Defining the next era
2015 – 2025
Dean Jennifer Widom, center, with new graduate students at the Dean’s Welcome event, September 2024. | Saul Bromberger/Stanford Engineering.
by Andrew Myers
Our school’s legacy of innovation and crossdisciplinary collaboration, spanning from the birth of Silicon Valley to groundbreaking advancements in human health, sets us apart and paves the way for tremendous impact."
— Dean Jennifer Widom, 2023
2015 – 2025
Dean Persis Drell reported in a 2015 assessment that the School of Engineering was in “remarkable” shape—blessed with stunning new facilities, incredible faculty, and amazing students. Such accomplishments should be acknowledged and not taken for granted, she said, but the school’s real focus should be on the future. Drell announced that she had appointed a faculty committee, co-led by then–Senior Associate Dean Jennifer Widom and Arun Majumdar, professor of mechanical engineering, to plot what that future would look like. (1)
“If you want to sum up our committee’s work in two words, they would be ‘enabling impact,’ ” Widom said. The work should begin at home, in greater collaboration with other Stanford schools, said Majumdar, but not exclusively. “We need a way to reach outside Stanford, perhaps outside of academia,” he said, “to bring the brightest minds together in teams to focus on the toughest challenges.” (2)(3)
SoE-Future, as the planning process became known, would lead to the establishment of a new research funding program to drive ever-broader interdisciplinary research, dubbed the “Catalyst for Collaborative Solutions,” and would suggest innovative ways to educate a new generation of engineering students, among many other recommendations across research, education, and culture.
A 3D bioprinter in Mark Skylar-Scott’s lab prints a sample of heart tissue, 2022. | Andrew Brodhead/Stanford University Communications.
The tenth dean
Persis Drell’s accomplishments as dean made a strong impression outside the school. In November 2016, just two years into her deanship, Drell was appointed provost, the university’s top academic and budgetary role, to be effective in February 2017.(4) Senior Associate Dean Thomas Kenny became interim dean upon Drell’s departure.
In March 2017, Provost Drell named Jennifer Widom the next dean of the School of Engineering. Widom was a professor of computer science and electrical engineering, an expert in data and information management, and a pioneer in online engineering education. On the faculty for twenty-seven years, Widom was a research leader in systems for managing nontraditional types of data, including active databases, semi-structured data, data streams, uncertain data, and data provenance.
Widom had also organized and taught one of Stanford’s first massive open online courses (MOOCs) and was just returning from a sabbatical year spent traveling the world teaching free data-science and design-thinking workshops in more than fifteen developing countries around the globe, including Peru, Tanzania, and Bangladesh. At home, she had been instrumental in shaping the SoE-Future initiative and was fully ready to pick up where Drell had left off to lead the school into the future.
“This is an amazing time to be taking the reins of the School of Engineering, just as the university is embarking on its own long-range planning under a new administration,” Widom said. “While Persis was dean, a number of exciting initiatives were launched as a result of the SoE-Future planning process, and I’m extremely excited to see them through.” (5)
One of these was the initiative to improve diversity at all levels, from undergraduates to faculty, which Widom viewed as having beneficial results across all aspects of the School of Engineering. Diversity in the classroom produces better discussions, she said. In labs, it produces better research and better outcomes. And, with faculty, diversity leads to a wider variety of role models and mentors. (6)
Widom also saw abundant opportunities outside the school and looked to strengthen connections to Stanford’s other schools across the campus, beyond the strong ties it already had with medicine and other sciences. The impacts between technology and society were increasingly important, Widom noted, and building collaborations with the School of Humanities and Sciences and Stanford’s professional schools—Law and Business— were essential. She aimed for collaborations across the university to solve big problems and recognized the strengths that engineering could bring.
Dean Persis Drell (center), Stanford President John Hennessy (right), and Jennifer Widom, before a faculty senate meeting held at the Central Energy Facility, 2015. Members of the senate toured the newly opened energy facility following the meeting. The system eliminates 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually and reduces total campus water use by about 15 percent. | Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service.
SystemX Alliance
In 2015, the School of Engineering rechristened the Center for Integrated Systems—home of research partnerships between academia and industry for thirty years—as the SystemX Alliance. The mission of SystemX was to develop unified hardware, software, and systems to support solutions to the world’s biggest problems in health, energy, and the environment. The alliance would be an ecosystem that enabled these new systems—the data center of tomorrow, the self-driving car, the smartphone with artificial intelligence built in, and next-generation biomedical devices—to become the next breakthrough technologies.
“The model in Silicon Valley since the 1970s has been to make better chips and then see what we can do with them,” said SystemX codirector H.-S. Philip Wong. “It was a bottom-up approach.” SystemX aimed to turn that model on its head: researchers would imagine an outcome and design the technology necessary to make it happen, Wong said, offering the examples of the “electroceutical” devices developed by SystemX researcher Ada Poon to treat diseases electronically or the data communication devices from researcher Jelena Vučković that use photons to transmit data. (7)
Electrical engineer Ada Poon developed the tiny “microstimulator” device to monitor health or deliver therapies deep inside the human body. The implant is one example of how researchers in Stanford’s SystemX Alliance are putting technology to work in new ways. | Linda A. Cicero/Courtesy Poon Lab.
H.-S. Philip Wong, professor of electrical engineering, 2009. Wong served as codirector of the SystemX Alliance, a partnership between academia and industry. SystemX refocused an existing 30-year program to create new materials and power sources, novel hardware and software, and coordination of these technologies through reliable control networks that would be needed for technologies of the future. | Stanford Engineering.
Jelena Vuckovic, professor of electrical engineering, 2023. A pioneer in quantum photonics, Vučković leads the Nanoscale and Quantum Photonics Lab. Her research focuses on developing semiconductor-based photonic systems for quantum and classical information processing and transforming photonics with inverse design techniques. | School of Engineering.
The Future of Everything
In 2017, the School of Engineering embarked on a new outreach venture when it launched The Future of Everything SiriusXM radio show with host Russ Altman, a professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science. The weekly half-hour podcast featured Stanford faculty from engineering, science, and related fields talking about their cutting-edge work.
Russ Altman, professor of bioengineering and of genetics, recording The Future of Everything, 2018. Launched as a SiriusXM radio show in 2017, it later became a podcast, and transitioned to Stanford Engineering in 2022. In 2024, it surpassed 250 episodes. The show explores how the research and technological advances of today will lead to the innovations of tomorrow. Altman has interviewed faculty from across the university about their research. | Amanda Law/School of Engineering.
Altman’s wide-ranging interests and enthusiasm were evident from the start as he engaged his guests in a “living room conversation” style, making their scholarship understandable to a lay audience. Altman noted that his quarter-century teaching career was a great “warm-up” for the job: “Over the years I’ve learned that I’m comfortable making scientific ideas accessible inside and outside the classroom.” (8)
New era in artificial intelligence
Since the inception of the term “artificial intelligence” in the 1950s by soonto-be Stanford faculty member John McCarthy, Stanford had been in the vanguard of the field. As the field blossomed in the 2010s with advances in computing power, vast amounts of data, and new machine-learning techniques, it also saw new challenges and risks. In 2019, the university created the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), placing the focus squarely where it needed to be—on AI’s human impact.
In a telling partnership, HAI was co-led by computer scientist Fei-Fei Li and professor of philosophy and former provost John Etchemendy. The university-wide institute would go on to become a global interdisciplinary hub for AI-related work. At its inception, the institute had already attracted some two hundred participating faculty from Stanford’s seven schools. (9)
A pandemic takes hold
In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the new virus, COVID-19, a pandemic—the first in nearly a century. Stanford University directed most of its seven thousand undergraduates to leave campus and prepare for all classes to be held online. (10)
At the School of Engineering, many faculty members pivoted their current research to study the virus, contributing scholarship and technologies to combat the disease. Alexandria Boehm, an environmental engineer, developed new ways to detect community-wide virus levels by testing wastewater. Mechanical engineer Ellen Kuhl used computer modeling to predict outbreak dynamics and inform control strategies. Bioengineer and physician Russ Altman used AI to examine existing drugs for COVID-19 effectiveness. Peter Glynn and Jose Blanchet in Management Science and Engineering introduced decision-making tools for managing resources at overwhelmed hospitals. Juan Santiago, a mechanical engineer, created a handheld, rapid COVID-detecting diagnostic tool. (11)
The campus reopened to juniors and seniors for the spring quarter in 2021, and by fall all students were back for on-campus instruction.
Code in Place
As shelter-in-place directives were established around the country to slow the spread of the virus, computer science faculty members Chris Piech and Mehran Sahami, with support from senior lecturer Julie Zelenski, created a new avenue to teach computer programming. The initiative, called Code in Place, offered the school’s most popular introductory computer science course, CS106A, for free, online.
Within two months, Code in Place had reached 10,000 students in 120 countries, more than half of whom completed the entire course—in contrast to the less than 5 percent completion rates typical of traditional MOOCs. The secret to its success was its ability to recruit more than 900 “section leaders” from more than 350 cities on six continents, who spoke more than thirty different languages. Students who had never coded before were able to write programs in Python that could model dynamics of the COVID pandemic, analyze DNA, conduct sentiment analysis from Twitter, and create a choose-your-own-adventure film, among other projects. Some students and section leaders started new careers or became professional teachers.
Celebrating the impact of the new course, Code in Place leaders wrote that the novel teaching approach could “change the way we think about teaching and learning at scale.” (12)
Pat Hanrahan, professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, 2020. Hanrahan and his Pixar colleague Edwin Catmull won the 2019 A.M. Turing Award. Hanrahan pioneered software that renders animation with photorealistic lighting, leading to multiple Academy Awards. His technology has been used in full-length motion pictures, video games, and virtual reality. | Andrew Brodhead/Stanford University Communications.
Jeffrey Ullman, professor of computer science, 1987. Ullman was a corecipient of the 2020 A. M. Turing Award with his collaborator, Alfred Aho of Columbia University. The pair did seminal work in compilers and algorithms and influenced the entire field with their popular textbooks. | Ed Souza/Stanford News Service.
Shining recognition for pioneering work
Other bright points shone amid these difficult times. The Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) announced that computer graphics pioneer Patrick Hanrahan, professor of computer science and electrical engineering, and his one-time mentor and Pixar colleague Edwin Catmull would be corecipients of the 2019 A.M. Turing Award. Hanrahan was the driving force behind Pixar’s RenderMan software, which introduced artistic, photorealistic lighting to computer animation. Used to make such films as Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Cars, and many others, RenderMan transformed animated film, video games, virtual reality, and more. The technical work had also garnered Hanrahan three Academy Awards for Science and Engineering and for Technical Achievement.
“Stanford is just an unbelievable atmosphere of interdisciplinary expertise,” Hanrahan said. “We were able to do things that nobody else could do because of that environment.” (13)
The following year, another Turing award recognized Jeffrey Ullman, professor of computer science. Ullman and his collaborator, Alfred Aho of Columbia University, were honored for their influential work on compilers and algorithms and the nine textbooks they coauthored, particularly Principles of Compiler Design, first published in 1977 and known in computer science circles as “the Dragon Book” after its distinctive cover illustration.
“In many ways, those textbooks, particularly the Dragon Book, brought a lot of new people to computer science,” Ullman said. “At some point, kids were proud to be seen walking around campus with that cover under their arm.
“While ACM is recognizing his foundational work in compilers and algorithms,” Dean Widom noted of her colleague, mentor, and friend, “I can assure you his influence extends far beyond those parameters. . . . Jeff is a profoundly influential figure, not only at Stanford but in the field of computer science as a whole.” (14)
Student Shops to PRL: A Legacy of Making
Carpentry shop, early 1900s. | Special Collections & University Archives.
Product Realization Lab, 2023. | Andrew Brodhead/Stanford University Communications.
The spirit of creativity and experiential learning has been at Stanford University since its earliest days. In the university’s founding grant, Jane and Leland Stanford set forth that museums, galleries, labs, and conservatories should be available on campus to foster students’ personal success as well as their “direct usefulness.” (15)
Guido Marx, one of Stanford’s first mechanical engineering professors, remarked in 1891 that progress “cannot be made by the study of textbooks. Learning must be carried out in the physical and testing laboratories and the workshop.” (16)
The earliest makerspaces on campus—the machine shop, carpentry shop, forge, and foundry—were collectively known as the Student Shops. In those settings, from as early as 1904, engineering students spent hours learning practical skills and experimenting with tools and manufacturing. (17)
As technology advanced, so did the tools available for making. The Student Shops expanded and adapted, but their core mission remained the same: empowering students to learn by doing and fostering a spirit of innovation that defines Stanford Engineering.
In the 1970s, the program was renamed the Product Realization Laboratory (PRL); as part of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, it integrated design, prototyping, and manufacturing in one place. (18) Beyond its modern equipment, expert guidance, and space to turn engineering ideas into functional prototypes, the PRL quickly became a hub for creative problem-solving, offering students from diverse disciplines a space to try, fail, rethink, and try again.
“The PRL is place where students learn that they can make anything, and therefore they can change the world,” said David Beach, emeritus professor of mechanical engineering and emeritus director of the PRL. “My greatest tribute to my students is that they find the courage to risk failure in the face of always having been top performers.” (19)
Today, the PRL is a central part of a broader network of makerspaces across campus, including labs dedicated to electronics, robotics, and even bioengineering. (20) These spaces remain rooted in the original ethos of the Student Shops: give students the freedom to design and build in a collaborative, hands-on environment. Whether working on personal projects, start-ups, or research, students continue to use Stanford’s makerspaces to push the boundaries of engineering and design.
“Stanford’s makerspaces are more than just workshops,” says Steven Collins, professor of mechanical engineering. “They are communities where students develop the skills, confidence, and creativity to tackle real-world problems. The spirit of hands-on innovation that began at Stanford in 1891 is alive and well today, and it’s inspiring to see students take that legacy forward.” (21)
—Hanna Ahn
Assistant University Archivist for Special
Collections & University Archives
Pars pro Toto
The Science and Engineering Quad (SEQ) welcomed a new art installation in 2021 that added a spirit of playfulness and inspiration. Pars pro Toto was a set of twelve stone spheres in a dynamic arrangement designed by artist Alicja Kwade to evoke alternate realities and a sense of possibility. Kwade had determined the stones’ positioning by rolling tiny spheres onto a 3D model of the SEQ. The stones—each unique in size and composition—had been sustainably sourced and shipped by low-carbon sea freight from masons in Berlin, Germany.
“I love this piece because it breaks us out of our day-to-day preoccupations. It reminds us that we’re a small part of a large world, and that randomness plays a part in everything,” said Sophia Pink (BS ’19, MS ’20), a student member of the artwork selection committee. (22)
A public art display called Pars pro Toto, created by artist Alicja Kwade, installed in the Science and Engineering Quad courtyard, 2021. The 12 spheres range in size from 16 to 98 inches and are made of stone sourced from eight countries. The work was selected by a committee of faculty, students, and staff appointed by Dean Jennifer Widom. | Andrew Brodhead/Stanford University Communications.
A new school of sustainability
Stanford announced in 2022 that it would create an entirely new school for the first time in seventy years. The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability would speed global-scale solutions to planetary challenges. The school would be named for John Doerr, a venture capitalist, and his wife, Ann Howland Doerr, board chair for Khan Academy and president of the Benificus Foundation. Their $1.1 billion gift was the largest single gift in Stanford history.
As its inaugural dean, the School of Sustainability chose Arun Majumdar, a professor of mechanical engineering, former codirector of the Precourt Institute for Energy, and cochair of the 2015 SoEFuture planning committee. The choice of Majumdar reflected the foundational role engineers and engineering would play in charting a course to a sustainable future.
As is often said, we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. We must create a future in which humans and nature thrive together.
— Arun Majumdar, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Former Co-director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, and Co-chair of the 2015 SoE Future planning committee
“As is often said, we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. We must create a future in which humans and nature thrive together,” Majumdar said. “The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability will not only harness the intellectual horsepower of our students, faculty, and staff across our campus, but also partner with external organizations around the world to co-develop innovative solutions and identify new insights through research and education.” (23)
With the launch of the School of Sustainability, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering became a joint department between the new school and the School of Engineering. A handful of other engineering faculty elected to have joint appointments, cementing a close relationship between the brand-new school and one that was nearly one hundred years old.
Exterior of the Mitchell Earth Sciences Building with signage to mark the launch of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, 2022. The Mitchell Building is the administrative home of the school. | Stanford News Service.
Chemical engineer William Tarpeh, 2021. Tarpeh’s lab develops novel approaches to recover valuable resources from liquid waste streams, reducing environmental impact and enhancing sustainability. | Rod Searcey.
Breakthroughs abound
The tenth decade of the Stanford School of Engineering was one of remarkable advances in many fields. In chemical engineering, for example, faculty developed stretchable and flexible skin-like electronics for wearable technology and medical devices, as well as water-splitting catalysts for sustainable hydrogen fuel.
In electrical engineering, strides in quantum computing hardware and new nanomaterials for electronics continued to push into new frontiers. New photonic structures made solar cells and energy systems more efficient. In mechanical engineering, the advance of haptics and soft robotics offered new possibilities for medical and manufacturing applications.
Researchers in bioengineering expanded the use of CRISPR technology to regulate genes and make epigenetic modifications. In materials science, advanced hydrogels transformed drug delivery and wound healing, while the creation of a stabilized lithium anode significantly improved lithium-ion battery performance.
Civil and environmental engineers pioneered research in resource recovery from wastewater and pursued innovations for more equitable and sustainable urban systems. In computer science, researchers continued to make groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence, improving machine learning, computer vision, and natural-language processing. New cryptographic techniques enhanced privacy and security, while progress in “edge” computing—a decentralized computing architecture where data processing occurs close to the source of data—promised greater power for mobile and remote devices.
Flexible, wearable, skin-like sensors developed by Zhenan Bao and her lab, 2024. The sensors, which use intrinsically stretchable transistors and integrated circuits, are designed to monitor human health, diagnose diseases, and provide opportunities for improved, autonomous treatments. | Courtesy Bao Group.
A human diver with Ocean One, a humanoid robot designed by Oussama Khatib, professor of computer science, 2016. Ocean One is fitted with pressure sensors on each hand that provide a human pilot with a sense of touch. The robot successfully retrieved artifacts from the wreck of La Lune, the flagship of King Louis XIV.
Ocean One exploring La Lune, which sank in the Mediterranean Ocean off the coast of France. | Frederic Osada/DRASSM/Stanford.
Flexible, wearable, skin-like sensors developed by Zhenan Bao and her lab, 2024. The sensors, which use intrinsically stretchable transistors and integrated circuits, are designed to monitor human health, diagnose diseases, and provide opportunities for improved, autonomous treatments. | Courtesy Bao Group.
A human diver with Ocean One, a humanoid robot designed by Oussama Khatib, professor of computer science, 2016. Ocean One is fitted with pressure sensors on each hand that provide a human pilot with a sense of touch. The robot successfully retrieved artifacts from the wreck of La Lune, the flagship of King Louis XIV.
Ocean One exploring La Lune, which sank in the Mediterranean Ocean off the coast of France. | Frederic Osada/DRASSM/Stanford.
The Stanford Emerging Technology Review
In November 2023, the School of Engineering and the Hoover Institution collaborated to launch The Stanford Emerging Technology Review. The Review drew upon the expertise of Stanford’s eminent engineers and scientists to assess recent technology breakthroughs in fields ranging from artificial intelligence and cryptography to neuroscience, with potential to impact societies, economies, and geopolitics. Cochaired by Hoover Institution director Condoleezza Rice, Stanford Engineering dean Jennifer Widom, and Hoover senior fellows John Taylor and Amy Zegart, the Review was focused on capturing relevant technical perspectives rather than championing any one viewpoint.
“The inaugural release of the Stanford Emerging Technology Review is an important new resource for those trying to keep pace with a rapidly evolving technological landscape,” Director Rice said. “The report combines the policy expertise at Hoover with Stanford scientists who are doing cutting-edge research in the heart of Silicon Valley, and it will serve as a translation of sorts between the two to make the latest breakthroughs continuously accessible to policymakers.”
Widom agreed, adding, “Our school’s legacy of innovation and crossdisciplinary collaboration, spanning from the birth of Silicon Valley to groundbreaking advancements in human health, sets us apart and paves the way for the tremendous impact of this project,” she said. (24)
Amy Zegart (left) interviews Jennifer Widom at the Stanford Emerging Technology Review launch, 2023. In their conversation, Widom discussed how the Review allows engineering and science faculty to engage in a larger dialogue about the broader implications of their work in a way that is accessible to lay audiences, including policymakers. | Patrick Beaudouin/Hoover Institution.
From left to right, Zhenan Bao, Allison Okamura, and Jennifer Widom prior to the Stanford Emerging Technology Review launch event, 2023. The School of Engineering and the Hoover Institution jointly launched the Review to capture diverse views from across Stanford on recent technological breakthroughs. | Patrick Beaudouin/Hoover Institution.
New spaces for the next century
In 2024, the School of Engineering celebrated the opening of the Stanford Robotics Center, a site for collaborative research to develop robots prepared for the “real, complex, and unconstrained world they will share with people.” The center focuses on both theoretical and applied robotic innovation in a new era where advances in artificial intelligence have the potential to enable unprecedented technology in the field, including cooperative robots, bio-inspired robots, ubiquitous robots, and others that could assist in areas such as production automation, agriculture, the food industry, medicine and rehabilitation, the entertainment industry, and beyond. (25)
In early 2025—Stanford Engineering’s centennial year—the school was slated to open the new Computing and Data Science building in collaboration with the School of Humanities and Sciences. The union reflected the continued collaboration across schools, driving the value of data and computation in research and innovation. The building, nicknamed “CoDa,” would be a hub of collaboration, home to faculty from the computer science and statistics departments, a cross-university data science initiative, and undergraduate programs in computer science, data science, and symbolic systems, which together comprised 25 percent of undergraduate majors. (26)
Exterior rendering of the Computing and Data Science building, opened in 2025. The building, nicknamed CoDa, is home to faculty from the Departments of Computer Science and Statistics, a cross-university data science initiative, and undergraduate programs in computer science, data science, and symbolic systems. Built jointly with the School of Humanities and Sciences, the building reflects the growing importance of data science in all areas of scholarship. | LMN Architects.
Charting the next hundred years
By 2025, one hundred years after the Stanford University Board of Trustees approved the organization of the School of Engineering, the school had grown beyond anything its founders could possibly have imagined. And yet, their original vision to educate engineers of strong character for leadership in an increasingly technological world holds fast today.
From the first bold spark of electricity that shot across a long-distance electrical cable in Harris Ryan’s High-Voltage Laboratory in 1926 to the ever-shrinking microchips, AI-guided robots, autonomous vehicles, and shape-shifting nanoparticles of today, Stanford Engineering educators and innovators have advanced technology and transformed society. Their pioneering spirit defines the school, inspiring new generations to push boundaries and tackle the greatest challenges of our time.
Rooted from its earliest years in interdisciplinary collaboration, entrepreneurial spirit, and a culture of bold thinking, Stanford Engineering continues to prepare responsible engineers for the future, while shaping the future itself. The school’s trajectory in the next century is being charted by those who are here now and will be defined by generations of Stanford engineers yet to come.
Dean Jennifer Widom, center, with new graduate students at the Dean’s Welcome event, September 2024. | Saul Bromberger/Stanford Engineering.
Explore more decades
100 Years of Stanford Engineering
A Century of Innovation
Designing for the future
Decade 9
Share your Stanford Engineering memories
Be a part of the celebration
As we celebrate the school’s Centennial anniversary, we invite you to mark this milestone by sharing one of your favorite memories of Stanford Engineering. We’d love to hear from you and will be re-sharing selected memories in a variety of ways both publicly and privately throughout the year. Please note: not all submissions will be shared publicly.