STANFORD UNIVERSITY IS a private university located approximately 37 mi. (59 km.) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 mi. (32 km.) northwest of San Jose in Stanford, California. Stanford is situated adjacent to the city of Palo Alto, near Silicon Valley. The university enrolls approximately 6,700 undergraduates and 8,000 graduate students. The university has approximately 1,700 faculty members. Forty percent of the faculty is affiliated with the medical school, and a third serves in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Graduate studies in the Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences involve academic course work and independent research. Students are prepared for careers as professional scientists in research or for the application of the earth sciences to mineral, energy, and water resources. Programs lead to M.S., Engineer, and Ph.D. degrees. Course programs in the areas of faculty interest are tailored to the student’s needs and interests with the aid of his or her research adviser. Students are encouraged to include in their program courses that are offered in other departments in the School of Earth Sciences, as well as courses offered in other departments in the university.
Launched in December 2002, the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP) at Stanford University seeks to find new solutions to one of the grand challenges of this century: supplying energy to meet the changing needs of a growing world population in a way that protects the environment. The primary goal of the project is to conduct fundamental research on technologies that will permit the development of global energy systems with significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions. With the support and participation of four international companies (ExxonMobil, General Electric, Schlumberger, and Toyota), the GCEP is a unique collaboration of the world’s energy experts from research institutions and private industry. The project’s sponsors will invest a total of $225 million over a decade or more as GCEP explores energy technologies that are efficient, environmentally benign, and cost effective.
The Stanford Climate Change Campaign, a project of Students for a Sustainable Stanford, in conjunction with People for the American Way Foundation, Global Exchange, and other student groups, has made a public commitment to lead the fight against global warming and to reduce its own carbon footprint.
The Center for Environmental Science and Policy (CESP) began as a specialized research center within the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) in September 1998. It evolved as an outgrowth of the more informal Global Environmental Forum, which had existed within FSI for nearly a decade. CESP is also an affiliated center of the Woods Institute for the Environment. Formed in 2004, Woods is Stanford’s principal initiative for assessing environmental science, technology, and policy on local, national, and global scales.
The center has grown considerably under the experienced leadership of a series of codirectors—Walter Falcon, Donald Kennedy, Pamela Matson, and Stephen Schneider. Leading scholars from the natural and social sciences, these individuals reflect CESP’s integrative approach to research, which balances the analyses of environmental problems from both scientific and policy perspectives.
The CESP plays a crucial role in mobilizing a multi-disciplinary network of scholars, students, policymakers, and leaders in understanding and helping to solve international environmental problems through science and policy research. The work of the center engages scholars from disciplines as varied as the biological and geological sciences, civil engineering, economics, and law to develop new methods for environmental assessment, negotiation, remediation, and protection.
Workshops, policy briefings, and publications link CESP with other public policy and scholarly institutions within and outside Stanford. The center houses the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, a multiyear, interdisciplinary program that draws on the fields of engineering, political science, law, and economics to investigate how the production and consumption of energy affect sustainable development. CESP does not award degrees, but it is heavily engaged in graduate and undergraduate education. The center holds a close affiliation with Stanford’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program on Environment and Resources and also directs the Goldman Honors Program, an interschool honors program in environmental science, technology, and policy.
