Archive for the ‘Best of’ Category

Documentary about Stanford brain research gets local Emmy nod

May 13th, 2013

Dylan’s Gift, a documentary detailing how one family’s generosity is advancing research on a little-understood childhood cancer, has been nominated for a 2013 San Francisco/Northern California Emmy Award. The film, which was inspired by a 2009 Stanford Medicine story, explores the work of Stanford physician-scientist MICHELLE MONJE, who cares for pediatric brain cancer patients and conducts research on a rare, vicious brain tumor that arises in school-aged children and usually kills them within a year of diagnosis.

A release issued by the Foundation for Biomedical Research (FBR) explains:

“When their 5-year-old son, DYLAN, is diagnosed with a rare and fatal brain tumor and given just six months to live, DANAH AND JOHN JEWETT become determined to fight the deadly disease, called Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG). When their son’s life is tragically cut short, they donate Dylan’s tumor to research at Stanford University School of Medicine. This generous gift has helped scientists create the first-ever mouse model of DIPG. The DIPG mouse model is now shedding light on this devastating disease and helping scientists discover new treatments and a potential cure to help other children. This episode was filmed on location at Stanford University School of Medicine.”

In the trailer, posted on the SCOPE blog, the Jewetts share their story and discuss their decision to donate Dylan’s brain tumor after he died.

Dylan’s Gift is nominated under the Emmy’s Informational/Instructional-Program/Special category. It is part of a TV series titled Bench to Bedside, which is produced by FBR Media. The awards will be presented at a ceremony in San Francisco in June.

—LIA STEAKLEY, Stanford School of Medicine

Innovation from many corners: 2013-14 U.S. and international Knight Fellows selected

May 7th, 2013

Twelve U.S. journalists and innovators have been awarded John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships for the 2013-14 academic year. They were chosen from among 100 applicants.

Next year's domestic Knight Journalism Fellows

“This group of U.S. Knight Fellows is easily the most diversified ever, with fellows coming from daily newspapers, online publications, tech companies and even an academic institution,” said JAMES BETTINGER, director of the Knight Fellowships Program. “This wide range of backgrounds and specialties reflects the variety and depth of expertise and commitment that journalism needs right now.”

The domestic fellows will join eight international fellowswho were selected last month. The program champions innovation, entrepreneurship and leadership in journalism by helping the fellows pursue their ideas to improve the quality of news and information reaching the public. Fellows also participate fully in the intellectual life of the university, through academic classes, lectures, symposiums and individual research.

The 2013-14 international Knight Fellows

The 2013-14 fellows will explore proposals that touch on many aspects of journalism: improving accuracy in reporting on Islam, raising the profile of indigenous perspectives on the news, engaging citizens in local food coverage, helping the public better understand data visualization and getting news quickly to communities hit by disaster. They also will be developing tools to help journalists create high-quality animated editorial cartoons, blog live on mobile platforms, gain relevant coding and data skills and better connect with “millennials” and the changing U.S. demographic.

The international fellows were selected from among 216 applicants. They will be researching a range of ideas to improve journalism, from bringing news to Pakistan’s tribal areas and fostering innovation in China and East Africa to training female reporters in Afghanistan and strengthening press freedoms in Myanmar.

To find out more about the 2013-14 fellows and their projects, visit the Knight Fellowships website.

Senior Maya Kornberg awarded Shultz Fellowship

May 3rd, 2013

Thomas L. Friedman, Maya Kornberg and George Shultz

While thousands of Stanford students earn scholarships and have the opportunity to study abroad, for senior MAYA KORNBERG, the awarding of her fellowship to study in Israel this summer was anything but ordinary. “This is an only-at-Stanford kind of morning,” said RABBI SERENA EISENBERG, executive director of Hillel at Stanford. Or as New York Times columnist and author THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN said, “Not many people get a fellowship handed to them by two former secretaries of state.” Not to mention a best-selling author.

Condoleezza Rice and Maya Kornberg

At a breakfast gathering at Hillel Thursday morning, Kornberg was awarded the George and Charlotte Shultz Fellowship for Modern Israel Studies from former U.S. Secretary of State CONDOLEEZZA RICE. Rice, also a professor of political science and business at Stanford, happened to teach Kornberg in her undergraduate foreign policy seminar winter quarter. Kornberg also received accolades from the namesake of the fellowship, GEORGE SHULTZ, also a former U.S. secretary of state. And Friedman, who established the fellowship in honor of Shultz on the occasion of Shultz’s 90th birthday two years ago, also joined in bestowing the honor.

“This fellowship is an example of what Stanford does best,” Rice said. “Great research universities bring together people from the entire academic spectrum, from 18-year-old freshmen to Nobel laureates, and put them together to instill in all of us a desire to search for the truth.” Despite her many commitments, Rice said she did not hesitate when asked to serve on the Shultz Fellowship review committee: “Anything with George’s name, I pay attention. George is emblematic of a great public servant, and he is also a university person, deeply involved with students. And Tom Friedman, he has helped us see inside this complicated region more clearly than any author or scholar I know.”

Rice, Shultz and Friedman all noted that a visit to Israel is essential for any scholar working to understand the Middle East. Friedman said he established the fellowship in recognition of Shultz’s “tireless efforts to broker Middle East peace,” and that the honor is available to any Stanford student interested in studying Israel or the Arab-Israeli peace process. The Shultzes then added to the fellowship, as did philanthropists LAURA LAUDER and JIM KOSHLAND. (Because of university restrictions on funding research opportunities in Israel while the State Department maintains a travel advisory there, the fellowship fund was established at Hillel at Stanford, which administers the award.)

Last year, the first fellowship was awarded to EMILY WARREN, a joint JD-economics PhD candidate, who used the time to study how Israel’s defense investments in the late 1980s resulted in a tech boom in the early 1990s.

Kornberg, a graduating senior majoring in international relations, intends to use her fellowship to examine Israeli political parties’ campaigns in elections between 1967 and 2013, investigating the platforms and rhetoric on issues relating to the peace process, such as territorial division, the status of Jerusalem and rights of return.

“What I have appreciated most about my Stanford experience is that they just keep throwing these amazing opportunities at you all the time,” said Kornberg, who is the daughter and granddaughter of two Nobel laureates, ROGER KORNBERG and the late ARTHUR KORNBERG. Her proud mother, who was toting a camera Thursday morning, is YAHLI LORCH, associate professor of structural biology.

Maya Kornberg plans to pursue a graduate degree in public policy at Columbia University. But when she returns from Israel, she has a date to meet with Rice, Shultz and Friedman to share what she learned.

—LISA LAPIN

Three Cardinal football players drafted by the NFL

May 1st, 2013

 

Photo Credit: David Gonzales/Stanford Athletics

Zach Ertz

Photo Credit: Dani Vernon/Stanford Athletics

Stepfan Taylor

Photo Credit: Don Feria/Stanford Athletics

Levine Toilolo

Three Stanford football players were selected in the 2013 NFL Draft last weekend with tight ends ZACH ERTZ and LEVINE TOILOLO being called alongside running back STEPFAN TAYLOR.

Ertz was chosen by the Philadelphia Eagles with the 35th overall pick (third pick of the second round); Toilolo was selected by the Atlanta Falcons with the 36th pick of the fourth round (133rd overall); and Taylor was called upon by Arizona with the 7th pick of the fifth round (140th overall).

It marked the fourth straight year that Stanford had at least three players drafted.

Ertz said he is excited about playing for Philadelphia. “My mom and dad were both born in Pennsylvania, so it feels like this very cool circle of life. I can’t stop thinking about how the Pac-12 gave me my start, and now I will be able to keep playing for a coach that I respected since I started at Stanford. Thank you all for your support,” Ertz said.

“I’m beyond excited right now. I’m looking forward to being a part of the Falcons organization,” said Toilolo. “I can’t wait to get out there to Atlanta, get to work and be a part of this team.”

For his part, Taylor called it a blessing to be a part of the Arizona Cardinals’ organization. “This is the perfect situation for me. I want to thank the Stanford family for the last four years, all of their support and best wishes.”

In addition, six players will get their chance to play professionally after being signed to free agent or rookie minicamp contracts with NFL teams.

Read more on gostanford.com.

Harold Hwang wins top Korean Award

April 30th, 2013

 

Harold Hwang

HAROLD Y. HWANG, professor of applied physics and photon science at Stanford and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has won the 2013 Ho-Am Award in Science, one of five annual awards often referred to as the Korean equivalent of the Nobel prizes.

The award – which consists of a 6-ounce gold medal, a laureate diploma and a cash prize of 300 million Korean won (about $265,000) – will be presented May 31 in Seoul. Recipients also are scheduled to give commemorative lectures at major universities, academies and high schools across Korea.

Hwang is an expert in creating complex oxide materials with extraordinary electronic and magnetic properties, including superconductivity. Made of alternating atomic layers of metals and oxygen, these materials are the focus of intense worldwide research seeking to design new combinations for electronics, sensing and energy applications.

“Complex oxides are today where semiconductors were early in the 20th century, when crystal radios were state of the art,” Hwang said. “If you put various semiconductors together, you can make fantastic devices just because the semiconductor interface can range from an insulator to a good conductor. With complex oxides, however, you can add superconductivity, magnetism, ferroelectricity and many other properties. Imagine the possibilities.”

The key, he said, is determining the principles that give each atomic arrangement its special behavior. Hwang and colleagues use SLAC’s light sources to probe the electronic behavior of these materials. His team is creating a chamber that will enable researchers to create complex materials layer by layer and measure their properties at the same time.

The Ho-Am Prize was established by Samsung in 1990 to honor its founding chairman, the late Byung-Chull Lee. “Ho-Am” was Lee’s pen name. Awards are given each year in the categories of science, engineering, medicine, arts and community service. In addition, a Ho-Am Prize in Mass Communication was awarded from 1991 to 1994 and in 1996.

A total of 177 people have received Ho-Am prizes, including two Stanford professors: THOMAS LEE (2011, engineering) and STUART K. KIM (2004, medicine).

Ho-Am Prizes are awarded to people of Korean origin. (The prize for community service, however, can also be awarded to non-Koreans who made outstanding contributions to Korea and Koreans at home and abroad.) Hwang’s parents are from Korea, and came to Southern California for graduate school. He said he’s descended from a Chinese merchant who moved to the Korean peninsula about a thousand years ago.

—MIKE ROSS, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Al Gore dedicates bench in memory of Stephen Schneider

April 25th, 2013

Former Vice President AL GORE was on campus Tuesday to remember a friend. Gore spoke at a private ceremony dedicating a stone bench in the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden in memory of renowned climate scientist STEPHEN SCHNEIDER, a former Stanford biology professor and senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, who died in 2010. Gore also spoke later that day, giving the inaugural Stephen H. Schneider Memorial Lecture.

Schneider and Gore worked together on several projects and shared, along with Schneider’s colleagues on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”

Before Gore spoke, Schneider’s widow, TERRY ROOT, a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute and frequent scientific collaborator with Schneider, thanked Schneider’s friends.

A bench dedicated to Stephen H. Schneider sits in the Papua New Guinea Sculpture Garden. An engraving reads, ''Teach your children well.'' At right, Terry Root, Schneider's widow and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, leaves a stone at the bench.

“I promised I wasn’t going to cry,” she said through the onset of tears, throwing up her arms. Then, the Rev. Canon SALLY G. BINGHAM, president of climate change advocacy group Interfaith Power and Light, compared Schneider to Old Testament prophets. “He raged on about drought, fires, floods, rising seas with the spread of disease unless we changed our ways.” Although Schneider was “not a believer,” Bingham said, he was among a small number of scientists willing to include religion in the climate change dialogue and to emphasize the moral issues involved.

“He was a force of nature,” Gore said of Schneider. “He was sui generis.” Schneider inspired others, Gore noted, with “his passion, his commitment, his stamina, his relentless desire to keep working for the truth and to get the message out.”

Gore recalled first seeing Schneider on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in the mid-1970s, when climate change had barely made it into the American consciousness. Schneider’s work to raise awareness of the issue was “awe inspiring,” Gore said. “There are very few people in history as successful as Steve was in helping to protect that only home we have ever known.”

After Gore’s comments, Stanford Woods Institute Co-Director JEFF KOSEFF wrapped up the proceedings. He called Schneider a “mensch,” a Yiddish term that Koseff translated as “a person you want to be around because he or she makes you feel genuine and whole. A mensch makes you feel good about yourself and what you do, lifts up those around him or her. A mensch inspires [people] to do good, to heal the world.”

Koseff paused to imagine Schneider asking him if he could come up with a slogan for the day’s event. “I said, ‘Yes, I can, Steve. We’re dedicating a bench for a mensch.’”

Watch a video montage of Schneider discussing climate change.

—ROB JORDAN, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

President Hennessy receives the inaugural Tall Tree Global Impact Award

April 24th, 2013

When it was time for the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce and the Palo Alto Weekly to honor outstanding local individuals and organizations with the 2013 Tall Tree Awards, they decided to add another prize to this year’s roster — the Global Impact Award. Stanford President JOHN HENNESSY was selected as its first recipient.

“I am deeply honored to be the first recipient of the Tall Tree Global Impact Award,” Hennessy said at a celebration of the awardees earlier this month. He noted that El Palo Alto, “the tall tree,” is at the center of both the Stanford seal and the City of Palo Alto’s seal.

During his acceptance remarks, Hennessy recognized all of the “incredible people” he’s worked with, particularly faculty and staff, “who are so dedicated to our students.”

“My career and my interests and my family have all been nurtured by this community over the years,” Hennessy continued. “Of course, living in this area I breathed the atmosphere of entrepreneurism that is everywhere and learned about thinking big, swallowing that potion that says you really can change the world and do something remarkable that affects people.

“The symbiotic relationship between the community, the university and the valley has been absolutely crucial to make that happen. One of the reasons we’ve succeeded is not only this inventive atmosphere that exists at the university, but because this is an absolutely delightful place to live. And that’s one of the things that’s really helped us recruit the best and brightest people from around the world.”

Hennessy said that when he and his wife, Andrea, first came to the area in 1977, it was not the world’s technological hub as it is today.

“When I first came, if you wanted to go talk to the movers and shakers in the computer industry, you had to get on a plane and fly to Boston or fly to New York. Now, they all fly here to visit us,” he said.

He reminded the attendees that there remains work to be done in order to ensure that the greater Palo Alto area continues to hold on to its core values: excellence in education; maintaining a vibrant arts community; building a state-of-the-art hospital; and being role models in environmental sustainability.

“I look forward to working with all of you to make sure that our community remains a leader not only in innovation, but also in the quality of life we offer the people who live here,” Hennessy concluded.

Since 1980, the Tall Tree Awards have recognized individuals and organizations that have made “bold and significant contributions to the heart of Palo Alto, while extending influence beyond our local community.”

In addition to the Global Impact Award (which will be awarded periodically, not annually), the 2013 recipients of the annual Tall Tree Awards are:

Outstanding Business: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati

Outstanding Nonprofit Organization: Breast Cancer Connections

Outstanding Citizen: RAY BACCHETTI, a former vice president for planning and management at Stanford

Outstanding Professional: BECKY BEACOM, health educator for Palo Alto Medical Foundation

—ELAINE RAY

Alumna Sharon Olds wins Pulitzer for poetry

April 23rd, 2013

 

(AP Photo/Jim Cole)

SHARON OLDS won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry April 15 for Stag’s Leap. The book has been called an unflinching response to the collapse of her marriage of 32 years, a mix of grief and confusion that shows in the collection’s namesake poem:

“When anyone escapes, my heart / leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, / I am half on the side of the leaver.”

Olds, who graduated from Stanford in 1964, teaches at New York University and is former poet laureate of New York. She penned most of Stag’s Leap in the late 1990s, in the years after her divorce. “I wrote these poems the way I always write, which is immediately,” she told the Concord Monitor. “Only then do I have the feeling that is so full in me that it feels the need to spill over into an expression of itself.”

But she held off publishing these poems for more than a decade, promising her grown children she’d allow time for the changes to absorb. She said she never imagined the kind of reception that lay in store for them.

“It was beyond unexpected,” she told the Huffington Post. “There are things we think won’t happen to us – that are outside our picture of ourselves.”

(AP Photo/Alfred A. Knopf, Michael Lionstar)

Stag’s Leap is her 12th collection. Her first, Satan Says, was published in 1980, when she was 37, a delayed start she attributes to earlier resistance from male editors. Her first submitted poem to a magazine got a reception hardly imaginable today. “They told me: ‘This is a literary magazine. If you wish to write about this sort of subject, may we suggest the Ladies’ Home Journal. The true subjects of poetry are … male subjects, not your children,’” Olds told The Guardian.

Olds has won numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Prior to the Pulitzer, Stag’s Leap won the T.S. Eliot Prize for the best collection of verse published in Britain and Ireland in 2012.

In awarding that prize, CAROL ANN DUFFY, chair of the judging panel, said: “This was the book of her career. There is a grace and chivalry in her grief that marks her out as being a world-class poet.”

—SAM SCOTT, Stanford magazine

 

Stanford ingenuity on display at 2013 Cool Product Expo

April 22nd, 2013

Earlier this month, hundreds of people attended the Cool Product Expo, hosted annually by the Graduate School of Business (GSB). The event, held at the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, showcased more than 40 companies and products at the cutting edge of technology and design.

“We selected these based on outstanding innovation in either technology, manufacturing or design,” said first-year MBA student DANIEL CHEN, one of six GSB students who organized the event. Chen and his classmates anticipate that these products, from foldable kayaks to electric skateboards to telepresence robots, are items that will top wish lists in 2013.

There were several clever gizmos from startups founded by Stanford students, graduates or faculty.

Boosted Boardsoffers the world’s lightest electric vehicle, a battery-powered skateboard that was born on campus by co-founders

JOHN ULMEN, SANJAY DASTOOR and MATTHEW TRAN. The battery-powered motor takes the board up to 20 mph and runs about 6 miles on a single charge. Regenerative brakes top off the battery as you go, or the plug-in battery recharges in about an hour. Supported in part by a strong KickStarter campaign, the company will ship out the first production boards in the coming months.

Another electric vehicle startup, Faraday Bicycles, was founded by Stanford grad ADAM VOLLMER. While working at IDEO, Vollmer began designing the vintage European courier-style electric bike as a way to attract people to commuting by bicycle. Vollmer refined the design with the help of ANDREW TAYLOR, a graduate of Stanford’s product design program and the company’s lead mechanical engineer. The plug-in bicycle provides 20 miles of pedal-assisted power, making climbing even San Francisco’s hills a breeze.

The booth for Instacube, a photo-sharing device from a company co-founded by BILL BURNETT, the executive director of the Stanford Design Program and a consulting assistant professor, and Stanford grad ANDY BUTLER, also drew a large crowd. The digital picture frame-like device displays a customizable photostream of content uploaded to various social networks by you or your friends. The touchscreen frame has potential outside of the home, too: Chef JAMIE OLIVER will soon be deploying the device on tabletops in his restaurants to serve as a sort of “digital sommelier” to help diners pair foods and wines.

Here’s a quick snapshot of other companies with strong ties to Stanford that were on hand at this year’s Cool Product Expo.

Freebord, another skateboard company, offers boards with wheels attached to swiveling axles, allowing for smooth free-ride steering.

Revolights has developed futuristic lighting solutions for bicycle wheels to make riders more visible at night, and to make bikes look incredibly cool.

Motrr offers a rotating platform designed to make video-conferencing with iPhones a smoother experience.

Clean Bottle, the company that launched a sports water bottle that opens on both ends for easier scrubbing, showed off the latest addition to its lineup, an aluminum bottle called The Square.

Artiphany shared a new augmented reality greeting card that can be programmed with personalized messages.

Radian, by Alpine Labs, is an iPhone- and Android-enabled tripod attachment that makes time-lapse photography a cinch.

Stealth HD presented a system that stitches together video from multiple cameras into a seamless high-resolution panoramic video.

Sifteo demonstrated its tiny intelligent videogame cubes, which have been a hit among the gaming community.

Tegu showcased the company’s children’s wooden building blocks, which are made from sustainable materials and snap together with magnets.

Tavis Smiley to moderate panel on the ‘State of Black America’

April 17th, 2013

Television host and author TAVIS SMILEY will be the moderator of a panel titled “The State of Black America 150 Years After the Emancipation Proclamation: Honoring the Past, Defining the Future.” The event, which is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday, April 18, in CEMEX Auditorium at the Knight Management Center, is free and open to the public.

The discussion, sponsored by the Program in African and African American Studies (AAAS), is this year’s St. Clair Drake Memorial Lecture.

Panelists are:

ARNETHA BALL, professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and director of AAAS;

RALPH RICHARD BANKS, professor at Stanford Law School;

ALLYSON HOBBS, assistant professor of history at Stanford;

MARC LAMONT HILL, associate professor, Teachers College, Columbia University;

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, professor of history, University of California–Los Angeles;

NA’ILAH NASIR, associate professor and chair of African American Studies, University of California–Berkeley.

The lecture series is dedicated to the memory of the late ST. CLAIR DRAKE, renowned professor of sociology and anthropology, an early researcher on black Americans. Drake also was the founding director of Stanford’s Program in African and African American Studies. He died in 1990.