 We are joined once again by pre-court co-director Sally Benson, who will be moderating our Stanford Educators panel. She is joined by three Stanford deans. We have Jonathan Levin, dean at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Deborah Sats, dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Jennifer Wittem, dean of the School of Engineering. So, Sally, over to you. Okay. Well, terrific. So, to all of you and the energy of Stanford and Slack program, I hope you've been enjoying it. It seems by your participation in the chat function, you're highly engaged, which is awesome. And thanks to Alicia for that great talk. So, we're really lucky today to have three of the deans from Stanford University joining us. And one of the most fantastic things I think about Stanford is that students, even though they're enrolled in a particular school and even a particular department, that they often take classes across the entire university. So, it's particularly relevant to have these deans here. Unfortunately, two other deans that we invited, Steve Graham from the School of Earth, wasn't available as well as Dean Moeller, the dean of research. But thank you, John, Deborah, and Jennifer for joining us. So, just to let you know a little bit more about this class of incoming graduate students, 33 are from the GSB, 67 are from engineering, 17 are from H&S, and eight from Earth. And we even have someone from the medical school. So, very diverse cohort of students that we have this year. So, to kick things off, what I would like to do is ask the first question, and really for all of you, what kind of energy-related teaching and research is taking place in your school, just so we can broaden the knowledge base for the students here? And maybe we'll start with John, if that's okay. Sure, thank you, Sally. And I really appreciate the chance to be here. It's great to see so many GSB students who are interested in energy and sustainability participating in this. And welcome all of you to Stanford. It's great to have everyone and get started with what's going to be quite an extraordinary year. So, energy at the GSB, it's actually hard to know where to begin, because there's lots going on. And I think on the education side, some of you are probably, who are GSBers are probably thinking about the EIPER joint degree program. That has become one of our most popular joint degree programs. The interest in both energy and climate sustainability has just been going up and up. And on the faculty side in classes, we are now offering a whole set of electives around climate. And a lot of faculty have gotten interested in sustainability issues over the in recent years. And that actually spans across all different types of perspectives on management. So, we have faculty in operations who are really interested in issues like sustainable supply chains. We have folks who are in our political economy group who are interested in government policy and regulation around energy, around climate, around sustainability. We have faculty in our economics group who are interested from an economic perspective. We just hired a finance professor about a year ago who is interested in basically long dated securities and securities that are perpetuities or last for a long time. And when you have long dated securities, it turns out that that the effects of climate change matter for how they're priced. So, he's gotten into thinking about climate, but from a completely different perspective. And then we, one of the features at the GSB is that we often, much of our teaching, particularly electives, is done by practitioners who we bring in from outside. So, we teach with our 10-year line faculty and sometimes to teach on their own. And we've increasingly been trying to bring people in who have an energy background or who have an interest in sustainability from a business perspective to offer classes that would I talk about business models that will support the energy transition or that have explicit sustainability goals. So, you know, it's a big topic of discussion at the school and I think you'll all experience that. And it's a really important discussion. And if you think about, you know, where the, what is, what are the, where is the potential to drive really important change in energy and in sustainability? I think we all understand that public policy, a carbon tax or something like that would be the natural global solution. But in the absence of something like that happening, it's going to have to come from the private sector and from business innovation and from different business models that are going to drive change. And I think that's something that, you know, we were talking about and thinking about all the time at the GSB. Okay. Well, terrific. Thanks very much. How about moving over to Deborah? So, Echo, John's welcome. We're really glad and excited to welcome you to Stanford. It will be a challenging year. And the way I'm thinking of the year, it's a year we all need to have a kind of double focus. There's a lot going on in the world outside that is stressful and challenging and exhausting. And we need to focus on riding the waves and making sure we all get the support we need at the same time that we need to move forward with the very important teaching and research missions of the university and to really focus in. And that's going to be a challenge. But we are committed, I think, as a school and a university to making sure that the, you know, transformational, innovative, exciting, creative work of our grad students and our faculty and our postdocs continues. And we're thrilled that you're here. So let me say a little bit about the school of humanities and sciences. We're a super broad school, unlike many of the other schools. We're not unified around a kind of broad topic area. But we span, you know, people who work on dark matter and dark energy to people who work on medieval poetry. And it's quite an array. We have 23 different departments and 23 different interdisciplinary programs. But energy and sustainability and managing the environmental crises we face are really interdisciplinary and are going to call on expertise from many different types of people from economists to political scientists to biologists and chemists to historians. And you, it's really not, I think, of energy and the environment in general, you know, it's not the primary possession of any one area of knowledge, but we'll really need all of us working on this because there are a lot of reasons, some purely technological, some political, some ethical that have made finding solutions so difficult. And so the school really, I can't say every department contributes equally to the study of energy or has it essential, but it really, you know, it ranges from obviously people in our chemistry department working on catalysts and catalytic, you know, agents that might, you know, lower the costs of certain and make more efficient certain kinds of processes, chemical processes, people working on batteries, on creating sustainable plastics, on fundamental research, not oriented to one particular area, but that we think will advance our understanding of molecules and how they come together and ways we can intervene. As like John in the business school, we have a bunch of economists who are working on policy issues from questions about optimal taxation to emissions trading policies to thinking about the regulation of air quality is very much a factor right now, as you know, in California. And we have historians who work on the conditions that have led governments to choose sustainable or unsustainable paths of agricultural development and what we can learn from them. And of course, we have biologists who study, you know, various kinds of energy sources from biological processes and biological materials. So it's, there's a tremendous amount to offer. I think from the school, we're all excited about the possibility of some new structure of school of sustainability and some structure that helps bring more of us together. Because one of the things that Stanford is great at is creating phenomenal research, but kind of disparate. And there's so much going on often, it's really hard to keep track of what there is. And we have an opportunity here to really become much more than the sum of our parts. And so we're excited about that possibility. But please, there's lots of stuff in the School of H&S related to energy research and courses that deal with these issues. Okay, thank you very much. It's so incredibly broad, the School of H&S and so much to contribute. So maybe we'll move over to Jennifer Wittem, the Dean of the School of Engineering. Hi, everyone. I'm Jennifer. Get ready with your raise hand button if you're joining the School of Engineering as a new graduate student, because I'm just going to do a little survey. Don't raise it yet. Oh, sorry. Just get ready. I'm going to be just doing a survey because I'm going to guess that we probably have in this group people from all nine of our engineering departments. We'll see. So there's 60 some of you, as I understand, 60 something engineers in this cohort. So when I look at what goes on across the School of Engineering, we do have nine departments and I'm going to enumerate them in a moment. There's really two areas, I would say, maybe three, that there's a tremendous amount of cross cutting work and a tremendous number of faculty working in applications in those areas. And they probably won't surprise you. One of them is human health and a full one third about the faculty in the School of Engineering actually have joint projects with people in the medical school. And the other area that's just really prevalent and becoming more so every year is the area of energy and sustainability. And I think close to a third of our faculty are actually also working in some aspect of energy. And so I was just going to mention our departments and for each one that what they're doing just very briefly and also just take a survey and how many of you are coming into material science? Raise your hand, do a raise hand and yeah. So not surprisingly, quite oh wow lots of materials science. So there's all kinds of things going on with batteries and materials materials for batteries and for energy storage. What about chemical, let's let those hands. What about chemical engineering? I'm sure we have some chemical engineers and raise your hand if you're a chemical engineer. Chemical engineering, just a couple that's a little surprising to me because a lot going on in chemical engineering as well. And in our material science and chemical engineers often work very closely together many partnerships, they're similar areas. And again, sort of like Deborah mentioned many people working in catalysts and so forth. What about bioengineering? Anyone here from bioengineering, a raise hand? All right, so that's next year we got to get some bioengineers in here because they're also, you know, they're people starting to work on biofuels and I think there's quite a close relationship with some of the work going on with plant biology as well. What about civil and environmental engineering? I hope we've got a great, awesome, there you know we have our civil and environmental engineering departments are combined. On the civil side there's a great interest now in sustainable urban systems. So just thinking about the, well the world was getting urbanized and it still is as a world though some small pockets I think in the U.S. are unurbanizing a bit but just looking at energy use and sustainability in urban areas is a huge area of our civil engineers and of course our environmental engineers are interested broadly in energy distribution and more broadly in environmental areas. What about mechanical engineering? Anybody from mechanical engineering? Great, oh quite a few and I'll just pause while you unraise and ask about electrical engineering. I hope we have some electrical engineers there as well, we do. So and across ME and WE of course people are also working on batteries and just I like to think of the people in those departments as working on energy efficient everything. So good group there. All right I am very hopeful that we've got some people from management science and engineering, anybody from management science and engineering? There we've got a lot of work now on energy policy on optimization. Our management science and engineering department really does go broadly from policy areas all the way over to hardcore operations research and all of those relevant to energy. Computer scientists we all know software is super important in all kinds of aspects of energy. How many computer scientists do we have here? Just one. So that's an area for growth next year as well and then the last one I'm going to ask about is aeronautics and astronautics. Do we have anybody from aeroastro because there's good that's great because there's some really interesting work now going on in energy efficient spacecraft and even like fleets of microsatellites that is I think is truly fascinating. So sorry to do the inventory there but we are a school that's small enough that we can do an inventory of our departments and again with the theme being we've got people across all nine of our departments working in the energy area and of course they're also working together collaborating with each other. I'm sure you've heard over and over how collaborative Stanford is and and we really are that's very low barriers to collaboration and we have it within the school and across the entire university. So welcome to Stanford Engineering. Well terrific thank you all very much that's a great overview. So moving on to the next topic that addressing challenges in global energy access and climate solutions requires an interdisciplinary approach and systems thinking. So the question is this for you how do you think about this and what opportunities are provided in your school for developing these perspectives and skills and maybe we'll go in reverse order maybe Jennifer will will start with you. Well I guess I just pick up where I left off which is that you know this is absolutely a global challenge and a challenge that touches every part of the university and so interdisciplinary is key we've been moving in the school of engineering towards what we call catalyst grants where we have groups of faculty across many broad areas coming together and we seed those groups with fairly significant funding to get started on projects that will be very hard to start at that scale and we have also partnered with the Precord Institute in doing this type of thing as well and it will I think we'll see more and more of that there's more of an appetite. So I do think one of the one of the issues with a global challenge of this scale is that sometimes in the university setting it is hard to launch a group that's of the scale that you need to really get going and prove that you're going to make progress. It can't just be a bunch of small individuals with their smaller medium-sized grants and so a lot of on the research side we're very interested in assembling those groups and working across the university to do that. Okay terrific okay thank you Deborah. So I'm just gonna I think basically echo what Jennifer just said. The barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration here are as low as I've ever seen. The problems around energy and sustainability are not problems whose solution can rest with any one discipline. As I said it's not just the technical set of questions we face but a bunch of policy questions. There's some ethical aspects to what's fair. There are you know many dimensions to the challenges we face around energy and climate. A couple of the initiatives coming out of the long-range planning of the university I think have a also an opportunity to contribute. So I think of again the sustainability school is a still a work in construction you know in theoretical construction but it will be a way to knit these different groups and faculty across all of Stanford's seven schools together in an exciting way. One thing in that's a university priority that's housed in the School of Humanities and Sciences is the Stanford Impact Labs that seeks to bring social scientists together with data scientists together potentially with scientists with natural scientists in partnership with NGOs, communities, state governments, city governments around naughty problems and climate is definitely one of the problems that that group you know it'll be open to grants teams applying and so far we've had teams from all over the university being chosen and there's a lot of interest in those space of environmental problems. So I think some of where the university is going around catalyzing to go back to catalyst research and figuring out ways to increase the power of the research we do and bring it to the public really fit with you know the interdisciplinary nature of a lot of the social problems we're grappling with today. Okay thank you. So John how about you? Well I would second everything that that Deborah and Jennifer just said about interdisciplinary research and and also just add that you know when you when we think about a problem like energy transition leading to a lower carbon world you know I think we all understand that there's there's technical aspects to that problem there's going to need to be a lot of technological breakthroughs in areas like batteries and clean energy otherwise just can't happen it's a political problem because the almost truly has to be some spur from regulation it's a business problem and it's a leadership problem it's so all of those things have to come together if we're going to have a dramatic change in in energy and climate over the 21st century and Stanford has all of those things they're all they're all here on campus expertise in in every one of those things and I think one of the challenges for students is just finding them and and Jennifer and Deborah alluded to this is just how do you how do you connect with all of that expertise across the campus how do you connect with students who are in all of those those areas and I think you know one of the things that's great about an event like this is it's just a way to start to see where different things are located and who the different students are and and so forth and I would just encourage you to try to seek out some of those those things as you go through the the program yesterday I was we ran a summer entrepreneurship program for our MBA students who are between year one and year two over the summer and yesterday I was at the final presentations and one of the things that really struck me in seeing the student presentations was how many of the GSB students who had had had an idea and were pushing it forward over the summer had had found someone or a group of people to work with from other Stanford schools it was and whether it was from the engineering school or the medical school or different different places around campus that was really really striking how many partnerships had had formed in that way around really interesting types of ideas around energy or healthcare or whatever it was I think you know that's and that's going to be a little harder this year frankly because we won't have the chance for serendipitous meetings on campus so it's going to take a little more proactive effort to get out there on you know to figure out ways to have those connections but that is an amazing opportunity about being at Stanford you know with with all of these different lenses that you can tackle come at a problem from so I you know encourage you to take advantage of that opportunity in every way that you can yeah so so just a follow-up is that the ignite program that you're talking about oh well I can actually this was a different program that we just set up different for that that we just set up as a experiment during COVID which was the Bosa Chan innovation internship program which was a program for GSB students to get funded to go that entrepreneurial part of the summer but we do for students outside the GSB we run a program called ignite which we ran virtually this summer and we'll run again during the year and it's a it's a wonderful program this is a program where you can you basically get a it's an introduction to management and entrepreneurship and it's targeted at students in other schools around the GSB and you can either do it part time during the year or you can do it over a month in the summer and I encourage you know invite everyone who's outside the GSB to apply particularly if you've got an interest and you've got an entrepreneurial banner even if you don't but you're just sort of intrigued to think about how work you're doing might eventually be commercialized or how you could be you know have that capability in your in your back pocket yeah I know that's a fantastic program I've had a number of my students take it so I highly encourage all of you to look into that so so just a little bit more I think the the theme you got you know regarding this question about addressing you know having getting an interdisciplinary perspective is the Precourt Institute has a number of initiatives there's the bits and watts initiative which is about grid modernization and it integrates all the way from fundamental innovation of a better a better gadget all the way through to business models and so forth and and there's one on natural gas the natural gas initiative there's the storage x initiative which we just launched about six months ago and we also have a new carbon dioxide removal initiative that's coming along so I highly encourage you to find a way to get engaged with those as a way of developing this sort of systems thinking we also have a fantastic class called the energy ventures class that is taught by two entrepreneurs and it's Joel Moxley and Dave Danielson and typically about a third of the students are from the business school a quarter maybe from the law school and then the other half from engineering and humanities and science and so forth so so seek out those opportunities because I think it's really by experience that you'll learn those things um I was going to ask you all about this new school of sustainability but you've all sort of touched on that so I'd like to jump to really the next uh the next question which is you know what advice do you have for incoming graduate students as they begin their studies and and given that these COVID-19 days perhaps you could sort of address something really specific do you have any suggestions because we've all been living with this now for about six months and and I think we we all have our our favorite solutions but what don't do what don't we start with with Debra you know an easy question uh you know graduate school is a amazing wonderful uh opportunity of a kind that's just a gift uh to have these years to pursue uh your interests wherever they leave you and uh to have the chance to find out for yourself what matters to you and to push it in these new directions we're counting on you uh so it's it's an incredible opportunity it's also even in the best of times uh can be uh challenging uh can be isolating can sometimes feel lonely and I think all of that is heightened at this moment um in the COVID world I mean I I have spent a lot of the last five months on zoom and I will say you cannot zoom the things that really matter uh you know the energy uh what John referred to is those serendipitous conversations and meetings that you have with people uh there's no substitute for those in-person collisions uh so we're in a second we're not maybe second maybe third best world but I would urge you to find ways to in this time be connected reach out take advantage of resources take advantage of the people go you know to zoom meetings or classes and really try to create community find out you know so one thing we have done better on the internet of you know it's easier to survey all the different options that are going on and take care of yourselves because this is just a really challenging time for all of us and it's exhausting and it's really really important like it's the backdrop to your everything you do in the world of knowledge and education that you are uh you know you're in recently good health and good spirits and maintain a kind of hope um in a in a very challenging time so we have a lot of resources on the campus there are university resources to help graduate students um I or somebody else could send those around you can also go to the VP GE the vice provost for graduate education website a lot of the departments and I hope all of them are stepping up and really trying to create community gatherings where people exchange not just ideas and research but also remind themselves why it's valuable for us to be together the I think I remember talking about this sort of at the beginning of the crisis and John I remember you're saying and I completely agree with this that the crisis has focuses focused us so much on what really matters and what makes Stanford great is the people who are here and what they're able to do together um by being here together and we just have to find as best we can in this hard time ways to keep doing that um and know that you know we'll get through this and uh we will have those serendipitous meetings and uh and conversations that blow you away and change the direction of your thinking that will happen again and some of that can happen on zoom it's just not uh ideal you know one thing I would say is I I think in a way even you know despite all the challenges that that COVID has brought this isn't this is an amazing time to be in school the world is just going through an incredible period of change and on many different dimensions we're having this incredible acceleration of comfort with technology and and and this reckoning with societal issues racism and but also things like thinking about other types of inequities in society around health and education and the and the effects of of climate change and you know the world the world is not going back to January 2020 it's going to be different when we get through this experience and hopefully it's going to be better and and I you know the our challenge is to sort of figure out how how will we make it better when we come out of COVID and and not not necessarily how will we how will we get back to what we had before and so you know in a way at a time like that it's just a great time to be able to to be able to invest in yourselves and to think and to reflect and to sort of figure out you know what is the path that you want to chart for yourselves when when we get through this it's a great time to to launch your your career whether it's going to be a career in research or in business or in policy or whatever direction you end up you end up going in this group's going to go in all different different directions so I mean that way I'm I'm I'm very optimistic about the experience you're going to have and I think Deborah's point is just spot on in terms of you know the the work that is going to have to go in this year to to making sure that we realize the what is so great about Stanford which is the people and and making sure that that you get the opportunities to meet people and to form relationships that are going to last and to learn from everyone on the campus even though some of that learning is going to have to be in this remote technology mediated environment but hopefully we'll we'll get through that too and and be able to get back to to doing what the things that we love in person so I'm excited for all of you I think I think you're actually at a great time in many ways this is like the perfect time to be starting graduate school much as that might be counterintuitive so you know I just I think putting in the effort to try to make sure you meet people and form relationships and like Deborah said you know just understanding that when things do go wrong this year and they're big challenges you will not be the only person who is feeling that way on campus there's going to be a lot of people who who are with you in spirit and and there to help you okay thank you that's uh those inspiring words how do we make it better when we come out of this so so Jennifer over over to you yeah as always going third is difficult because I'm you know want to say similar things to what Deborah and John said but actually they kind of got me thinking one way you could go into this year is saying wow this is the moment in my life where I've you know I'm coming to Stanford and it's entirely ruined because of this you know virus and everything else going on and how could my first year of graduate school be ruined or you can look at it as wow this is a time when I'm going to be able to make a difference in how we come out of this and of course it's much better to take that second viewpoint and graduate school I always tell people I think graduate school can be some of the best time of your life you're sort of through some of the anxieties of undergraduate you've probably know more or less what you want to do with your career you're getting to specialize you're getting to contribute you're part of a cohort and so I just think it's a really exciting time so if any of you are thinking about being a professor enjoy graduate school because once you're a professor boy you've got a lot more responsibility so but it's I mean being a professor is awesome as well but anyway graduate school is a great time you know on on the personal side if my recommendation if you are living on campus is to get outside you can see I'm outside this is not a fake backdrop this is my own backyard I live near the foot of the dish trail for those of you who have become familiar so get outside walk the dish walk around we're very fortunate that we're in California and have good weather once this smoke goes away but you know I'm thinking this is going to be a year where people are going to be outside a lot for the year or try to get outside and we're going to be able to do that because of our simply because of our weather and I've been taking walks every evening and fairly often walk through the graduate student dorms including the the brand new ones and I see a community building there so you know put on your mask and go outside and meet other graduate students if you are living on campus that's what I would do and you'll meet some really interesting people so I do think that even though we have a lot of restrictions there are you're if you are here you're in a setting where you can still meet people if you're not local I hope you're in a okay situation and you try you know we're going to have all kinds of opportunities for you to connect virtually so again you know take advantage of everything Stanford has to offer even in this unusual time okay well thank you for that good advice you know I'm going to put you all on this spot this whole conversation has made me realize that it's a little bit more difficult to get to know people during these times and we have to take every opportunity to try to do that and of course the three of you have very important leadership positions at the university but you're also incredible academic scholars and and I just wanted to ask each of you to spend you know maybe two three minutes just describing the kind of research that you do the kind of questions that you're passionate about that have you know driven you to get to the point where you are and and we'll start with you Jennifer and apologies for springing this on you but I it's such a great chance for people to get to know you all yeah so no I'd be happy to uh happy to to talk about that briefly I'll start by saying that I was a music major undergraduate so I I'm the only dean of engineering anywhere with a bachelor's degree in trumpet performance I'm pretty sure about that um but and that takes a lot of energy but anyway I did switch over to computer science so I am a computer scientist and my research area when I began my career was considered one of the most boring areas of computer science database management um all we did then was build systems that handled large amounts of data and how boring could that be and at the time that you know the the people who are interested in using large amounts of data were people like banks and enterprises and boy has that changed in my career so it's been really exciting for me to watch my own research go from this sort of sort of traditional area of and again I was more on the systems building so building systems for nontraditional types of data into something that is so important across every area it's just it's been wonderful to watch that the the need for data data systems data analysis tools data visualization tools which is my area to all of those areas to blossom so that's that's where I've come from and obviously data is huge to making advances in energy all all aspects really okay thank you so so Debra how about you okay uh so uh maybe I'm you know the furthest out here I'm a philosopher I'm a political philosopher lots of people don't really understand even what philosophers do but actually philosophers are you know we're all nascent philosophers uh and what philosophy political philosophy does is it responds to current problems and crises and confusions in the culture are things that are in contention that we're not sure of and it tries to clarify what the values and concepts are how they're related to each other why they matter as a way of trying to resolve and see whether there's a resolution for some conflicts that people are trying to deal with conflicts between very abstract concepts like equality and liberty you often hear that they can't be reconciled this is you know large literature trying to explore the space for reconciliation my own work has really been focused it's just about equality I wrote I think my first book which really looked at the reasons for thinking that equality as a generic or abstract or simply income focused uh you know a project was too narrow and that there were real differences between when and where equality matters so that equality for example in life expectancy or in access to opportunities is quite different than the fact that we're all unequal in height and so and people respond quite differently to different kinds of equality and I tried to come up with a kind of an analysis of why that might be so and what values might be driving that right now I'm involved in a five-year project that's being led by uh Angus Deaton who's a economist at Princeton uh Nobel Prize winner which is working on something called the Deaton report on inequality in the 21st century and mostly economists but I'm writing the normative chapter about where equality matters and why and what are the different arguments and how do you respond to people who think equality doesn't matter at all what really matters is poverty what are the kinds of arguments that you can give and how does this relate to some of the directions that economic research should go in and this is connected to climate although I myself don't work on issues about climate but clearly there are lots of considerations in the policy space especially when we think globally about fairness in the distribution of up costs and benefits in the context of climate change yeah so so Debra just a quick reminder that we actually did a project together I work on carbon capture and storage and there was an ethical issue um you know there are many ethical issues you know should we be doing part two in carbon capture and storage and you had two fantastic postdocs who we we worked together and that was a real treat so thank you for that um so now we'll uh John what about you what uh what excites you what is what was your academic path my background is as an economist and uh in fact I started at Stanford in the economics department and was there for 16 years before I moved to the business school and in within economics I worked I worked on it well I worked on a bunch of different things but I most of my research was in a field called industrial organization which is about research innovation r&d competition regulation of different industries and I particularly focused on technology industries and so actually by field has now become since I have less time for research has actually become incredibly interesting because people are rethinking with the rise of the large technology firms the people are really rethinking the way government should regulate technology and the the the relationship between large business and and government and and you can see the political divisions there so there's a political aspect to it as well as a an economic aspect to it I sometimes wish I had more time to be thinking and writing about that because I think it is such an interesting problem particularly since we're here in Silicon Valley it's a really pertinent problem for for us here I also worked on other one of the other areas I worked on was was a field called market design which is basically had a set up market mechanisms to accomplish different types of goals so designing auctions or matching markets or different kinds of incentive mechanisms and in fact the last the paper had an opportunity this last year to write a paper which proved to to be timely which is that I wrote a paper of a Christmas about creating incentives for vaccine development it's done some work that I had done probably 13 or 14 years ago to set up a program to accelerate the introduction of pneumococcal vaccine in in the developing world so project I did with an economist at Hartford named Michael Cramer and we wrote a paper over Christmas about a retrospective on that program how we set it up and and how it had worked and and then of course it I mean not anticipating that that vaccines would be on everyone's mind come come March and so that that proved to to be the model we had set up called an advanced market commitment proved to be something that people have been thinking about a lot about now in the context of COVID so Michael's been doing a lot of advising of different different groups including the WHO and and the European Union and the White House and so forth so it's it's nice to feel by one one degree of separation that research is is still relevant in the world yeah well anyway those are really exciting stories and for all of you you know incoming graduate students I I hope you heard this common theme that people pursue their academic interest and and you know over time the impact of these areas grow and all of a sudden you find yourself at the epicenter of of a whole new wave of innovation so it's one way to think about is is you want to be in a situation where you're skating to the puck and so what are those areas those really innovative new areas that that eventually will flourish and make a tremendous difference so now we want to open it up to questions we don't have too long but so what the way we'll do this is just please raise your hand and and we will call on you great thank you very much well firstly thank you to all the deal and Sally as well as an ex team I guess for the warm warm welcome to Stanford my question was just really around the EIPA program you mentioned that it's particularly popular these days and clearly very relevant for the audience at the moment do you have any plans to open that up to other graduate programs for instance the MSX program of the GSP I can I can take that one because it relates to a GSP cross degree program so the EIPA program is is students are able to enroll in that from a number of other programs at Stanford including the RMBA program in the law school and and so forth there I think with the plans in coming out there's now plans coming along to create a school of sustainability at Stanford that likely would be the home of the EIPA program and I think there has been some discussion at least in some of the things I've been in about what would be the natural evolution of that program could it expand it's been very successful would there be more opportunities as as Stanford has a bigger footprint in sustainability so I think that's you know there will be some discussion over the coming year about what you know can that program be expanded it's been a wonderful and successful program already and so it's and there's probably more opportunities I don't know that there's I'm not aware of any specific plan at the moment to expand it but I but it's certainly in the air as as something that people will want to think about with the new school it'd be fantastic if we could clearly but that's very exciting that there's a new school of sustainability as well it's a fantastic development I've been following through the question you know we're in the middle of Silicon Valley so so not only is the campus at stealth a you know incredible opportunity to be there but you know how can students take advantage of the place that they're in now I know it's a little bit hard right now with COVID-19 but you know if we roll that back and we we imagine that you know this is past how how can that enrich the graduate student experience and that I'll open up to all of you and whoever wants to go first just go first yeah I'll just jump in and say you know even in COVID times we have very close connections with Silicon Valley with companies a lot of companies some of them sponsor our research a lot of them are have our graduates working there or leading the companies the people at companies are very interested in giving seminars and meeting students hiring them for internships so there is a very close collaboration and in some ways some of our seminars and people's interest in speaking at them and the participation in them has increased quite a bit so one you know one positive effect of COVID is everybody's at home they're not traveling and so we've seen increased participation so there's going to be a lot of events that cross your email a lot of them and I just say pay attention to those events pick ones that interest you go to them sometimes you know if there's questions or opportunities to meet speakers just take advantage of everything that that we offer because even in this current mode there's they're going to be a lot of opportunities I would say to make connections here from meet people in in Silicon Valley well I'll just highlight one of the programs the Precourt Institute offers it's the Tomcat Center organizes the opportunity to work in energy startups in Silicon Valley and there's summertime appointments and they're really really interesting you are you know typically in a very tiny company that's in this very early stage of trying to get off the ground and they're very exciting because you kind of do everything you're you know incredibly important part of the team so I encourage you to take a look at that we also have a fantastic internship it's now going to be called the Schultz energy fellows program where we place people with local government so we place people in Palo Alto Sacramento San Francisco and you work directly with the leaders of these government organizations and really understand what what public service is in terms of a career so do we have any more more questions oh is it okay if I ask a question of course um this is uh really I think for Dean Sats but anyone's welcome to um to opine I just wondered if you had any thoughts on sort of where we are with our current political moment and partisanship and kind of how that all relates to to climate and energy as a political philosopher ask me after in November we'll see fair enough I you know I think it's a challenging moment um and uh I will say that uh one of the things hns is doing that I'm very excited about and you should all um but it's I think now posted on the hns web page and we'll be pushing it out to the community uh under uh the leadership of our new senior associate Dean and the social sciences Rana Bramitsky we're running a um fall uh weekly series on problems in democracy that'll look at everything from healthcare to climate uh to racial injustice to inequality and it will showcase faculty in the university I think we have 39 faculty lined up from the law school the business school the engineering school hns it's really fantastic and uh part of what we're trying to do is you know again evidence-based analysis trying to also understand why in the light of evidence sometimes people disagree what extent those disagreements are about uncertainty about the evidence to what extent it's about different values and uh ranking different values differently so people will make different trade-offs to what extent it's involved in uncertainty so it'll be offered as a one-unit course for undergrads but it will be open to everybody with a Stanford ID and um I think this will be you know a great moment to sample lots of phenomenal research that's going on in the university around everything from voting to political polarization to racial justice um and uh and hopefully spark a lot of really good conversations okay we'll take one last question this will be from Hisu and then we'll wrap up so Hisu why don't you ask your question uh yeah so I'm a I'm an incoming physics phd student so no human science but I have a lot of interest in like political theory like um and like history and those kind of kind like things that are very much unrelated to what I will be researching which is material science um and so what are some of the ways that like uh students who are doing research in a very unrelated field kind of get involved with like what's happening in the other kind of side and also like learn more about more active research in that area um so there's some great classes offered in the philosophy and political science department around uh you know everything from why democracies succeed and fail to what are the ethical values at stake in democracy versus hierarchy uh uh how do we think about uh you know uh you know debates about justice so I would look at and there are a lot of grad offerings as well as the kind of mixed undergrad grad courses we do there's also a lot coming out of again some of the um long-range planning so uh there is an ethics and technology and science initiative uh there's something we're calling a hub that's brings together people from the medical school and people from the sciences from computer science from political philosophy who are interested in ethical and political questions uh the co-leaders of that initiative are Margaret Levy who's a political scientist and runs our Center for Behavioral for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences up on the Hill and uh Rob Breach who is a political philosopher and they're doing some really wonderful things and the aim of this is actually he sort of bridge the gap between our incredible work that goes on in the campus in technology and science with some incredible work going on in ethics and political philosophy and to find ways of bringing that into dialogue um there's a an undergraduate course talk uh co-talk uh probably uh a very popular successful course on ethics politics and computer science uh that try is taught co-talk by an ethicist a policy person and a computer scientist trying to help students move back and forth and understand both all of those different languages um and be able to think you know we shouldn't get into thinking i'm a technologist so i don't need to think about these other questions of ethics uh there are lots of points of uh ethical decision making that is involved in the conduct of scientific research and wherever you come down on those issues you want to be you know able to be reflective on it and have the opportunity to get feedback so it sounds like there are lots of opportunities anyway thank you to to one of the three of you for joining us this was an incredibly great and exciting panel uh so and thank you for sharing your own personal personal stories as well and with this i think we will wrap up this session and uh thank you so much