2023 Stanford Engineering Donor Impact Report

BRINGING OUR MISSION TO LIFE

DONOR IMPACT REPORT 2023

You inspire us.

You enable Stanford Engineers to accelerate their efforts in solving the world’s most important and challenging problems. You broaden our possibilities and amplify our mission of research and education.

Thank you for helping to make a brighter future possible.

Front and inside cover photos: Andrew Brodhead and Christophe Wu

Alumni and friends like you play a vital role in advancing Stanford Engineering’s vision for research and teaching. By giving back, you’re helping us attract and develop the most talented students and supporting our incredible faculty and the innovative programs that they champion.

I’ve traveled the world to teach, and I’ve learned that engineering unites us. When we work together, our differences fade in importance.

On behalf of the entire Stanford Engineering community, thank you for your confidence in our ability to create a lasting, transformative impact in the world.

Photo: Steve Fisch

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

Photo: Courtesy of Jennifer Widom

In 2016, Professor Jennifer Widom embarked on an “instructional odyssey” that saw her teach data science courses in 15 countries over six months.

Intended as a year-long sabbatical, her trip ended early with an invitation to become dean of Stanford Engineering. As dean, she still travels to three or four countries each year, such as Mongolia in 2023.

ENGINEERING FOR OUR ENVIRONMENT Exploring Hidden Environments When Dustin Schroeder was collecting data in Antarctica during graduate school, he depended on a Douglas DC-3— a workhorse aircraft of World War II—to survey the massive ice fields.

Photo: Matthew Chalker

Our engineers are searching for ways to help humanity—and our planet. Their aim is to discover transformative ideas that can advance technologies and materials, while creating a more sustainable approach to modern life.

Times have changed, and Schroeder says it’s a thrilling decade to be in the young field of radioglaciology, which uses radar technologies to take soundings of the vast quantities of ice covering the North and South Poles, as well as Greenland.

“One of the things that’s amazing about glaciology is it is in a discovery period like planetary science and it has massive societal relevance,” he says.

His findings help inform models for sea-level rise reported every few years by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), projections that policymakers then use to face a changing climate—from deciding where to build levees to where to retreat from shorelines.

Schroeder’s lab is also applying ice-penetrating radar to more distant questions—as in, more than 390 million miles away from Earth. The technology and modeling are also useful for answering questions about other planets and their moons.

Europa is one of Jupiter’s 85 to 90 moons, and planetary scientists believe that beneath its icy shell there is a

Dustin Schroeder, Associate Professor of Geophysics and of Electrical Engineering; Senior Fellow, Woods Institute

subsurface ocean that is 10 times deeper than ours.

Schroeder is a science team member on NASA’s Europa Clipper Mission launching in fall 2024.

“Ice is a really cooperative medium,” says Schroeder, of how radar returns a different signal when it moves through water as compared to ice—and how the extreme cold of space can help with transmission.

“A lot of the game is trying to separate frozen water from liquid water. Is water in the ice sheet? Is the ocean going underneath it? Is it melted on the bottom? Is there a lake on the bottom? And that contrast makes nice bright reflectors that are how we do our business.”

Dustin Schroeder learned about electromagnetic waves from his dad, an appliance repairman. Today Schroeder’s laboratory splits time between researching the rapidly changing ice sheets and glaciers on Earth and those on icy moons in space.

Photo: Dustin Schroeder

Centering on Community The global housing gap is an issue that sits on my heart very heavily. In Nigeria where I grew up, the problem is acute—there’s a lot of homelessness and housing insecurity. I’m hoping my work will, in some way, contribute to the industry’s ability to not only build better housing and more efficiently place people into housing, but also give them homes that are dignified.

My favorite Nigerian architect, Kunlé Adeyemi, is the founder of the design firm NLÉ and he does a lot of innovative work in sustainable engineering and community-centered design. I am always moved to see work that prioritizes community needs and considers and integrates traditional building methods into the technology that will support underserved populations.

It’s important that sustainable development is anchored by solutions being self-sustaining within the community. I can’t imagine how that’ll happen without co-designing with the community and infusing their practices into the final design in a way that makes it intuitive for them to build and maintain. The easiest way to undo all the good work you do is to not make your work accessible to everyone.

Photo: Ananya Niharika Navale

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Simi Aluko, MS ’23, PhD candidate, Sustainable Design & Construction

I’m interested in pulling all these ideas together to create housing solutions that are truly sustainable, not band-aid solutions for a global problem.

Simi Aluko, MS ’23, PhD candidate, discovered her love for the built environment on a trip to London as a teenager, seeing for the first time how buildings can tell stories. With her doctorate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, she hopes to explore a people-first structural design that celebrates cultural context.

Photos: Courtesy of Simi Aluko

Doctoral student Simi Aluko spent a summer experimenting with aircrete, a building material similar to concrete, but mixed with foamy bubbles rather than sand and rocks, which makes it more lightweight. Her prototyping took her from Tanzania to her own backyard, with help from her dad (pictured left).

Building Social Equity I’ve done a lot of work in the water sector. The recent water treatment plant failure in Jackson, Mississippi, is an example of what can happen when residents complain for a long time, but their complaints are ignored, resulting in the failure of an entire water system. We’re trying to provide communities in similar situations with the data and analysis they need to successfully advocate for themselves. It’s a matter of giving voice to the voiceless, because I know what it’s like to be voiceless.

Something that’s important to me is working to diversify academia. I want to be able to look at my classrooms and see not just one or two people who look like me, but a representation of what communities in this country look like. It’s not something I can accomplish on my own, but I can have an impact on it by working in recruitment, being thoughtful about the type of courses I teach and who those attract, and providing a voice when it comes to admissions. I also work with high school seniors helping to review college and scholarship applications, and I hold workshops and seminars aimed at African American youth back home in Portland every year. All these little things really add up.

When I’m on my deathbed and someone asks me if I had a fulfilling life, I want to try and count how many people I’ve been able to help and find that the number is uncountable. That’s why I went into academia, because I feel it’s where I can have the greatest impact

Photo: Nathira Osman

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Khalid Osman, Assistant Professor, Civil & Environmental Engineering; Center Fellow, Woods Institute

both on policy and on all the students who will walk though these doors and go on to improve the lives of so many others. It’s an amazing ripple effect.

Today I try to bridge the ideas of social equity and environmental justice with civil infrastructure systems.

Khalid Osman was born in a refugee camp in Kenya after his family fled Somalia, later moving to Portland, Oregon. One of 11 kids growing up, he says, “I never felt poor because I always had love.” Yet he saw marked differences across Portland’s neighborhoods—inspiring his lab’s focus on equitable infrastructure solutions for a sustainable future.

Photo: John Cameron | Unsplash

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Redesigning Life From weed-killing tomatoes to lab-grown steak, Stanford researchers are investigating how to responsibly harness the power of synthetic biology— the research that seeks to make biology easier to engineer.

Professor Michael Jewett, PhD ’05, is a pioneer in a “cell-free synthetic biology” technique that rapidly produces proteins outside of living cells. Jewett, who joined the Stanford faculty in 2023, believes that synthetic biology has a vital role to play in the sustainability of biotechnology.

“We need to find new ways of producing materials and chemicals that don’t rely on fossil fuels and that are environmentally sustainable,” he says. “That’s where synthetic biology can really make a difference.”

Here are three such projects in the works at Stanford Engineering.

Weed-killing tomatoes. What if we could turn the tomato plant we know and love into a master of self-defense? Its growth can be easily stunted by competing weeds, so Assistant Professor Jennifer Brophy and Associate Professor Elizabeth Sattely are working to create a tomato plant that secretes an herbicide—momilactone, a chemical that’s been shown to subdue weed growth—without compromising its fruit.

Lab meat. Of all the meats, beef takes the biggest toll on the environment, yet global beef consumption is on the rise. That’s why Professor Helen Blau and Professor Sarah Heilshorn are embarking on a new project: growing a steak from the cells of a cow. This new approach to satiating carnivores is known as labcultured meat, or cellular agriculture. The researchers’ aim is to sustainably create actual meat, rather than plant-based meat substitutes, by using 3D printing and cellular scaffolding.

Photos: Stanford Engineering faculty

Mussel-inspired binders for concrete. Try to pry a mussel off a rock with your bare hands—it’s not easy. Taking inspiration from this bivalve’s natural super glue, composed of protein-laden stringy fibers, Professor Michael Lepech and Assistant Professor

Possu Huang are harnessing synthetic biology to create a more eco-friendly version of a key component of concrete, one of the world’s most common construction materials and a significant source of greenhouse gases.

Left to right: Michael Jewett, Professor of Bioengineering; Jennifer Brophy, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering; Michael Lepech, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Senior Fellow, Woods Institute; Elizabeth Sattely, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Left to right: Possu Huang, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering; Helen Blau, Director, Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation Professor; Sarah Heilshorn, Director, Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials (GLAM), Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

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EMBRACING ETHICS Engineering has long held innovation as a beacon, with pathbreaking ventures and early adopters of technology lighting the way. Yet technical prowess can have unintended consequences. That’s why Stanford faculty and students continue to examine the ethical dilemmas of engineering today.

Photo: Courtesy of Knight-Hennessy Scholars

Designing for Rapid Change My doctoral research focuses on designing efficient hardware for algorithms used in cryptography and machine learning. In cryptography, we are often interested in the security implications of enabling faster execution of cryptographic protocols.

Understanding how fast we can run these algorithms is useful for two reasons: first, to keep anyone from gaining an unfair advantage, given a security protocol, and second, to minimize authentication delays when we all use secure messaging or web browsing.

On the machine learning side, it is more necessary to balance tradeoffs between time, energy spent, and model accuracy when deploying models in real-time applications. In autonomous driving, for example, conditions are always changing. If a car is in a school zone, it might be useful in that moment to devote more resources to determining whether any pedestrians are on the road compared to when a car is on the interstate.

Our research explores these kinds of tradeoffs by building chips for these applications. This work has given me the exposure to designing hardware for a range of application requirements in these fields.

My parents have always said that while it is good to have technical skills, it is just as important to be able to effectively and clearly communicate what you are working on, and to make sure your research is accessible. Today, I am passionate about improving

Photo: Courtesy of Kavya Sreedhar

Kavya Sreedhar began her PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford in 2019.

Kavya Sreedhar, PhD Candidate, Electrical Engineering, 2019 Knight-Hennessy Scholar

the comprehensibility of these algorithms and how they work so that everyone can have confidence when they are used—especially for applications like autonomous driving where safety is paramount.

At the end of the day, the goal of all this technology is to benefit society and help the world. We cannot do that if people are reluctant to adopt technologies because we have not properly communicated how they work.

Researchers and engineers need to be responsible for this communication as they do the work.

I am a huge superhero movies fan, and I always think about the SpiderMan quote: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Having scientists and researchers in conversation with policymakers and legislators to govern the consequences of using research should be part of our responsibility as we build new technology.

Kavya Sreedhar is president of the Stanford Science Policy Group, where she has organized Congressional Hill Days to connect students to their representatives.

She also serves as the elected School of Engineering representative on Stanford’s Graduate Student Council, where she organizes community events for graduate students together with their family and friends.

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I am proud that STVP, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship Center, is appreciated as a thought leader in research and teaching entrepreneurship.

STVP began with a focus on technology-intensive, growthoriented ventures, but that has grown into a broader discussion of how ethics and entrepreneurship intertwine. Our big turning point was realizing that we could do more to make “ethics in tech” a deliberate element within our teaching.

All you have to do is look at the news cycle over the last decade regarding technology startups and there are plenty of situations that have made ethics clearly hyper-relevant. When you couple that with trends in science and technology like exploring the unintended outcomes of technological breakthroughs, for example—of course we’re going to respond to that.

It’s fertile ground for developing both critical and ethical thinking skills in our students, who, to their credit, are asking for these lessons! I’m so impressed

Photo: Courtesy of STVP

Leading with Principles

Tom Byers, Entrepreneurship Professor in the School of Engineering; Faculty Director, STVP, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship Center

by Stanford students and their desire to be good people, not just good students and future innovators and entrepreneurs.

Right now, there is inadequate inclusion of women and people of color in the venture capital community.

I believe the statistic is only one of every six venture capital partners in Silicon Valley is a woman; and women, Black, and Hispanic founders are still substantially underrepresented.

Inclusion isn’t a subset of the recent interest in ethics in technology but a parallel movement. We believe that you cannot teach entrepreneurship without talking about this. It would be a gross missed opportunity. So, there’s every reason—moral and practical—to be very proactive as entrepreneurship educators.

Tom Byers has been faculty director of the Stanford Technology Venture Program since its inception in 1997.

He says he’s always loved school, and in some ways his career honors his mom, who didn’t have the opportunity to go to college but always wanted her children to have that advantage.

Photo: Andrew Brodhead

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CHARTING 60 YEARS OF AI Stanford Engineering reflects on the people who made six decades of 1960-1969: AI DEVELOPING

1970-1979: AI EXPERIMENTING 1972

• Shakey the Robot is the first mobile robot able to reason about its own actions; it uses a system called STRIPS, for Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver.

FATHER OF AI Stanford mathematics professor John McCarthy (1927– 2011) was a giant in the field of artificial intelligence.

Credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence” at a summer research summit at Dartmouth University in 1956, he subsequently went on to define the discipline for more than five decades.

“Those of us who were involved in the development of A* and STRIPS are gratified to know that these systems are used in many present-day AI applications.”

—Nils Nilsson, MS ’55, PhD ’58, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science

“John McCarthy was the legendary great who founded the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.”

—Chris Manning, Director of Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), Professor of Linguistics and of Computer Science

1962

• John McCarthy returns to Stanford faculty after his tenure at Dartmouth.

1965

• Stanford forms the Department of Computer Science. The university is an early pioneer in formal logical inference and expert systems.

Founding member Professor Edward Feigenbaum goes on to win the ACM Turing Award—often called the Nobel Prize of computing.

1966

• SAIL campus opens on Arastradero Road in the Stanford foothills.

1968

• Barbara Liskov earns her PhD in the emerging discipline of computer science, one of the first American women to do so. Four decades later, she too wins the Turing Award for her invention of the CLU programming language, concepts still used in Java, C++, and C#.

1973

• Terry Winograd joins Stanford faculty; during his PhD at MIT he designs SHRDLU, an early natural-language understanding computer program.

“The work that I was doing at that time in understanding language by computer, I always tell people it’s the great, great, great ancestor of Siri.”

—Terry Winograd, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science

1975

• The Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), pronounced “karma,” is founded.

John Chowning, one of the founding members, said he and colleagues used to do their composing “mostly at night and on weekends so as not to abuse our hosts” at SAIL.

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AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY innovating in artificial intelligence possible and the milestones along the way.

1980-1989: AI IMPROVING LIVES

1990-1999: AI INTERACTING

1980

• Stanford hosts the first American Association of Artificial Intelligence conference.

1982

• Professor Kenneth Salisbury, ’74, MS ’78, PhD ’82, designs a robot hand for his PhD project, kicking off a lifelong career in personal robotics.

1990s

• Romeo and Juliet mobile cooperative robots are built, exploring what human workspaces can be.

“One of the first robot programming systems was developed at Stanford. We get a lot of inspiration from humans.”

—Oussama Khatib, Director, Stanford Robotics Lab

1993

• Daphne Koller completes her PhD at Stanford, and she is among those ushering in a new style of AI driven by emerging leaders at the time.

1984

• Professors Bruce Buchanan and Edward Shortliffe publish a book on an early AI program designed to assist physicians in treating blood infections. The program MYCIN has been called “the granddaddy” of all expert systems, according to Forbes, “the one that launched the field.”

“Because we were looking to expand the group and rebuild it, there was the opportunity to bring in and hire amazing young colleagues like Sebastian Thrun and Andrew Ng and Fei-Fei Li and Chris Manning and others to really create what turned out to be one of the strongest departments and arguably maybe the strongest department in the world.”

—Daphne Koller, PhD ’93, Adjunct Professor in Computer Science

“When expert systems and really solid decision support systems are integrated into the data management environment [then] a computer could really help the delivery of healthcare and hopefully the quality of care, perhaps even lower the cost of care.”

—Edward Shortliffe, PhD ’75, MD ’76

1998

• Professor Kenneth Salisbury shares in patent for robotassisted, minimally invasive surgery.

“Having been involved in the field of artificial intelligence for a long time, Stanford has had the benefit of training many of the researchers around the world who are going on to really push the field forward and that’s helped spread this discipline.”

—John Hennessy, President Emeritus (2000–2016) Shriram Family Director of the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program James F. and Mary Lynn Gibbons Professor Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Computer Science Photos: SAIL and Stanford Video; Stanford Engineering; Stanford Medical History Center

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CHARTING 60 YEARS OF AI AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY 2000-2009: AI ACCELERATING 2000s

“Stanford became in the 2000s the leading lab for doing natural language processing research. We started to have this new era of deep learning-based speech recognition systems. What we’d like to be able to do is have computers that have the same kind of ability to understand and learn human language, like the networking layer of the societal mind.”

—Chris Manning, the most highly cited researcher in natural language processing

2005

• Stanley, the autonomous car designed by the Stanford Racing Team, led by Sebastian Thrun, wins the DARPA Grand Challenge, successfully racing 132 miles over desert terrain in under 7 hours.

2010-2020s: AI SERVING HUMANITY 2011

• Andrew Ng develops Stanford’s main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform and also teaches a machine learning class to over 100,000 people, leading to his cofounding Coursera.

2014

• Stanford accepts proposal to host the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, or AI100.

2015

• Olga Russakovsky as a PhD student approaches her advisor Fei-Fei Li with an idea for easing the diversity crisis in the AI field. Their efforts lead to AI4ALL, a national nonprofit with the mission to make AI more diverse and inclusive.

“In order to train AI to benefit humanity, the creators of AI need to represent humanity.”

—Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Capital Professor, Denning Co-Director of the Stanford HAI

2019

• The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence opens.

2021

2006

• Fei-Fei Li, together with her students, launches ImageNet, the largest database of images ever created, 15 million images spread across 22,000 distinct categories—an internet-scale dataset.

This database sets the stage for major advances in computer vision.

• The OceanOneK diving robot allows human touch, vision, and interactivity 1,000 meters below the sea’s surface using the robot’s haptic—or touch-based— feedback system and stereoscopic vision for better depth perception.

“This is the first time that a robot has been capable of going to such a depth, interacting with the environment, and permitting the human operator to feel that environment. It has been an incredible journey.”

—Oussama Khatib, the Weichai Professor in the School of Engineering

“One of the things I love about Stanford is there is a critical mass of women researchers in the Stanford AI Lab leading research at the faculty level as well as at being graduate students and undergraduate students.”

—Chelsea Finn, Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering

Learn more at engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/60-years-artificial-intelligence-stanford

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HELPING HUMANS The human body is an engineering marvel, despite the inevitable challenges of age, accident, or illness. What medicine and engineering can accomplish to help humans survive and thrive today would have been nothing short of miraculous a century ago. What awaits us tomorrow?

Photo: Kathleen Hinkel

Stretching the Limit Skin is an almost magical material, capable of sensing, conducting, bending, stretching, healing, decomposing, and communicating with our brains.

Inventing soft flexible electronics capable of mimicking our human sense of touch is what has captivated Zhenan Bao for two decades.

“My students are big fans of science fiction movies: that self-healing Iron Man, super-stretchy SpiderMan, or reconstructable Terminator. Now materials we design can realize a lot of the things in the movie concept,” she says of the progress made in her lab.

Zhenan Bao, K. K. Lee Professor

to the brain. The final goal—which could one day bring sensation to people who use prosthetics—is becoming foreseeable.

Initially, Bao says, she worried she had laid down too lofty an aim. Would trying to unify so many capabilities in a single device be too much?

Meanwhile, Bao says, skin serves as target, motivation, and inspiration. “It allows my students to be more creative because they can see this is the bigger picture,” she says. “Then they can say, ‘We are missing this part of skin function,’ or ‘As a material, skin has this property. Why don’t we also incorporate that?’”

But she decided it was better to be bold. “I thought, if we don’t set down an ambitious goal, we will never get to it.”

In pursuit of this larger goal to mimic skin’s abilities, her lab has achieved breakthroughs that found useful applications, like a smart electronic bandage for wound healing that helps to reduce infection and minimize scarring, or noninvasive blood pressure monitors for premature babies, or wireless sensors to monitor tumor growth.

Photo: Bao Group

Since she joined the Stanford faculty in 2004, her lab has made steady advancements. It now produces multiple versions of self-healing, latex-like biodegradable electronic skin that can function when stretched to twice its original length, has the sensitivity to “feel” the footsteps of a ladybug, and can convert those signals into electronic pulses that are intelligible

Of particular importance to Bao, given the mental health struggles she has seen among her own friends and family, is a stick-on sensor that measures skin conductivity, heart rate variance, and cortisol levels— all corollaries of anxiety and stress—that could someday guide new metrics to assess depression. Her lab continues to leverage their advances in materials and devices to develop other tools for understanding and treating neurodisorders.

Zhenan Bao was born in Nanjing, China, into a household of science. Her dad was a solid-state physicist and her mother was a chemist. More than their formal knowledge, Bao credits her parents for passing on a curiosity about the world.

Solving for Safety I was born in China’s Hunan Province and came to the U.S. alone when I was 17. My family is a bit traditional and conservative; they didn’t really want me pursuing higher education, but when I got a chance to come here for college, they didn’t stand in my way.

Photo: Ananya Navale

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As an engineer, I’m always trying to find materials that could solve the safety issues that exist in our lives.

Rachel Huang, MS ’23, PhD ’23, Materials Science & Engineering

When I was 11 years old, an electric heater in our fourth-floor apartment caught on fire, burning down the entire apartment. No one was home, but we were downstairs and could see the smoke coming out of our living room windows. There is absolutely nothing you can do in a situation like that except wait for the firefighters.

Today I work on developing materials that might solve the safety issue of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries.

The electrolyte in these batteries is flammable, and this problem is only increasing as we begin to roll out electric cars. At Stanford, I learned that if you increase the amount of lithium salt in the electrolyte, you can create an electrolyte that is non-flammable and has comparable performance; it just increases the battery’s safety. It’s a brand-new solution to an old problem, and very exciting.

It’s my passion to build materials for sustainability causes. I also enjoy working with students, and I

hope to pursue a career in academia. Another thing I really enjoy is standup comedy. I started to think I might be funny when I was working at Apple. It can be hard as a female engineer to get your point across the room, especially in a very male-dominated work environment. I realized that if I could make my presentation funny, people would listen.

When I started grad school at Stanford, I began to do open mic comedy events. When I sent my family a video of my performance at Pigott Theater at Stanford, they thought I’d done a TED talk. But they did tell me it was funny.

Rachel Huang, MS ’23, PhD ’23, researched safer lithium-ion batteries with her advisors Professor Zhenan Bao and Professor Yi Cui and postdoctoral scholar Dr. Jian-Cheng Lai at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Photo: Christophe Wu

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Reaching for Independence My research interests lie at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and control theory. For example, my lab is designing a robot to help people with very limited mobility feed themselves. It may sound like a small thing—using a fork and knife, or a spoon, to lift a meal into your mouth—but for people with impaired motion, this is a major limitation to a more independent life.

Eating involves a series of precise movements, from skewering or scooping a bite to using depth perception to gently feed someone, let alone navigating flimsy lettuce leaves or unruly garden peas. My team has broken down this complicated problem into individual steps, so that we now have developed several novel robotic algorithms for autonomously and comfortably feeding a person.

In my work at Stanford I hope that I might be a role model for students and help people expand their ideas of what’s possible.

In Iran, where I grew up, there are many female engineers, and I never really doubted my ability

Dorsa Sadigh, Assistant Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical Engineering

to follow this path. My family eventually moved to the U.S., and I attended UC Berkeley for both my undergraduate and graduate studies. Throughout much of my education, I didn’t really appreciate the impact of role models. I thought, “I’m strong, I’m working on interesting research problems, I don’t really need any role models.”

But then I met Anca Dragan. She joined Berkeley as a faculty member as I was nearing the completion of my PhD. I began to work with her, and something shifted for me. Prior to meeting her, I always had male advisors and mentors. And for some reason, I couldn’t see myself in them the way I could see myself in Anca.

As I watched her become an academic and build a research group, for the first time it occurred to me that I, too, could become a professor. In 2017 I joined the Stanford faculty, and it’s interesting to me that I never thought something like this was attainable until I started seeing myself in Anca. I hope I can inspire students in the same way.

Dorsa Sadigh is working on algorithms for safer humanrobot systems, from self-driving cars to assistive-feeding robots. Through her lab’s research, people with spinal injuries and other disabilities might one day be able to eat with help from robots that use AI-informed vision and haptics.

Photo: Micaela Go

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NAVIGATING WHAT’S NEXT Changing Trajectory My focus is all about tracking the things we put up in space. There are big things we can track, like dead satellites and old rocket bodies, but we can’t really track smaller objects that have potentially formed from two things in space colliding and exploding everywhere. I’m trying to develop methods to track the smaller orbital debris because it can pose a threat to our access to space in the future.

In the space environment, there’s a lot of plasma, and the objects we’re trying to track can create disturbances in this body of plasma by sending waves through it. We already know how to detect waves in plasma using radars on Earth, but some particles are too small to use this method.

Right now I’m developing code that predicts how the waves we’re looking for interact with other waves that we know exist in space. If we can identify unique behavior, then we can go to ground radars or send something up into space to look for the behavior we’re predicting in order to detect these smaller, but still risky, bits of space junk.

Whenever I work on a problem, I’m expecting something to fail at some point. I’ve found that trying to avoid failure ends up wasting a lot of time. I remember once as an undergrad, I took an engineering statics class and I was too embarrassed to ask a question about something that seemed really simple, and when I took my first exam, I failed it because of the question I didn’t ask. Ever since then, it’s been second nature for me to be OK with not fully getting it, because it’s better to do that in the learning process than when there’s a high-stakes situation that you need to execute on.

Photo: Chris Williamson

Our faculty and students think outside the box—sometimes way outside—to adapt to change and lead the way into future possibilities.

Michael Kwara, PhD student, Aeronautics & Astronautics

I’ve learned that not being afraid of failure, and accepting it as part of the process, is imperative to getting a PhD. Surprisingly, I’m not super into sci-fi. Space is cool, but it’s also the source of a lot of my stress, so it’s nice to enjoy other things. I really like inspiring, feel-good stories. I’m a big Ted Lasso fan. In Ted Lasso, there’s a sign hanging in the locker room that reads: Believe. It reminds the team to believe in themselves and their work when they need motivation. If I had a sign like that mine would read: Carry On. There’s a lot I’m looking forward to in the future.

Michael Kwara is a doctoral student and a member of Professor Sigrid Elschot’s Space Environment and Satellite Systems Lab, where he is developing code and devising methods to track orbiting space junk, including smaller, hard-to-detect pieces, by using radar on plasma waves.

Photo: NASA.org

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GIVING BACK Why do you choose to support Stanford Engineering? Are there memories that keep you coming back, or traditions you want to uphold? What can a legacy look like, and how can we shape one together?

Preparing Our Cities

Photos: Courtesy of Cindy McColl

Cindy McColl, ’81, says she became an engineer almost by accident.

“I came from firefighters and working-class people,” she says, noting that her ancestors fought the blazes that ravaged San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.

“I really had no idea what engineering was, but I liked math and was good at it.”

A high school teacher is the one who nudged her to explore the field in college.

“Civil engineering has been fantastic because it’s so broad,” McColl says of her undergraduate major, adding that her love of fluid mechanics might relate to the fact she also swam and played water polo at Stanford, later coaching both sports at Los Altos High School for 15 years.

In 1981, she became the first female engineer to be hired by a 10-person structural engineering firm on Howard Street in San Francisco. The firm specialized in modernizing older brick mid-rise buildings, preserving

Cindy McColl, ’81, Civil Engineering, is pictured with her four sons. Three of her sons became engineers—two in mechanical engineering, and one in management science and engineering.

their historical integrity, while bracing for the next major earthquake—which arrived all too soon. In fact, she was at a swimming pool when the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake struck. As a structural engineer, she says the quake, though devastating, was fascinating to witness.

Giving back to Stanford’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering is a way of honoring her history there and envisioning what’s next.

“It’s been really great to watch the transformation of engineering as a whole,” she says, of how the field has branched out across disciplines and teams have become more collaborative over the years.

“The kids at Stanford today, they’re just so inspiring, super creative. They’re going to solve the problems of the world. They see no roadblocks.”

Alumna Cindy McColl is the fifth generation in her family to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Three of her mother’s great-uncles, pictured above, were firefighters in the Mission District.

Cindy McColl, ’81, is an alumna whose career inspired her to support the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

16 Photo: Courtesy of Frank Shi

Betting on Stanford Frank Shi, MS ’01, lives more than 6,000 miles away from Stanford, but he says the School of Engineering continues to shape his days as a member of the Stanford Alumni chapter in Shanghai, China. In fact, that’s where he reconnected with a former classmate who would become his business cofounder.

In 2012, Shi was chatting with Patrick Chiang, PhD ’06, at an alumni bridge competition. Shi had recently sold his first startup, and Chiang, a visiting professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, was looking for a business partner to help him translate his research on energy-efficient optoelectronics into the marketplace.

Soon, as they played cards and placed bets, Chiang asked him to make a calculated gamble.

Frank Shi, MS ’01, Materials Science, Sharon Du, and their son Lawrence

“He told me, ‘You are still young, right? You don’t want to retire yet,’” says Shi.

Across campus, he appreciated the freedom he had to audit business and law classes. He came to Stanford Engineering as a materials scientist, and left with an entrepreneurial spirit. Shi says one lecture series from alumni engineers was especially formative.

So they became partners, with Shi as CEO and Chiang as CTO. Their company, PhotonIC, incorporated fully in 2016 and now has about 120 employees.

“I realized the Stanford education is almost like a golden key that could help open up a lot of doors,” he says.

Photo: Andrew Brodhead

Reflecting back, Shi says his career path was made possible by the serendipity of meeting Chiang again, as well as the generosity of alumni who came before him and supported his financial aid.

They asked, “How will you carry more responsibility and be a more well-rounded individual to make this society better?” This is the message that those people were trying to send us as new students. This was the kind of DNA built up in our daily lives.

His advice to current engineering grads echoes their earlier message: “Go out to make this Earth a better place to live,” he says.

Frank Shi, MS ’01, is an alumnus who, together with his wife, Sharon Du, made their first gift to the Engineering Fund in 2017. “It is our turn now to give back,” he says.

YOUR GIFT MAGNIFIED. 3,257 alumni and friends gave the gift of discovery and innovation

43%

increase in female graduate students over the last 10 years

Photo: Andrew Brodhead

69%

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

3,597

graduate students enrolled

101

countries represented by Stanford Engineering students

ONWARD

Photo: Andrew Brodhead