anatomical miracle that is the heart will be a career’s work.

“So we’d better get started,” says Skylar-Scott.

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EXPLORING ETHICS Earning Trust “I’m really interested in how humans and AI come together,” says Professor Carlos Guestrin, PhD ’03, who was formerly Apple’s senior director of AI and machine learning before returning to Stanford.

“How can we collaborate to augment each other’s capabilities and do things we haven’t been able to do before?” says Guestrin.

Remember phone books? He contrasts typing into a web search engine with flipping through the yellow pages, trying to find an address. When artificial intelligence performs well, tasks get easier and more seamless.

When AI performs poorly—say, when self-driving cars have accidents—the public becomes more reluctant to trust these machines. As AI is being leveraged to calculate financial risk, personal credit, and even medical diagnoses, the stakes are high and getting higher. The fundamental question becomes: Can I trust this technology?

Photo: Hoyt Koepke

Our computer scientists are guiding research and prompting conversations about how to navigate the crossroads of ethics, technology, and society.

Carlos Guestrin, Professor of Computer Science

Curious to better understand how trust is built, Guestrin turned to medicine. There he found a framework elucidating how physicians can improve trust with their patients. Fascinated by how this methodology might apply to machine learning, he adapted these questions for AI: • Clarity: Does this AI understand me and communicate clearly with me?

• Competence: Is this AI skilled enough to deliver accurate, high-quality results?

• Alignment: Are our values aligned? Is the AI working with me or against me?

Photo: DrAfter123 | iStockphoto

Whenever there is a science fiction movie of a robot gone wrong, he quips, it usually can be tracked back to a misalignment of one of the three metrics above.

Guestrin is a strong advocate for open-source computer software. When code is designed to be publicly seen, modified, and distributed, it increases the transparency and thus the reproducibility of the computer science, and this in turn improves the trustworthiness of the results.

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Photo: Adobe Stock | Melita

Crowdsourcing Democracy Nine years ago, a team of Stanford researchers launched an experiment to see if community residents could have a more direct voice in how their local governments spend money. The result was the Participatory Budgeting Platform (pbstanford.org), in which residents are typically asked how they would allocate a specific pot of money between a list of competing projects—a new playground, for example, versus new bicycle lanes or a new library.

“We envision an era in which large communities can deliberate and brainstorm with one another on important issues with the aid of intelligently designed algorithms and digital communication platforms,” explains the website.

More than 100 local governments have used the Stanford platform for 120 local participatory budgeting elections, from New York City to Oakland, California, to Austin, Texas. Those surveys have been used to allocate about $75 million, and the numbers keep climbing.

Photo: Courtesy of Stanford Engineering

But now Professor Ashish Goel, PhD ’99, and his collaborators are wrestling with new questions: How much can cities do to seek equitable participation, by reaching out to minorities and older adults who are often underrepresented? Should they worry about

Ashish Goel, Professor of Management Science and Engineering and, by courtesy, of Computer Science

an unbalanced result if one demographic group is so passionate about an issue that it seems to overwhelm everybody else?

Goel says there may be a better alternative. Instead of just focusing on demographics, he and his colleagues are also looking at ways to analyze “clusters” of opinions.

“Technologically, we are excited about finding what we call ‘opinion minorities,’” he says, akin to a teacher scanning a classroom for the quiet students whose voices may be muffled by shouting peers.

“We can report not just opinions segregated by demographics, but also identify and report on opinion clusters that don’t take demographics into account.

These can become part of the decision-making process, which would help ensure that we don’t miss minority voices.”

YOU ARE LAUNCHING FUTURE ENGINEERS. 1,652 3,390

68%

graduate students enrolled

59%

increase in female graduate students over the last 10 years

Photo: Andrew Brodhead

of all coterm students on campus received their degree from Stanford Engineering

98

countries represented by Stanford Engineering students

graduate students receiving fellowship support

43%increase

in incoming underrepresented minority graduate students over the last 10 years

PLANNING A LEGACY How do you hope to be remembered? For one donor couple, they aim to leave a legacy of innovation in the name of civil rights.

Advancing Human Rights

Rights Campaign and raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for political allies. In 2014, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, the long-term partners gladly tied the knot in New York.

Juan Ahonen-Jover, MS ’84, PhD ’85, is a systems thinker—in business, advocacy, and philanthropy. He credits Stanford Engineering for laying the groundwork for his entrepreneurial career, and together with husband Ken Ahonen-Jover is investing in Stanford to foster a more equitable future.

“Now that gay rights have moved forward, thank goodness, we’re ready to say that our mission is all human rights,” says Ken.

“We hope to leave a legacy of people being empowered, conscious, and deliberate in taking care of human rights through the use of technology,” says Juan.

“I am totally convinced that you can do innovation for bad or for good. You can take any technology, and you can make it human rights friendly, if you will,” says Juan.

After Level One and then Intel acquired Juan’s computer chip company in 1996, coincidentally on the day he turned 40, the couple redirected their lives toward activism. Ken, then an emergency physician and medical executive, decided to volunteer for the Democratic National Committee in Florida in 2000. “I had a hunch it would be a close election.”

The experience tipped them into political advocacy; they became, as one journalist described, a “two-man activist factory.”

As technology expands to countless aspects of daily life, they want human rights to be considered from the start. And they want to invest in a new generation to champion this work.

Juan used his Stanford engineering expertise to launch a philanthropic website for LGBTQ rights, eQualityGiving.org. Soon they were a leading online voice in the push for gay marriage, rivaling the Human Photo: Courtesy of the Ahonen-Jovers

“You know, we have done our part,” Ken says. “We need to pass the baton.”

Ken and Juan, MS ’84, PhD ’85, Ahonen-Jover

The couple created a charitable remainder unitrust through Stanford Engineering, a dynamic gift to support faculty and students who, they hope, will continue to protect and advance human rights using technology.

“When we pass, all of our assets will go to Stanford.

And in the meantime, this trust is giving us a wonderful income each month. It’s a win-win,” says Ken. “Quite frankly, we feel like Stanford deserves it.”

“Stanford Engineering allowed us to be who we are today,” agrees Juan.

YOUR IMPACT GROWS FROM HERE

Photo: Andrew Brodhead