When Stanford embarked on its homegrown TEDxStanford effort in May, the objective was to “share important Stanford discoveries and innovations with the world far beyond campus,” says MELINDA SACKS, director of media initiatives in the Office of the Vice President for Public Affairs. That plan has materialized with the posting of one of the May 19 event’s videos on TED.com. The video features J. CHRISTIAN GERDES, associate professor of mechanical engineering and a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy, discussing the autonomous car.
“The posting of Professor Chris Gerdes’ talk on TED.com will spread this breakthrough work to a tremendous global audience. We look forward to more collaboration between Stanford and TED,” says Sacks.
PETER SAUER, a co-captain and starter on the 1998 Stanford Final Four basketball team, collapsed and died Sunday night after he fell and hit his head on the concrete court during a pickup basketball game in White Plains, N.Y. He was 35.
The outgoing Sauer, who played four seasons for the Cardinal and graduated with an economics degree in 1999, was part of a five-man recruiting class that played in the NCAA Tournament four consecutive years and won the Pac-10 title in 1999.
“Everyone in the Stanford community is deeply saddened by the passing of Peter Sauer,” said JOHNNY DAWKINS, Stanford’s Anne and Tony Joseph Director of Men’s Basketball. “Peter was a tremendous individual and a devoted husband and father. He was very passionate about Stanford and our basketball program. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his wife, Amanda, and their three children.”
Sauer was in attendance during Stanford’s NIT championship run at Madison Square Garden in March, and prior to one of the games watched practice before speaking briefly to the team. Sauer, a former Bank of America executive, led an early-morning tour of the bank’s corporate headquarters the following day.
“Meeting him for the first time, you could easily see how invested he was in this program and, really, all of Stanford athletics,” said Dawkins. “Peter truly embodied what it meant to be a Stanford student-athlete. He spoke to our guys about taking full advantage of their opportunities and how attending Stanford is a lifetime decision.”
In the video below, Sauer talked about how the NIT tournament was a good building block for the Cardinal men’s basketball program.
MISLA BARCO, a high school Spanish teacher at East Palo Alto Academy, was immediately suspicious when she was asked to be at Vice Principal JEFFREY CAMARILLO‘s office for a recruitment meeting at 7:30 a.m.
“He kept texting me, ‘Don’t be late. Don’t be late,’” Barco recalled. “I was thinking, this isn’t for recruitment. I was so worried.”
The nine-year veteran of the academy, a charter school operated by Stanford’s School of Education, was, indeed, in for a surprise.
When she arrived at Camarillo’s office, she was handed the phone.
“I wondered if I was in trouble. I took the phone and this person said, ‘Hi Misla.’ I said, ‘Hi,’” she recounted. “‘This is ARNE DUNCAN, secretary of education. Do you know who I am?’”
Barco said she was shocked and humbled that Duncan took time to speak with her.
The call came during Teacher Appreciation Week in May. As part of the celebrations honoring educators, Duncan chose four teachers to personally call and thank. Hundreds of teachers were nominated from around the country.
“I’m part of a great team of teachers that every day come and do a wonderful job,” Barco said. “I’m happy for the school because it’s a great recognition for the program. It’s a great recognition of the work that Stanford is doing to support the high school.”
East Palo Alto Academy opened in 2001 as a joint project of Stanford, a Bay Area nonprofit organization and the Ravenswood School District.
Stanford was invited by the district to develop a charter school that would serve East Palo Alto, which had been without a high school since 1976, when its community school was closed through a district-wide desegregation plan. East Palo Alto students were dropping out or not graduating at alarming rates.
Stanford assumed full responsibility for the high school in 2005. It now has about 250 students in grades 9-12, and a graduation rate of 91 percent. Many have gone on to four-year colleges and most have been admitted to some kind of post-secondary education – a major accomplishment since many of the students’ parents never graduated high school.
Beginning in the fall, the school will be chartered by the Sequoia Union High School District.
Stanford professors work closely with Academy teachers, and some science laboratory studies take place on the Stanford campus, as does graduation.
“It makes me very happy and very proud that I am part of this amazing experience,” Barco said. “We are changing people’s lives.”
On May 19 the university hosted TEDxStanford, a daylong event featuring more than two dozen presentations and performances. Topics ranged from early cancer detection to the consequences of helicopter parenting and questions about what makes music.
If you were not among the 600 or so guests who attended, or if you’d like to experience some of those illuminating moments again, videos of the presentations and performances will be posted weekly on the TEDxStanford website. Many of them also will be featured here in The Dish.
First up are videos that feature two legendary Stanford personalities: JULIE LYTHCOTT-HAIMS, who left Stanford just last month after serving as the university’s first-ever dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising, and MARK APPLEBAUM, associate professor of music. Applebaum also is an accomplished jazz pianist and composer. He builds electro-acoustic sound sculptures out of hardware and found objects for use as compositional and improvisational tools.
In Lythcott-Haims’ presentation, she talks about what she calls “the padded cell of childhood” constructed by parents afraid to allow their children to make mistakes or fail.
Applebaum plays musical pieces including Beethoven and his own compositions. His instruments are the piano as well as his sound sculptures. His question to the audience is, “Is it music?”
The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) is honoring Harvard Professor MARTIN S. FELDSTEIN for his contributions to economics.
Feldstein, who will receive the second SIEPR Prize for Contributions to Economic Policy at an event this fall, is also president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
Initial funding for the award came from GEORGE P. SHULTZ, former U.S. secretary of treasury, labor and state, and a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution. Shultz also played an important role in the creation of SIEPR and serves on the prize selection committee.
The prize recognizes those who have made outstanding lifetime contributions to improving the design and conduct of economic policy in the United States or abroad.
“I think Marty is a perfect choice for this prize,” said JOHN SHOVEN, director of SIEPR. “He led the profession in analyzing Social Security, he was one of the first economists to focus on health policy, and he was ahead of the curve in thinking about how changing demographics are impacting the economy.”
Shoven also praised Feldstein for his ideas on how to improve the functioning of the economy and said Feldstein “warned early on of the economic costs of large budget deficits.”
Feldstein, a graduate of Harvard College and Oxford University, began teaching at Harvard in 1967.
Stanford has earned a 2012 Gold rating from the Association of Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) for its overall sustainability performance, according to FAHMIDA AHMED, director of the Office of Sustainability.
According to Ahmed, Stanford is one of only 32 institutions out of AASHE’s 1,000 members to earn the Gold rating.
AASHE sponsors the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS), which is a transparent, self-reporting framework for colleges and universities to measure sustainability performance. STARS was developed with the cooperation of the higher education community. It includes such broad categories as education and research; operations; planning, administration and engagement; and innovation.
View Stanford’s AASHE report card at this website.
Fahmida Ahmed
In addition, Ahmed, who joined Stanford in 2008, was recently awarded a Private College/University Sustainability Champion Award at the 2012 California Higher Education Sustainability Conference. The award recognizes “an individual who has been a role model to their peers around the state; has promoted sustainability throughout their campus; achieved results; and who truly embodies the term ‘leader.’”
Ahmed leads the Office of Sustainability and the campus program Sustainable Stanford. She co-chairs the Sustainability Working Group, connects the Sustainability Working Teams, coordinates implementation of sustainability projects, supports Stanford’s long-term resource infrastructure planning and manages the office’s communications and evaluation programs.
Some of those sustainability efforts were recently highlighted in an article in The Guardian.
ROBERT TIBSHIRANI, a professor of statistics and of health research and policy at Stanford, has been named the winner of the Statistical Society of Canada’s highest honor – the SSC Gold Medal. The award, which recognizes the contributions of Canadian statisticians, noted the researcher’s “broad and important contributions to genetics, medicine, public health, traffic safety and other scientific areas.”
A world-renowned innovator in the field of statistics, Tibshirani is particularly well known for his contributions to machine learning and the analysis of biological and health data. His many advances include the “lasso” method and generalized additive modeling, both of which are now standard approaches in data fitting, and significance analysis of microarrays, used by biologists to evaluate changes in gene expression levels.
Tibshirani currently conducts research on high-dimensional data, an area with special relevance to the data-swamped field of computational biology, and develops genomics and proteomics software packages.
The citation also recognized the researcher’s educational contributions. His textbooks, which include Generalized Additive Models,An Introduction to the Bootstrap and The Elements of Statistical Learning, are considered standard introductions to the field.
Tibshirani will deliver the Gold Medal Address at the society’s 2013 annual meeting.
