 Thank you so much, Arun, and with that I would like to introduce Steve Graham. He is the transition vice dean and the Chester Naramon Dean for the School of Earth, Energy and the Environment. Thank you so much, Steve. Thanks, Ines. I'm really excited to be here today. What I'm going to do is give you a first look at the new school that Stanford has founded and announced just yesterday. In fact, you're the first public group that will see what I will show today. This is the first new school at Stanford in 75 years. And it's a big deal. It's a big deal. I hope maybe you saw the New York Times announcement yesterday. But it's taken an army of people to get to where we are today along with a remarkable set of donors, and the new school is the Stanford Door School of Sustainability. Now among the announcements yesterday of the name and the remarkable gift by John and Ann Door, the essentially the foundational gift for the school along with gifts of others, the dean of the school was announced as well. And the dean is none other than Arun Majumdar. Please give him a hand. I can really think of no better person for this job. So congratulations, Arun. So over the course of the last five years that have transpired to get us to the point today, we've often been asked, how do you define the sustainability? And as you know, sustainability is thought of in different ways by many different groups of people. And after lots of consultations with folks outside of Stanford, with the faculty as well, we finally arrived at this definition, creating a future in which humans and nature thrive in concert and in perpetuity. And indeed, this is the mission statement for the new school. The vision for the school consists of three pillars. On the left, as you might imagine from a research institute like Stanford, advancing knowledge critical to sustaining life on earth is a fundamental building block for the school. And as an educational institution, we want to be able to prepare our students as future sustainability leaders and good citizens through rigorous engaged education and research on sustainability and allied subjects. And this school is a school that really needs to make impact. And so the third pillar shown on the right is catalyzing what we do here to basically create solutions and get them out and upscaled into the world. So why a new school? We could have gone a variety of different ways. But the reason I think will be clear by virtue of the next slide. So this complicated slide, but this constellation of dots here represents all the areas or all the units within Stanford and even beyond in which sustainability is a key matter. So it includes all seven of the academic schools which are shown in the green dots up above. It includes the policy institutes, pre-court, of course, J, and the Woods Institute and several others. It includes other units within Stanford. Those are the dots to the lower left are field stations of various sorts and blue over to the right. And of course, the relationships we have with external partners such as yourselves. Now sustainability is essentially spread like peanut butter across the university. And while that's wonderful and we wouldn't want to change it, it also means that there's no obvious center of gravity for sustainability at Stanford. So really one of the important reasons that we decided to build the school was in fact to create that sense of place, that identity. And so the new school is going to bring together the pre-court energy institute, the Woods Institute for the Environment. It's going to bring the entire School of Earth Energy and Environmental Sciences together along with civil and environmental engineering from the School of Engineering as a joint department and the Hopkins Marine Station down at Monterey. And all these will be brought under one roof and not only will this provide a center of gravity, it will become a force multiplier for what we intend to do in sustainability. So that's really the motivation for the creation of the new school. So how are we going to pull that off? Well, one of the reasons that we want to bring the institutes and the academic schools together is basically to aggregate what we might call the academic superpowers that both of those two kinds of entities have. So what are these? Well, the institutes basically are homes of interdisciplinarity here at Stanford and their reach spans across all the schools and beyond. That's a remarkable power and one that certainly pre-court has manifested in a really huge way as you've seen this week. What about the schools? Well, the schools admit students. They hire and promote faculty. They build and own curricula and they grant degrees. So the optimum mix here is to bring these things together. So what will the academic coverage of the school look like? Well, this diagram has eight pie slices with an intricate web of interconnectivity shown schematically here in the middle. And so the key academic areas in which we will focus are human health and the environment, human society and behavior, food and water security, the natural environment, sustainable cities, climate change, earth and planetary sciences, and of course, very importantly, energy technology. So this sort of plan for what we intend to do academically came about through a democratic polling process that was conducted a couple of years ago. Very rigorous process where we got everybody who was cared about sustainability, cared about the new school, engaged in helping us to decide exactly what the scope of the school will be. And this is basically the product of that process. Now, how will we actually put that into play? This is a complicated diagram, but I want to take a moment to walk through it because this is the blueprint for the new school. And it's essentially a matrix in structure and the matrix will be headed by Arun, as dean of the school, shown at the top. And there will be in the vertical columns the academic units within the school. So the departments, there are nine of these. Not all will be stood up right away because we're trying to gain critical mass in faculty numbers for some of these, but they include civil and environmental engineering. As I mentioned, a joint department between energy and the new school, a climate science department, an environmental behavior department, an environment and ecosystem department, a geophysics department, geological sciences, global environmental policy, and oceans. And significantly, in the lower left, energy science and engineering. This is going to be an astonishing department. And you'll hear more about it as the days roll on. So this is really exciting opportunity to create some actually totally new departments that don't exist right now, but will be so critical for what we do with sustainability this century. I might note as well that, for instance, the school of which I'm dean, Earth Energy and Environmental Sciences, is a STEM school. And civil and environmental engineering comes out of a STEM school, school of engineering. This is much broader. You'll notice all of the societal elements that are going to be included in the department or in the school as individual departments. And as you all know very well, and was just touched on by Arun a moment ago, also just so important to make sure that it's not just about tech. It's about how it affects people. And particularly, for instance, marginalized groups. Now to round out this matrix, you'll see the horizontal green bars. They are the policy institutes, woods, pre-court, and a new institute to be founded which is an institute for sustainable societies. Once again, recognizing the importance of the societal connection to all of this. The smaller headings off to the right of each of these institute names represent some of the initial initiatives that we expect to have launched out of the new school. And I'll say more about those in just a moment. And then finally, the last feature I want to point out is the blue bar at the bottom. This is one of the things that makes this new school totally novel. And I'll talk more about that in a moment. Namely, a sustainability accelerator. I also want to note up in the upper right. And I've highlighted it in yellow. We intend, particularly now thanks to this remarkable translational gift from the doors to hire 60 new faculty over the coming decade into this school. This is something that happens in a university once a century if it happens at all. So we have presented to us just a phenomenal opportunity to make impact in a big way. Just a word about the institutes and the initiatives. So the idea here is to essentially create an ecosystem of institutes that will be a place where people who want to make an impact can gather together and find ways basically to make that happen. We want this ecosystem to be able to respond quickly to inquiries and requests both from internal and external stakeholders. And importantly, this ecosystem will provide funding opportunities for research teams that basically want to take action. And particularly a flexible structure to allow them to do this in a way that we'll be able to address problems that have some time bound urgency. And of course, if we're successful with all this as we expect to be, it's going to become a magnet for us to attract the best and brightest from all over the world. This is a very busy slide. I don't want to have you try and focus on the words. These are the 12 initiatives that we hope to basically put forward from the new school. Just you might notice the column on the left under pre-court. As you all appreciate, the link between economy, energy, and climate is absolutely vital. That will be one of the early initiatives. We've already heard today and you all certainly appreciate the importance of data science for everything with regard to sustainability. There's technological solutions as well. And then again, as Arun just emphasized, there's this whole question about infrastructure systems. So these are things that we will be taking action on immediately building on all the wonderful things that have already happened in this space. Now the second pillar of our vision is our educational mission. And so we expect to enhance our disciplinary degrees that already exist. We have at least three amazing interdisciplinary degrees already on the books that range from undergraduate education through PhD education. We are going to be offering new undergraduate and graduate degree programs. And many of those are in the works already. There are also many students who really want to gain some knowledge and expertise in sustainability and energy, but really don't want to make it a major. And so we intend to start to develop a certificate program for people to get those credentials. And then finally, very important, as you will all appreciate, we want to have a very robust education program for professionals, executive ed, but not limited to that. As you know, there's so many people out in the public sector who might not be able to afford the price tag for executive ed, yet they are so important because they're on the front line. And that's something we need to accomplish as well. So just to give you some sense of where we'll be going, experiential learning is so important for students, right? And so on the left is sort of a very first order road map of what we can expect for our undergraduate curriculum and sustainability. That basically takes students through the early stages of sort of seminar-like interactions, through experiences off campus, through practicums and internships. And finally, capping things off with a capstone project that ties all of this together for them. Again, the key thing here is experiential learning and something similar for graduate students as well. Now I mentioned the accelerators. So this is particularly important and again, novel in this space. You're all familiar with accelerators in tech and pharmaceuticals and so forth, accelerators in sustainability, particularly in universities are, well, I think they're essentially unheard of. And this is, I think, a huge opportunity for us with the new school. And so the goal here basically is to pull together experience from the university, but partnering with folks on the outside to co-create and to scale solutions for climate sustainability, the things that really were faced with this century. And so to make this work, we're going to need to have convening space for the accelerator, we'll need to have equipment. We need to particularly have expert staff, staff who are Stanford based but who understand the process of upscaling and partnering with external entities. And this is going to be then an opportunity educationally as well. It will be a space in which our students can very early on come to appreciate the important role of partnership between the university and external entities. So this graphic probably illustrates this best. We imagine the accelerator to have two poles, a policy pole and a technology pole. And spanning between those are all the things that lie in the interstices, including considerations of what kinds of laws need to be put in place, policies as well, something Arun knows certainly very well. Of course, always paying attention to basic knowledge, the development of basic knowledge, which then translates readily to technologies in many instances. And then we hope through the accelerator to begin to develop new companies as products of this. So looking at the bottom, the key elements of this is we need this physical space, we need project funding. And indeed we have a really robust set of initial funds available thanks to the development work that's gone on to create the school. This in turn will provide some opportunity for training for people for instance from Stanford but people from without. As you all know data and computational power is absolutely critical. And that will allow the connectivity, the converging and so forth, the convening that will be needed. And key to all this of course is the people. And so as you all know, students are the lifeblood of research institutes such as Stanford. We faculty try and help them along and as I mentioned earlier, particularly key for this to work is to have knowledgeable accelerator staff. And we are about the task of beginning to hire those now. And again, this wouldn't work at all if we don't co-create with our external partners folks such as yourselves. So accelerator priorities are shown here and on the left a key thing, as I mentioned, is to be able to provide funding for groups within Stanford that really want to take things from the bench top and move them towards implementable solutions to connect scholarship with action. That's going to happen by engagement with governmental agencies, with community organizations, and obviously with investors and technologists and multinational market actors. And again, this done effectively will provide many, many interesting learning opportunities for our students and others beyond as shown in the right hand column. And so finally, last thing I want to touch on is space. So as I just mentioned with regard to the accelerator, but for all the other amazing things I've already described about the new school, we need space to be able to do that. And frankly, we're flat out of space right now. And particularly with 60 new faculty and their entourage is coming on over the new decade, special space is going to be critical. So we have begun to envision what we're calling a sustainability commons. And that's best explained by showing you a map. So currently we are where the red star is over, I need the super laser here, right over there. We're in that building in Wong Center. And within the yellow dashed ellipse is the area that will be the sense of place, the focal point for sustainability in the university. Again, not diminishing at all the sustainability that happens everywhere else in the university. This area will be anchored by two buildings that already exist. The Green Earth Sciences Building, which is down here. The Yang Yamazaki Environment Energy Building, which is adjacent to Wong, right there, the Y2E2 building as it's called. Everything in this space around the green space represents new construction that will be developed over the coming years. We hope to be able to occupy the first of these buildings already in planning in five years. And if in fact this whole effort is as successful as we intend, we will be able to build a second building over here across the street. We have naming gifts already for both of those two new buildings. So we're really far ahead of the game in that regard. But that's not all. It turns out on the west side of campus here, there are other great assets, like the Stanford Energy Center, like the Stanford Educational Farm. And what will come as well is a new residential neighborhood over here that will feature a sustainability theme house where students will be able to live the life, to walk the talk. And that will provide them really ready access to all of the assets that are here in this focal point for sustainability within Stanford. So that's the first view. As I said, you are the first folks to get to see this. I'm really delighted to have been able to share it. And I'll invite your questions. Thank you. There's a question over here. So we do have a few minutes for questions. Yeah, go ahead. Thank you so much. That's very exciting. I'm here from the Stanford Daily. We were super excited for the announcement yesterday as well. So I was wondering if there's anything specific that you might want to relay to the student body perspective? Is there any information that you can share that would be meaningful for the undergrad or graduate population right now? Sure. Now, there's still much to be worked out because we are really just at the starting line right now. But as I hope I've demonstrated on these slides, there should be phenomenal new opportunities for undergraduate students, both in terms of curricular offerings and degrees, but also with regard to tremendous new expanded opportunities for research in the sustainability space. And as you well know, given the generation you're in, the current group of students here at Stanford and I think across the country is really eager to be involved in shaping sustainability for the future. So I think that the upside potential for Stanford graduate students is essentially unlimited. And we really look forward to seeing how this all plays out when we get specific curricula set up. And there are people actively working on that right now. But thank you for that question, it's so important. Hi, Amy Herhold from ExxonMobil. I think many of us share your excitement, so this is fantastic. And it's like interdisciplinary research on steroids, so really good to see. Can you say something more about what environmental behavior department means? That kind of seemed very interesting, I'd like to hear more. Right, so this is one of the departments for which we lack critical mass right now. But we have been in close contact with people on the humanities side of campus. There's a lot of eagerness about this. The school of which I'm dean has already taken some steps in that direction. So we have on our faculty among the geologists and geophysicists and energy engineers, a sociologist, who basically looks at how groups of humans react to issues regarding climate change, their level of engagement and excitement about that. And so that's one dimension of what that department might include. But there's so many others. Environmental justice has been mentioned here today. This is something that I think is going to be baked into the university or into the school from the start. And Arun mentioned this just a moment ago in his remarks. So it will be a department of that character, but again, it hasn't fully taken shape yet because we're working towards critical mass. We have three faculty searches going on right now that represent our inaugural effort to fill in the 60. And one of those is exactly focused on populating that department. Thank you for that question. Hi, John Matranger from Aviva OSI Soft. You talked about experiential learning. A living campus I think is important to that conversation. Can you comment more on that? Yeah, sure. In fact, throughout this whole development of the school, we've often talked about making Stanford a living lab. And to a large extent, that's already happened. So for instance, we have in the School of Engineering the Kodega Waste Center. We've got efforts in water recycling on campus, land building and real estate, which is the functional side of the university towards things like decarbonization and so forth, is engaged with us in the new school. So I think we'll advance across a host of areas with regard to, in fact, making Stanford live the talk. To hopefully be an inspiration for other universities to do these kinds of things as well. Hi, Amit Sarkar from Total Energy. First of all, great move from the great institute and could not be more relevant than our corresponding time. I just had a quick question regarding the energy sciences and engineering. Is the department is going to be focused on primarily on sustainable energy or is it going to be also mixture of the conventional and sustainable? Well, it will be a mixture. And in fact, it's essentially building off of the energy resources engineering that's in the School of Earth right now. But it's gonna have a much broader portfolio than that department does. That department, of which NS, for instance, is a faculty member, has already expanded its domain from what it had been once upon a time, which was petroleum engineering. And the move towards the new department, which I think will be formalized authorized by the university next week, is much, much more than that. And in fact, I might even invite Arun to have a word about that, because Arun will be in part in that department. Anything you wanna add? Okay. Yeah, I mean, so this is gonna be, I mean, first of all, Inez and many others, Hamdi Chalepi and all already in the department. I believe each way is joining the department at 50-50, along with me from people from School of Engineering, are joining the department. Steve Chu is going to be partly in the department along with his physics appointment. And we are just super excited to join hands with Inez and the others in the department to create something which is where one plus one is greater than two. So that's really, really looking forward to that. So when I announced the departments earlier, I said this is a blockbuster department, now you know why. Arun, can I keep you standing really quick? Mark from Stanford, as you can see, there's just high energy everywhere. And not just here, but alumni, partners, just all sorts of folks in the broader Stanford ecosystem. I've already been asked, what can I do? And I know you're now not even 25 hours into the job. But is there sort of maybe an initial vision or those of us who are like in the broader community that's really, really excited to get involved? How do we get started? What are some of the things to help you along to make this successful? I'm minus one month into the jobs because my official date actually is middle of June. But at this point, it's very important to get our internal team together. Because this is a big transition. This is not trivial, departments are changing. New organizations are coming together. So it's very important that people feel a home in this new school. Through this transition, so that's going to be kind of the first priority. Is to get that in order. In terms of engagement, and I'd love to get Steve's thought on. Because Steve, by the way, was the originator of the idea for school. So this has been one of his vision right from the beginning. I think it's going to be the new things are accelerators, as Steve pointed out. So I think in terms of external engagement, the institutes, the accelerators are going to be critical. And the way it is structured, it's sort of on the time scale of impact. So we know we have to act now. There are things we need to do to address climate change, food security, water shortages and all of that. And there are things that can be scaled that have been proven in at least a prototype system or policies that are almost there. But the scale is not there. And the scale has to be, and so that's the job of the accelerator. How do you take things to scale? And of course that needs partnership because we at a university cannot scale. So that's kind of a short term now. We've got to act now. The institutes have already created a connective tissue across campus to find solutions that you can co-develop with external partners. And it's been going on for the last 15 or 20 years with pre-court of the Woods Institute, right? And so that's kind of, I would say, the mid-term. Then the departments, the research and the departments, the fundamental research is absolutely critical because that's the long term. When you take things to scale at the gigaton or giga people scale, there will be unintended consequences. And we need to understand what the unintended consequences are up front as part of the research, fundamental research effort. Because we are living in the 21st century of the unintended consequence of what we did in the 20th century. And we did not pay enough attention. We cannot afford to do that. So that is the fundamental research of what the unintended consequences are. And the other part of the fundamental research is we don't know what we don't know yet and there will be new things that we'll be discovering and we're pulling our hair out. And we need the knowledge to be able to find out what the points of attack are to address those issues, which will be the problems we'll be solving in 10, 20 years from now that we don't even know of. So the structure of the school and the departments looking at in a sort of scholarship and knowledge development, knowledge creation, et cetera. Then the institutes to bring all that together to make prototypical solutions and the access to take it out and co-develop it and take, that's the structure of the school. And this is unique in academia. This is, I don't think it's ever been done. I don't think so. No, I think you said it very well. There's a question over there. Question for Steve and Arun, actually. Karen Law, engineering a law. Is there a mechanism for Stanford to make money with the new companies at the accelerator? I'm not probably best suited to answer that. Maybe you, Arun. There are obviously the standard techniques of intellectual property, licensing, royalty agreements and things like that, right? I mean, that's, and besides that, I mean, they potentially could be other things. We haven't really thought about it, whether university can take equity stake and things like that. We don't know yet. And there's obviously the Stanford management that invests in various organizations that are investors in this and there's another route to that. But right now, we are looking at obviously the standard techniques, whether there'll be new ones or don't know. And with that, we'll end this session. And I'd like to thank again Steve and Arun for the interventions. And we'll move to the next one.