Archive for the ‘Heard on Campus’ Category

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

Expert advice on talking to kids about violence

April 16th, 2013

Victor Carrion

Ubiquitous news reports of incidents like yesterday’s explosions at the Boston Marathon and the Newtown, Conn., shootings in December present a challenge for parents.

VICTOR CARRION, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital (LPCH) who has conducted extensive research on childhood trauma, says honest, age-appropriate communication with children is one of the most important elements of helping youngsters handle news of traumatic events.

In the following Q&A reprinted from the LPCH website, Carrion offers several suggestions for parents to help their kids process difficult news.

What are the potential short-term psychological effects on school-age children hearing or seeing information about these events?

The short-term effects include children becoming concerned about their safety or the safety of their family. In addition, children who are closer in terms of proximity to the event will be at increased risk for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. However, because the images in the media are now so prevalent, the psychological effect on the child can be the same as if the child were at the scene of the incident. We must protect children by limiting their exposure to these images.

What about the long-term psychological impacts?

For some children—if they are not treated via an assessment and psychosocial therapy—their academic and social life will be impacted. Difficulty paying attention, managing emotional responses and problems with memory are common symptoms children may experience.

What are some of the early warning signs of childhood trauma for parents to look out for?

Irritability, a greater susceptibility to crying, and difficulty with sleep are among the symptoms that should raise a red flag if they persist longer than a month. Younger children may become clingier and experience nightmares and distressing or bad dreams. Children may regress in some behaviors—such as bedwetting or sucking their thumb—and you may hear them complaining more about a stomachache or headache.

What is your recommendation for parents on how to talk to their children about disturbing events and images they witness or hear about?

Encourage discussion with your children, but do not force it. Let them know that it’s OK to be fearful or angry or sad. It’s also very important to give the message, “You are protected. You are safe.” In the event you notice warning signs in your children’s behavior, I would recommend taking them to their pediatrician or mental health specialist to obtain a consultation.

Learn more about Victor Carrion, MD, and his research interests.

 

 

From the TEDxStanford archives: Professor Sherry Wren on global health

April 4th, 2013

At last year’s TEDxStanford conference, SHERRY WREN, professor of surgery, gave a talk explaining the importance of surgery in global health care. In a video of that talk, recently posted on the Medical School’s news website, Wren stresses the need to reject the current dogma that surgery is not cost effective or part of basic health.

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share ideas that spark deep discussion and connection.

TEDxStanford 2013 is scheduled for Saturday, May 11, and tickets go on sale at 9 a.m. Monday, April 8. In the meantime, watch Wren’s 2012 talk, in which she offers some staggering statistics about surgery and global health.

Stanford synchronized swimming team captures seventh collegiate national title

March 27th, 2013

 

The Stanford synchronized swimming team won its seventh Collegiate National title, and first since 2008, on Saturday.

“I could not be more proud of the Stanford synchro team today,” said head coach SARA LOWE. “The girls have worked so hard all year, and it was so exciting to see all of their hard work pay off and culminate in a national championship.”

Lowe was a member of the Cardinal squads that won four consecutive U.S. Collegiate National championships from 2005 to 2008. Stanford also won the title in 1998 and 1999.

The Cardinal, which finished fourth last year, swept the team, trio and duet finals March 23 to claim the title in its home pool at the Avery Aquatics Center.

Stanford dominated the team final as MADISON CROCKER, MORGAN FULLER, LEIGH HALDEMAN, MARIYA KOROLEVA, MICHELLE MOORE, OLIVIA MORGAN and EVELYNA WANG scored a 91.075. Ohio State took second with an 89.362.

Read the full story on the Athletics website.

 

Rachel Maddow at Stanford, now on video

March 22nd, 2013

We know you have busy lives, so it’s rare that we post a long-form video in the Dish. But we will make an exception for RACHEL MADDOW, Stanford alum, author and MSNBC talk show host. On March 16, Maddow returned to her alma mater to give a talk at Memorial Auditorium. In the video, she’s introduced by ROB REICH, associate professor of political science and faculty director of the Undergraduate Program in Ethics in Society. For years, Reich has required ethics students to read Maddow’s honors thesis on the dehumanization of HIV/AIDS victims, but this is the first time they had met.

Here’s Maddow in her own words.

Stanford bioengineer Covert receives $1.5 million Distinguished Investigator grant

March 19th, 2013

MARKUS COVERT, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, has been awarded a $1.5 million Distinguished Investigator exploratory grant from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Covert was one of five recipients of this year’s award, which, according to the foundation, “aims to unlock fundamental questions in biology.”

Covert’s research involves building complex computer models of living organisms. Last year, he announced completion of the world’s first whole-cell computer model of a simple bacterium. The three-year Allen grant will support Covert’s ongoing work to develop models of cells of increasing complexity, including human cells.

“Recently, our lab built a computer model that takes every single gene into account for a single cell, but we still have a long way to go before this technology is ready to apply to complex organisms,” said Covert, who works in the Department of Bioengineering, a joint effort of the School of Engineering and the School of Medicine. “The Allen Foundation’s generous award will enable us to solve some of the most critical challenges posed by more complicated cells.”

Read the full announcement on the Stanford Engineering website or watch this video, in which Covert talks about his work.

Stanford Humanities Center hosts annual Publication Celebration

March 14th, 2013

Jesse Rodin, assistant professor of music, had two publications on display at Monday's Publication Celebration. They were "Josquin's Rome: Hearing and Composing in the Sistine Chapel" and an audio CD of 15th-century choral music. He is photographed with his wife, Daphna Davidson, Credit: Steve Castillo

Guests from across campus gathered at the Stanford Humanities Center March 11 to join the 20th Annual Publication Celebration.

Held each spring, the event recognizes the broad scope of work produced by Stanford humanities scholars in the past year.

The 79 publications from 2012 ranged from a novel about life in North Korea and a history of medieval poetry to audio recordings of the Stanford Chamber Chorale and a philosopher’s guide to procrastination.

The works on display “bring meaning into the world,” said DEBRA SATZ, the senior associate dean for the humanities and arts in the School of Humanities and Sciences. The celebration is one of her favorite occasions at Stanford, she added.

Noting the array of languages represented in the titles – among them Spanish and Catalan, Korean, German and French – Satz commented that the works represented all “bring new ways of seeing ourselves in others.”

The varied publications represent a wide range of research interests. Some look to the past, presenting research about ancient Roman economics, music performance in the Sistine Chapel during the 15th century and a survey of poetry across the globe. Others focus on contemporary issues such as the experiences of evangelical Christians in the United States, reading in the digital age and a study of Russia’s criminal justice system.

Humanities Center Director ARON RODRIGUE, a professor of history, acknowledged the presence of guests who were at the very first celebration 20 years ago, when it was called the “Book Celebration.” The name was changed in recent years to reflect the wide array of media submitted by scholars.

Rodrigue, who will be stepping down this year after five years of leading the Stanford Humanities Center, said that his role “at the heart of the humanist enterprise” has been “both edifying and humbling.”

—VERONICA MARIAN, The Humanities at Stanford

 

Let’s talk about climate change

March 1st, 2013

Communicating Science and the Environment, a course in the Program on Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), seeks to educate future environmental communicators while providing material for California GOV. JERRY BROWN’s effort to engage the public on climate change and other environmental issues. Students in the winter quarter sophomore course recently wrapped up a video project in which they interviewed prominent scientists around the country – all of them fellows with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment’s Leopold Leadership Program – about urgent environmental issues. The videos will soon be posted on the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research website.

“We are struggling with how do we talk about climate change,” KEN ALEX, a senior policy adviser to the governor, said during a recent class session. “Unless your generation and the rest of us get our act together, we’re in big trouble.”

In the syllabus, instructor and PWR Lecturer CAROLYN ROSS asks, “How can ‘translators of science’ most effectively communicate complicated science to the public?” The students’ answers, in the form of 2-minute videos, ranged from stunning imagery and bracing dialogue to humorous hand-drawn animations and specially composed music.

“We have no choice but to deal with it,” former Woods Social Science Research Fellow SUSI MOSER says of climate change in one video. Moser likens the situation to the Titanic – too much momentum in the wrong direction. “We’ll at least scrape the iceberg in a really bad way.” Still, Moser and the other scientists interviewed repeatedly point the way to solutions from composting to price-competitive, desirable low-emissions products.

For students JANHAVI VARTAK and BEN ROSELLINI, the videos are messages of hope in an often doom-and-gloom media landscape. “It helped me with my feeling of helplessness,” Vartak said. “We’re actually doing something with this,” Rosellini added. “Solutions don’t have to be these huge drastic things that no one wants to do,” fellow classmate FRANCES BALL said. Alex concurred, telling the students, “Yes, there is hope, and I’m glad you’re thinking in that way.”

After a recent class, Alex said he could envision the students’ videos featured on a YouTube channel or on TED-Ed, an online educational effort run by TED. “Everyone we’ve talked to has thought about it, or thinks it’s a great idea.”

—ROB JORDAN, Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Steve Weitzman reflects on what matters to him and why

February 21st, 2013
Weitzman

Steve Weitzman

There’s a certain irony to STEVE WEITZMAN‘s life and work. The religious studies professor is Jewish, specializes in Jewish literature, religion and culture, directs the Taube Center for Jewish Studies, is married to a rabbi and is raising his children in the Jewish tradition.

But he wouldn’t actually call himself religious.

Weitzman, who came to Stanford from Indiana University in 2009, was the first speaker in the recently reinvigorated “What Matters to Me and Why?” noontime speaker series. The popular series, which has been on temporary hiatus, asks campus speakers to reflect on what matters to them in their lives and work.

“I don’t have a sense of the divine,” Weitzman told an audience recently assembled in the Center for Inter-Religious Community, Learning and Experiences in Old Union. “Religion for me is something that other people seem to have, but I don’t.”

Nevertheless, Weitzman said he’s pretty clear about what matters to him: other people. Better understanding the complexity of people in all their depth and mystery is what drives him. Questions about life’s purpose particularly obsessed Weitzman as a teenager. But that has occupied little of his time since – at least until he was asked to speak on the subject.

“It’s an unbelievably disruptive question!” he said to appreciative laughter.

During his talk, Weitzman described his struggles to understand both himself and others and to avoid viewing individuals only as “instruments” in his life. People are infinitely more interesting than what they reveal on the surface, he said. So, the struggle to understand others led him to a life of scholarship, then to humanities scholarship in particular, then to religious studies and finally to ancient history. He traced the progression for the audience.

Weitzman described his youth in a Los Angeles suburb as “very, very boring,” with life seemingly revolving around a shopping mall. It was a comfortable life, he remembered, but one without choices or the freedom to pursue an unexpected life, including that of a scholar.

Reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the works of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius helped Weitzman realize that scholarship, especially in the humanities, could lead to a better understanding of others.

“Scholarship is a form of liberation, allowing you to transcend your circumstances,” he said.

His interest in ancient history was spurred by the 1980s excavation of a Native American archaeological site – called the Lost Village of Encino – in his community. The discovery prompted him to look for the possibility of history hidden beneath the surface of everyday life.

“I had an epiphany that something must have happened before this suburb was born,” he said. “A lot of what I try to do today is at the intersection of the study of the ancient world and our current experience.”

That epiphany turned Weitzman to the humanities with its emphasis on the pursuit of meaning because he saw in such scholarship “a way to reach beyond the surface into the depths.” Religious studies, given its universality among all cultures, he said, became a way to “embrace the complexity of human life, allowing the study of both the rational and irrational sides of people.” And studying the ancient world, he humorously added, “was as far back as I could get into the human experience.”

It was this search to know that led Weitzman to study King Solomon, a man who supposedly knew everything. Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom was published by Yale University Press in 2011. In that book, Weitzman reviewed how little we actually know about Solomon, but how much his wisdom has influenced Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Weitzman’s next project is a history of biblical miracles. He seeks to better understand how miraculous religious experiences reflected the world in which they occurred and affected the lives of witnesses.

But for all the joys of a scholarly life, Weitzman, who is also resident fellow of Roble Hall, said scholarship also presents challenges and frustrations.

“I find that students come with questions such as ‘Is there a God?’ or ‘What is the meaning of life?’ I have to say that I don’t know,” he acknowledged.

He also worries that the pursuit of wisdom as an end in itself – along the lines of Plato or Aristotle – has been lost to the modern world.

“Where is the Socrates in our culture? Some would argue,” he said, “that, in the modern world, wisdom has lost its luster.”

Learn more about “What Matters to Me and Why.”

—KATE CHESLEY

Usua Amanam: High energy on and off the field

February 19th, 2013

USUA AMANAM is one of only a dozen or so undergraduates majoring in Energy Resources Engineering, a department in the School of Earth Sciences that examines energy production and conservation.

The Stanford senior whose interception with two minutes left in the 2013 Rose Bowl Game sealed Stanford’s 20-14 victory over Wisconsin earned hardware as the Defensive Player of the game. But he not only knows how to read a quarterback’s eyes, he knows how to infer the makeup of the subsurface by drilling an exploration well.

Amanam, whose first name is pronounced OOS wah, has a passion for football, and he dreams of playing in the NFL. “I’d love to make millions of dollars running around with a football in my hands,” he laughed.

But he’s been one of the smallest players on every one of his teams since the fourth grade, and at 5’10′ and 176 pounds, he’s a realist.

“There’s a low probability that an NFL career is going to happen for most college football players,” he said. “That’s the reason I chose Stanford. If the football route doesn’t work out, I’ll have a Stanford degree to fall back on.”

Amanam’s sheepskin from ERE will leave him well positioned for a job in the oil and gas industry, which doesn’t typically draw much interest from undergraduates, particularly ones with their eyes on a career in professional football. How is it that it calls to Amanam?

“My family is originally from Nigeria,” explained Amanam, who said his interest in oil was piqued by a 2007 article in National Geographic called “Curse of the Black Gold.”

“Oil was found in Nigeria in the late 1950s and the 1960s,” Amanam said, “and it was a way for a developing country like Nigeria to become truly relevant in the world today. The National Geographic writer basically detailed what Nigeria has gone through in terms of the oil industry and how it has caused more trouble and more strife than the good it was supposed to. Reading that article and understanding how much a properly working petroleum industry could really jump-start a country economically and socially is what attracted me to ERE.”

RICHARD NEVLE, director of undergraduate programs for the School of Earth Sciences, has known Amanam since both were at Bellarmine Prep in San Jose – Nevle as a science teacher and Amanam as an honors student.

“Usua was a rock star as a high school football player, a superstar,” Nevle said. “He has legs that are steel springs and he’s a very gifted sprinter.”

Stanford’s head football coach, David Shaw, was the team’s offensive coordinator when the Cardinal recruited Amanam.

“We get lots of mail and email about high school players, but we got a lot about Usua in particular,” Shaw said. “That he was bright and engaging as a student and that he was a dynamic football player as well. Everyone said he was the kind of kid who should go to Stanford.”

ROLAND HORNE, professor of energy resources engineering, says that after a sharp drop in oil prices in the mid-1980s and the massive Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound in 1989, undergraduate interest in petroleum engineering evaporated. Over one 10-year stretch, Stanford did not award a single bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering.

In 2006, the School of Earth Sciences changed the name of its Department of Petroleum Engineering to Energy Resources Engineering, reflecting its expansion into research and embracing additional forms of energy, such as geothermal and renewables; a changing energy landscape; and society’s changing energy needs and environmental concerns.

“It sounds cliché,” Amanam said, “but what really interested me about ERE is I’ve always wanted to do something that carried a lot of weight and meant something, to do something that could change the world. My sophomore year, I took a class called Energy 101 from my current adviser, energy resources engineering Professor TONY KOVSCEK. It sparked my interest in understanding how the oil and gas industry affects everything we do in our life, socially, economically and culturally. It’s the linchpin to the world we live in today.”

Amanam’s passion for his academic calling is not lost on others. “I go to a lot of events to which I bring students as emissaries,” Nevle said. “Usua is very effective at communicating what the ERE major has to offer students in a personal and compelling way. He has a charisma about him, a stage presence. When he speaks, people want to listen.”

You can hear Amanam in his own words in a video produced in a partnership between the School of Earth Sciences and Athletics.

Read BRUCE ANDERSON‘s full profile of Amanam on the School of Earth Sciences website.