 We have a terrific group. And I guess the question, I suppose, if I put myself as a graduate student, incoming graduate student, it happened about 30-something years ago, coming in to Stanford, they're all interested in perhaps arguably the most defining challenge of the 21st century, which is energy and climate and the environment and national security. Given that they're coming from different backgrounds, they're entering different schools, different departments. They'll be here anywhere from two to five or six years. In your own thinking, how should they approach their life at Stanford, the academic life, the professional life, their foundation in life for the future? How should they be looking at this? Because each school is different. And yet we are at Stanford, as Stacey mentioned, the walls are very porous. John, let me start with you. That's a narrow and easy question, Arun. So first of all, thanks. It's great to be here. And I'm delighted to see that we had 15 GSB students in this group this year. It's fabulous. It just really shows the incredible enthusiasm and energy we have at the business school right now around climate and energy transition and sustainability broadly. I think you asked a great question about just how to navigate your life at Stanford as a graduate student. And I think it does depend a lot on where you are in some ways. And of course, the first thing you have to do as a graduate in Stanford is just establish your home base in wherever you are. And at the business school, if you come in and you're, say, in our MBA program, you've got 420 people that you get to meet. And that takes a while to meet 420 other people in your class, let alone the people in the other classes. We have the MSX program. Some of them, you guys are here as well. You've already had a chance to be here for a couple of months. But I think finding your home community and establishing a base is really, really important. But I think what Stacey just said is also incredibly true. I mean, it is such an amazing thing at Stanford to be able to just walk across the campus and expose yourself to all different aspects of knowledge. And the energy and environment is probably that of all of the things you could think about at Stanford, it's probably the one that spreads out the most across the campus. And that is, on the one hand, actually incredible. Makes it a little bit complicated to navigate, because you're just going to see slide after slide with like 73 different things that you could get involved with. It's like a fire hose. And so it will take a while to figure that out. But as you start to figure out what are some of the interesting opportunities, whether it's going over to the Earth School and taking classes on environment or engineering, learning about technology, or coming to the business school and learning about entrepreneurship and innovation, or going to a law school and learning about policy, that's a huge opportunity. And I encourage you to do it. And Stanford is a place with, as Stacey said, it's very porous boundaries. That's something we pride ourselves on. And we try to be welcoming at the business school. We want all of you to come over and take some classes and get involved with the things we're doing around sustainability and energy. And for those of you who are at the business school, you definitely want to see this part of campus as often as possible. So I think I just encourage you to take advantage of that. And I'll just say one other thing about that, which is we spend a lot of the time as the deans talking about initiatives that will span across the university. But the truth is, is that all of you, the students, are the glue that holds the university together. Because you're the ones who are going back and forth all the time. And so in some sense, you may not realize it, but you play a huge role at the university by your the connective tissue between the schools. And so we count on you in some sense to actually go ahead and do what we're suggesting that you do. Taking a word from particle physics, I think I don't know if people have told you. You got to the gluons, glue in this campus. Deborah, you're the dean of a very diverse and lots of departments, School of Humanities and Sciences. What is your perspective on this? So thanks. So the School of Humanities and Sciences is 23 departments and 23 programs, spanning creative writing to quantum physics in terms of the interests of people. So I would say, I mean, I want to echo what's been said about, this is an amazing place because we have across the board at Stanford phenomenal faculty. I mean, just phenomenal. And they're all here on one physical campus, which is very unusual. A lot of places you have to go off campus for the medical school or go off campus for the law school. Everything is right here. You can just walk. You can play your gluon role by walking through. The thing I would say is you're so important to the future. I mean, the kind of research you're doing is so important to us. We want you to thrive here in thinking through and contributing to thinking about energy issues. But I would encourage you to be, although you have to find your place and you're part of writing a dissertation, I think Stacey may have been kind of channeling her here, is narrowing down. Every graduate student comes in with this huge, ambitious project and undoable within a finite number of years and a finite number of pages. And we always push our graduate students to narrow. But start by thinking really broad. And the thing that to me is very important is that energy is not just a technical question. It has lots of technical questions that we have to make progress on. But it involves political and ethical questions as well. And so I would encourage you to reach out across the campus and across H&S and take courses in policy. Learn about the history of water conflict in the West or take a course in ethics in the environment or take a course on legal regulation. Just be broad because you're going to need to pull on vast numbers of tools, even if it's not what you specialize in, to attack the energy problems that we face. And this is a great place to do that. We are physically co-located. The barriers are really low. All the deans and all the schools were closely together. We're interested in mounting joint courses and bringing faculty together and faculty and grad students across the schools. So take advantage of that. That's a really phenomenal thing about this place. Something I didn't appreciate. I was at MIT as a graduate student. And MIT is a great place, but it's very, very different, especially in my field, which was philosophy, not only like four of us on the campus and one undergraduate. So it was very different. But it was much more siloed than this place is. And I just think this is, you have an incredible opportunity here. And I urge you to take it and look forward to seeing you in some humanities and sciences courses and working with some of our faculty. Cam, you are a graduate student in physics out here. And now you're the dean of research. That's right. So give us both perspective. Well, in some sense, I still feel like a graduate student in physics sometimes. I really agree with the advice that Dean Levin gave to those of you who are working on the policy and business side to really stay deeply in touch with what's going on the technology side. Obviously, that interface and joint strengths is part of what makes us hopeful that Stanford will have a real impact on this incredibly difficult challenge. How many of you are working on the energy technology side from a science and engineering perspective primarily? How many of you are planning to do that? Raise your hands a little higher so I can see them. Awesome. Thank you. And of those of you, how many of you are in science, the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences? Are in it or plan to be working in it? OK, that's really interesting. Last year, it was a lot higher numbers. I wonder what the shift is. I'm actually a Slimes PI. So for the two of you, I look forward to seeing you there. My own work has been in quantum materials. And I worked in quantum materials because I love physics. Quantum materials are a super exciting intellectual challenge. But I also chose that particular field of physics because when I was a physics graduate student, I was highly optimistic that we could discover new materials that would transform the energy landscape and maybe also the information technology landscape. I personally, the reason why I'm an administrator now is because I felt like the problem has become so severe for the world. And quantum materials has not yet produced those awesome high temperature super connecting cables. I felt like a good chunk of my time could be best spent creating an environment where all of you can do your best work. We really need you. So for the two-thirds of the room who raised your hand that you're working on an energy technology, my advice to you would be yes. Get super fascinated by the work that you're doing. Become experts in your field. Go to conferences in your subfield. But also, your brain and your time are a really incredible asset for the world. So it's really your responsibility to come to programs like this to make sure that you're aware of the broader energy and policy landscape so that you can make sure that you're putting those technical talents to where they have their best highest use. So that's my primary advice for you. And then I also have a request for you. As the dean of research, I oversee a number of services for researchers, parallel to the ones that Professor Bent mentioned for graduate students. So if there is something that you need and it's missing, some help in technology transfer, entrepreneur training, whatever it is, please reach out to me and let me know. Because we're here to provide services that will make you be effective. Steve, school of arts. Well, I think everything that's been said is very much to point. One of the great things about this place is that there are the opportunities for people to really dive deeply into specialization. And there's undoubtedly true that deep technical expertise is going to yield breakthroughs in technology as Cam has already alluded to. At the same time, the university is built these days to take advantage of interdisciplinarity. And in fact, the fact that pre-court is hosting this event is a testimony to the fact that the university is open for business with regard to cutting across disciplinary boundaries. And so do take advantage of that. I guess an additional thing I would say is that, and it's to point that John made earlier, it can be difficult if you're sitting in the business school to try and see what's out there and navigate that. And a lot of it is done by word of mouth, your colleagues, the cohort you're developing here. But we've also done a lot in recent years to try and lower some of the barriers and have started to develop joint curricula of various kinds to take advantage of the fact that everybody knows that energy is a complicated systems problem. And you have to look at it from many points of view. So as an example, there's an interdisciplinary graduate program cited in Stanford Earth, the School of Earth Energy and Environmental Sciences, called the EMET Interdisciplinary Program on Energy and Resources. And that particular program offers the opportunity for someone in the business school to get an MBA and simultaneously get a master's degree in Stanford Earth for those people who are interested, for instance, in the natural resource end of things. And that program offers joint degrees with all of the other schools as well. So there are a number of those kinds of opportunities that you may not know yet about that you would want to look into because they will afford you some ability to diversify your portfolio in a way that actually builds credentials. Stacy, let me ask you a slightly different question. And that is on the director of the Pumpcat Center. You created in your tenure one of the most impactful programs on the innovation transfer program, which we talked about yesterday. And in the context of our ecosystem around us, tell us a little bit about why you did that. Where do you want this to go in the future now that you're handing over to a couple of fantastic people? And how could the students leverage that? So OK, yeah, we're wearing a different hat, which is the former director of the Pumpcat Center. So when we started that program, which was maybe five or six years ago, the reason we started this innovation transfer program, have you had the panel yet or is that later? I think that's later. OK, so you'll get to hear from some of the amazing teams that we've funded and have gone off and started great ventures. But we felt that there was a real absence of that here at the university. So amazing research, an amazing tradition, actually, of innovation and entrepreneurship, but not as much in the area of energy and sustainability. Some of those are really hard things to launch and get outside of the university. They're hardware intensive. They may have very long time frames. And so what we wanted to do in order to have the biggest impact for all this amazing discovery that was taking place at the research level is help facilitate the way of externalizing that, getting that outside. Either the people within Stanford might decide they want to start something new commercially or it could be picked up by industrial partners. And so we started sort of tentatively about six years ago not knowing if there'd be interest and whether it'd be sustainable, speak of sustainable. And we have since gone on to fund about 50 or 60 different teams. We've given out about $4 million in small budgets so everyone gets a small amount, 50 or 100,000. It's a competitive process to get funding. It's teams with a faculty advisor. But those students have gone on to do amazing things with a little bit of seed funding. They've raised about $200 million and they now have revenue-bearing companies. They hired 600 different people. They've got a really great success story. Where I'd like to see that is one, to have that continue. And what I'd really like to see is for that model to continue elsewhere. It doesn't only have to be at Stanford. In fact, that was one of the pushbacks we got when we first started the program. Why do you think all the good ideas are only going to come from Stanford? Of course, we don't think that, right? We might think that internally, but we've never seen that out now. But of course they're not all coming from Stanford and we would love to see similar programs at other universities across the country. So that's sort of the next step. I think it's still a very much a thriving program and I'm glad you'll get a chance to hear more about it. Brian Bartholomew's, he'll become lead the discussion later in the week as the executive director and he leads that program. Terrific. I want you all to think about questions. We'll be opening it up and in fact, I would rather have you have this dialogue with the deans over here. But before we go there, let me ask all of you and in particular Steve, since you are leading the sustainability effort, our campus, and this will be new to you, our campus has new leadership, new president, new provost, and many of the new leaders over here. And our campus has gone through something called the long range planning process to really set itself up for success for the next few decades. And out of that came a highlight, which is a focus on sustainability. And Dean Graham is sort of leading our campus effort on that. But let me just open it up to all of you to tell us a little bit about the long range planning process, what were the outcomes of the broader outcomes, and then we can focus on the sustainability part as well. Mr. Steve. Well, as Arun said, this has been a process that's been going on for a while now. It's coming to a head. And I anticipate that by around the end of the year, the president will make some big public statements about what the outcomes are. One of those, and the one that may concern you folks more than the others, is a sustainability initiative. And of course, Stanford has been deeply engaged in the issue of sustainability, including the energy component of sustainability for well over a decade. In fact, one of the outcomes of the last such big push over a decade ago was the creation of the Precourt Institute and the Woods Institute for the Environment. And those two institutes have done amazing things. In fact, you sitting here as an example of that, to lay down the foundation for what the next step is in terms of Stanford and sustainability. And all of you have seen all the headlines this summer of all the amazing and terrifying things that are happening with regard to climate change and other aspects of climate change that are impacting people at a fundamental level. The time is now for us to act urgently and Stanford intends to be at the forefront and trying to push forward to the next phases of not only the technology of sustainability, but also the full integration to for instance, finance and social impact as well. So you are fortunately here just at the right time to see this come to fruition. And I expect that again by the end of the year you'll hear some big announcements about what we will do in sustainability. Certainly it would include some initiatives that are geared towards improving technological approaches but we expect it to also include strong ties over to, for instance, people in Deborah's school, the ethics of sustainability issues, climate change. And certainly you can't do this without thinking about how all of this has to be funded and that's where we'll be interacting strongly with people in the graduate school business. I'll add, I really agree with everything that Steve said and I think the one thing that's really clear from the long range planning is how much community energy there is around this particular topic. The Area Steering Group on Research reviewed a couple thousand proposals and if you look at where there are huge amounts of energy across the entire campus and all seven schools and in the independent academic units like Precourt and Woods and Symes, there are sort of two topics that everybody's deeply interested in. One of them is data, everybody's very interested in data and the other one, frankly, is sustainability. People across the entire campus, from the School of Medicine to the School of Education to the School of Law, who aren't represented here today to speak for themselves, everyone feels like this is hugely important. And of course there's also a lot of great work going on up at Slack, which none of us have talked about yet. Any other thoughts? Broadly on the long range planning and our president has said that Stanford is a purposeful university. So any thoughts on just the broader aspect of the long range planning and where we're going? I mean, there's a kind of overarching theme of at least part of the long range plan, which is trying to remove the barriers to getting research out into the public. So we have a bunch of accelerator projects that are trying to accelerate the research our faculty and graduate students and postdocs are doing and bring it out to the world. So we have an innovative medicines accelerator that's trying to remove some of the barriers to the development of new medicines. We have a socials problem solving kind of accelerator to think about how do you tackle major social problems in partnership with NGOs and government and for profit companies to get the work out. We have a public humanities project to take the work of our humanities faculty and get it out to the public. So I think one of the kind of key pieces of the long range plan is how do we accelerate the development of research and how do we accelerate the development of impact in the world? And obviously the sustainability initiative fits completely in that so does the social problem solving initiative. We've got a data science initiative similarly focused and a human centered artificial intelligence. And I think that fits with a purposeful because although I actually believe in knowledge for knowledge's sake and I don't wanna say there aren't non-instrumental reasons to care about being an educated person. It's also true that we have a responsibility. You have a responsibility to share your research with a broader public for social good. I'll just pick up on one thing that Deborah said which is years ago after I was an undergraduate here I was a student at Oxford University in England and some of you may have been to see places like Oxford or Cambridge in the UK which were the original universities. Everything there was built with walls around it all of the colleges and the walls were built to protect the people inside the university from the townspeople but also to protect the townspeople from the people inside the university. And when universities came to the United States they were modeled on those same universities from Europe with that same idea of protecting the university as an institution from the world and setting it apart. And Stanford was just built in a different way. That goes back to the founding of the university and particularly to the way it grew up in the 1950s and 60s as a national and then global institution. That was part of the way it was built as a university was to be, Stacy said we're porous between the schools but we're also porous with the outside world and that's just built into the way Stanford is and I think part of the long range planning process has just been thinking about if that's part of the by design of Stanford as an institution then what are the biggest problems and opportunities in the world that as an institution we should be thinking about? And the long time has basically as identified four or five I don't know that we've actually nailed down whether it's four or five but key areas and they're basically what you would expect. They're the biggest challenges or opportunities in the world, they're the biomedical revolution, they're the rise of data and artificial intelligence, climate and sustainability and the general problem of finding solutions to all kinds of social problems and inequities that are problematic in our society and around the world and thinking about how as a combined institution across the schools we can be with our research and with our education and be productive contributors to the world and that's, I think you're gonna get to be here in an exciting time because that process has been going on for two years and now this year we're just last spring we started until we launched the first major institute on AI that came out of Long Range Plan but I think over the course of the next year too we'll be launching a whole bunch of new university-wide institutes and initiatives and so you're gonna get to be here at I think a really exciting time for Stanford. Stacy? I wanna just say something a little bit historical about the Long Range Plan because I think it gives some insight into how Stanford's philosophy maybe differs from a lot of other institutions. So you probably aren't familiar with it because it started two years ago but the way the Long Range Plan process was run here was it was open to the entire Stanford community. Students, staff, faculty were given the opportunity over a course of a couple months to submit proposals and we got thousands of proposals. This was the 2,000 proposals that Cam was referring to and what you're hearing about now is literally a distillation through many different teams took those thousands of proposals, picked which ones resonated or had the most support or really took advantage of Stanford's unique strengths and in areas of education, research, our community and this is what you're hearing. So the point is Stanford is really a bottom-up type of place. You have the opportunity here as students to influence what Stanford does as well. You don't all need to do that of course but many of the things we're talking about the programs, the initiatives originated from students especially interdisciplinary ones who really started something new back when they were students here and said I wanna work between these faculty and these schools and then those things grow over time and then they really become big initiatives of the university. Cam, you hit. I did, I wanted to add one more aspect of the Long Range Planning outcome which I think is more of an internal thing so it won't maybe feature as much in big public announcements but I think one decision that we collectively made at the university is that wherever it's feasible and reasonable we want to make our resources shared resources instead of resources that are captured by an individual researcher or an individual PI. Sometimes, I mean I'm a low-temperature physicist. I don't want anyone else soldering the wires on my cryostat. There are some things that really do need to be controlled by a single group but for research computation, data services, nano-facilities, imaging facilities, makerspaces and other life science facing facilities. There's really I think a great opportunity. We do a pretty good job already but a great opportunity to do an even better job of setting up those capabilities in such a way that there is no structural barrier to anybody in this room so that you could just access all of those facilities just by signing up for them and so then your research can really be driven by you without needing to wait for your PI to talk to another PI to see if you can have access to that wire monitor. So it's another homework assignment I'd like to give you so when you go back and plan out your research, think about what are the things in those categories that you need. If there's a data set that you'd like us to have a subscription to, right? Or there's a kind of spectrometer that would really help you that's not available. Think about that. Again, you can let me know about it directly, make sure whatever PI's you're working with know about it and get that fed into the hopper and have possible priorities for acquisition. And maybe some of those things can be here in time to help you with your research. Terrific. We have half an hour left. We are halfway through. And let's open it up for questions. And I know the first question is always the largest barrier but we have a first one over there. And, yeah, the mics, yeah. Hello? Sorry. Just name yourself and say your name and school. Do I have to stand up? No, you don't have to stand up. You can sit down. My name is Alba and I'm from Aerospace. And I wanted to ask you this. So you've been speaking about long range planning. So how much exactly does it see in the future? Is it one year, five, 10 years? And how confident are you in this prediction? Anyone wants to? Well, I think the university-wide initiatives that we've been talking about are things that we think will be essential activities for Stanford for the foreseeable future. I don't think that we see data science and AI or the biomedical revolution or climate change and sustainability or the need to do foundational research. None of those are things that are going to change in the near future. So identifying those big topics and thinking about what are the main things that we want to achieve in those topics? What kind of work can we do that will accelerate research to impact? And what resources do we need to do that? The details of it will change as we go along, but I think we feel pretty confident that those are important topics for a while. Could I add something? So in this process, we've been asked to think about 20 years out, sort of to the long view, as Canvas talked about. But we're also trying to identify and prioritize things that we can do very quickly that will have a short-term but really impactful outcomes as well. So we're thinking about sort of the whole range of timescales involved here. Question? Over here. Hi. My name's Oquisi. I'm from the electrical engineering department. I had a question with regards to the business classes. For an engineer that wants to start learning about the entrepreneurial side of the energy field, do you think that there are a number of prerequisites that they'd have to do in order to get into the classes? Or is it just more like, maybe the classes could be stuff that you can come in without really experience of business and entrepreneur stuff? I think the most important thing is an open mind and a good attitude. And that'll get you a long way. So we have a whole range of different classes around entrepreneurship. Some of them are classes that are focused on managing and leading organizations. So they're heavily focused on the management and leadership side. And you can sign up for those out of engineering. They build to some extent on our core curriculum. But then you can have entry. And then a lot of them are experiential classes. They're just classes we're going to work in teams on projects. And you're going to build a business plan, try to build out a business model. In fact, some of them end up later with Stacey as ventures with the ones in energy. And those, actually, we love having engineers in those classes. Because it's an opportunity then to create teams that where you put together business students with engineering students who might have technical expertise in an area. And actually, some of the most interesting projects we get end up being interdisciplinary projects where you have both someone who's people who are expert on the business model and thinking about how to build out a business plan and think about the customers and people who have a really good technical foundation so they can think about the underlying product. And we've had many great collaborative companies come out of business school classes. So yes, we want to see you, all of you. Startup Garage is probably the biggest of our experiential classes, which is a class that we have about 300 students a year go through that class. Thank you. Questions? Comments? Yep. I've heard a lot of positive, oh, thank you. My name's Nathaniel. I'm from Civil Environmental Engineering. I've heard a lot of positive encouragement of graduate students getting involved in research. And I've heard of a lot of different resources. Pre-court Institute, Siams, VPGE, Bits and Watts Initiative. All of these places have their own websites. Where's a good starting point? And is there a formal application process? Is it just a cold call to a professor? Is it an email to the Institute itself? Where do we start to get involved in research? A Google map, or energy at Stanford, that's a good idea. Any thoughts? I can start answering that. I think in terms of research inquiries, you really have to reach out to the specific faculty member. You can get information on all the various websites we're talking about. You can find out who is doing the research. But we are not a top-down organization. Nobody at the Institute is going to be able to assign a student to a faculty member. It's going to have to be done between the research group and then the student. I just want to echo that comment that is something that Stacey said before. This is a truly bottom-up place. You may be in civil and environmental engineering, but you could have a co-advisor in another department. I'm in mechanical engineering. I'm co-advising two chemical engineers in my group who sit in my group meetings and one from physics. So this is, I mean, you could have as many co-advisors. In fact, the whole idea of things like a Bits and Watts initiative is to bring faculty with different expertise together so that the student who is part of that team gets the benefit of multiple advisors and their expertise. And by the time they leave, they are well-rounded in their education and research. So that's the whole idea. Yes? So I want to express a slightly more pessimistic view about the bottom-upness. We're also an incredibly decentralized university, and that has a lot of great things, but it does make it challenging to get information. We're trying to do better at having websites. So Stacey had mentioned the energy websites that try to help people pool. But it's not so easy sometimes to find the appropriate place. I agree the advisor is a good place to start, but you've sometimes got to reach beyond an advisor to really have a sense of what's going on, because your advisor might not even know all the things that are going on that are relevant. So there's a challenge here. We're trying to do better at respecting the good parts of the decentralization and the bottom-up, but helping people navigate it better. So I think it will be somewhat challenging. Let's work in progress. To that point, being well aware of the challenges that particularly you as a new graduate student face and trying to navigate the landscape of energy and sustainability, one of the outcomes of the sustainability initiative we hope will be a recognition of the fact that there needs to be some sort of centralization, at least of information, so that you can, in fact, get past that problem. It's part of the reason we're having it, this energy standpoint slack. Yep. Hi there, I'm Chris from Chemistry. One of the things I've gathered about the difference between undergrad and graduate school is many of these degrees you're expected to focus very narrowly, and you're intended to get a degree of expertise in an area. How do you recommend both maintaining this breadth wall being in a program that, so for instance, my program, it's encouraged not to take very many classes. You're supposed to be in the lab. How do you recommend both staying broad wall in a program that's intended to make you focus narrowly on a subject? I would say classes are great, but seminars are also great. You don't have to be enrolled in a three-unit class that requires you to do 10 hours and more of work every week in order to really get the benefit of being at Stanford. So I think take a lot of advantage of seminars and of conversations with different people. And also, within the chemistry department, you can look for a PI in a research group that's supportive of your desire to educate yourself broadly and will be supportive of your taking key energy classes. And since I know a lot of the chemistry faculty, I know that there are some that will be supportive of that. I would think of yourself as an asset and put yourself where you can best flower. Any other thoughts? I completely agree with that. It is a challenge because graduate school is about honing and narrowing and becoming an absolutely deep expert in an area. Unlike in undergraduate, we want some depth in our undergraduates, but it's not a full-scale immersion the way it is in a PhD program. But at the same time, lots of the faculty are connected to people outside their department and to other areas. And lots of the issues that people work on have other aspects that are relevant to being deep. And so I would say try to find out where those are, take advantage, find a faculty member or a group of faculty members who are supportive. The advisors love students who are both deep and broad. I don't know who your advisor is, but you might want to just suggest that in your group meetings, you invite people from other groups to come and give a research talk. And that becomes like a class then. It's like a tutorial of a different subject. We do that all the time. So that's where you broaden yourself, even though you may be sitting in a group, suddenly you get someone from a different field coming and giving a seminar. It's a new topic, but you learn. And that's the whole idea of broadening yourselves to the research meetings. Hello, my name's Jordan. I'm with the business school. I like the self-identification, though. You know, I decided to hype up the business school today in anticipation for this talk. One of the reasons I came to the business school, I previously worked in politics, but I really wanted to gain some technical training on how to operationalize big impactful ideas. And one of the things that has been mentioned multiple times is this effort to accelerate ideas to impact, which is fascinating to me. So my question is two-fold. One is, what do you see as the biggest impact, or the biggest obstacle to accelerating those ideas to impact? Because I feel like a lot of times, we just have many, many brilliant people thinking up great ideas, and so many of them never actually make it into the public. And the second would be more personal, which is, for somebody like me who's a new MBA student, what would be your single best piece of advice for how to engage with that process? So the obstacles differ, I think, in different areas. We know that in the innovative medicines, there are, you know, you hit a block of trying to scale up and get the pharmaceutical companies. There are blocks, so they're trying to figure out how to jump over those blocks. In the social science realm, I would say sometimes the problem is that the relevant communities are not partners in the room, and so they're not co-creating the knowledge or shaping the knowledge. So that's one of the things we're looking to do is to create some labs in the social sciences that'll involve partnerships with, let's say, cities around social problems. The cities will be brought into the room. They'll be co-creating. The research will test it and then scale it with the cities. But I think the obstacles vary and sometimes they're legal obstacles, so we're also trying to create infrastructure to help people with their memorandums of understanding so that faculty don't know how to do that. I mean, a lot of faculty and a lot of graduate students, I would say, don't know how to write for a public audience and of course, part of what you're trained to do is to write for peers and peer review and publish in the top journals and that's all super, super important, but there's another aspect. We know that science communication is really, really important and we haven't been doing as good a job as we should be and so I think we're trying to think about ways to help our faculty be better at getting their ideas out into the public in a way that can be part of the public conversation. Deborah, you mentioned earlier something very important that came out of the Long Beach Planning is the accelerator. Can students get involved in that and if so, how? So all of these things are in process, but I think graduate students definitely can get involved. The impact labs are just being set up. They'll have faculty PIs but they'll certainly involve graduate students. We have an immigration policy lab that's very successful and that involves a bunch of graduate student co-workers on the project so I think that'll all be coming out of the Long Beach Plan. It's still, we're still launching and so we're still, it's all a work in progress but hopefully by the end of this year a lot of these things will be launched. Jordan, are you interested in impact in a particular area or more generally in the whole process of acceleration to impact? A lot, but sustainability and energy. Sustainability and energy. So you asked what's the first thing a graduate student would do? I would say try to find a mechanism within the business school maybe to get academic credit for something and if not do it anyway. Get a group of other people together from the business school and maybe the law school to do a survey of what do we most need to do in sustainability and what are their barriers to impact and then come back and report to this group in six months. I think that would be an amazing. You got a homework now. You got a homework. Yeah, there you go. I think kind of a club or a practicum that looks at this issue could be tremendously helpful. That's your specific interest. School of Earth is open for business. So. Yeah. I just echo, I love Camp's ideas. Fantastic, that'd be a great starting point. I do think that from the programs that we have at the business school, I would say that many of the challenges we see for students who want to do impact-oriented work, whether it's in energy or environment or in other areas, I think one of the big challenges is scaling. So a lot of students want to come in and they want to start on the entrepreneurial level and then the challenge is just how do you get a flywheel that you can think of an idea that can be fabulously impactful at a local, small level? And how do you think about a business model that will scale or something that will take off? I think we'd say the other category is to come in at the other level and to think about how do you make change at a level where there already is scale with large organizations or with government? And there are the challenges typically more political. It's how do you reorient or how do you get an idea that sort of catch hold in a larger setting? And those are both great ways to come at the problem and I think it's just a, but there's sort of specific challenges in either way and I think if you look around at faculty, for example, Stanford, who are working in these accelerators, they're actually, they come from both of those directions. Some of the initiatives are around policy impact and how do you work through large organizations, institutions to have an impact on say climate or sustainability and the other direction, just how do you come from bottoms up innovation? And you have, you know, you can try thinking from both those directions but I think CAM actually, that's a great way to think about it which is just go out and your own survey and come up with your own answer and this group would probably love to hear it when you have it. This is Massimo from Italy, electrical engineer. Very simple question. You mentioned some projects that comes from Stanford on the energy and sustainability field that they say went out and were successful. Could you give some example of actual, what they did in order to reduce emission or make more clean energy, you know, like what they've done? Do you have an example? I can give. Which time do you have? Yeah. Stacey. You'll hear more about this actually later in the week but I could, I mean, some of our earlier teams that we funded that have now been in business for about five years. One was on using sort of satellite imagery and computer automation to figure out where to place solar cells on rooftops. There was another one also doing really well on how to use machine learning to discover materials. So they're working with lots of different applications, many in sustainability. So materials for, say, solar cells, rather than going and synthesizing all of them, they can scour the literature and use machine learning to figure out what the next best material is going to be. So those are just examples of a couple of them but it's broad ranging. Like I said, we've had about 50 different teams. Some of them are related to energy efficiency, just like smart outlets that will help you figure out when to turn off and on devices that are already being deployed in some of the stadiums in the area, for example. One of the companies that came out of this being funded by the Tomcat Center is, in fact, I'm advising them, helping them, is to use drones to go along transmission lines and distribution network to find where the trees are and where the fire hazards are because you've just arrived at California, I'm assuming, but California had a major problem with fires and the electricity network. And so this is, and they are right in the middle and they had planned it long back before the fires happened but they are subtly very much in demand at this point. So this is another example and there are many such, as Stacy said, you'll be hearing about that later. Questions? Any other comments, questions? Yep. Hi, my name is Bowen and I'm starting my master's in civil and environmental engineering. My program will be sustainable design and construction. Anyway, so I recently learned that the pre-court energy efficiency center closed down. Is anyone an expert in pre-court? But anyway, so I am interested in the building energy efficiency projects. I was wondering, because the energy efficiency center closed down, if the projects won't be available anymore or are there any more ways you can still get involved in by, I don't know, some ways. I guess the question is for me to answer. Yeah, the center has closed down but the activity, the research activity is going on. You should talk to Martin Fisher, Rishi Jane and a few other people and get into that network of faculty looking at energy efficiency and I'm sure they'll be happy to work with you. Steve Camelo, who is in the business school is teaching, co-teaching a course with Diane Grunick on energy efficiency, policy and technology. So many opportunities, yeah. So we can chat later on. Okay, sure. Any other questions, comments? Yep. Well, hi, I'm Jerry. Well, I'm from Materia Science and the Engineering program. Now I'm a master, I'm in my master's program and I think some of our students like me would have an idea of a new pursuing PhD program. So do you have any advice for us who, for students now in a master's program and then would like to continue for a PhD program? Cause maybe for a student like us we'll think that a research experience would be incredible, important. But maybe for our two years in Master of Science program and we have to spend a lot of effort on research, is this right for us or maybe do you have any idea? You said you're in. Yeah, I'm interested. Potentially, yeah, it's very program specific. It's gonna depend on exactly what program you're in, whether there are routes that are already in place for master's students to consider petitioning for the PhD program. It's also very program specific whether there are gonna be research opportunities for master's students. But that comes back to an earlier question. If you're a master's student and you say, I'm here for the master's, I didn't think about doing research but now I wanna try it out. That's generally a one-to-one discussion with a faculty member to find a faculty member who has an opening and you're enthusiastic about that research program. So there are routes but it will depend very much on your program. Let me get personal with all of you. At one point in your career, you were graduate students. You were, imagine yourself entering graduate school and you have all had very successful and diverse careers. You've got a diversity that is on parallel. Going back, and if you were that person entering graduate school now, what would you be telling yourself about how to plan your career in the future? How to plan graduate school moving forward? What would you be telling yourself when you were 20 something years old? Cam, you wanna start? You're thinking about it, I know. Yeah. You wanna go later. Well, no, I already gave, I think some of my advice earlier but I guess I think the most important thing is to think of yourself as the author of your own career and your own trajectory and your own growth and think about what you need. Don't just look around and see what everybody else is doing and what other people who have been successful are doing. Really think about what your goals are, what you can do to make sure that your research is the most effective that it can be, why you're doing that research, what you wanna do after you do that research, how that research fits into the larger context of knowledge in your field. You should take ownership of that. I think the number one mistake that most graduate students make is they just assume that the other people around them know what they're doing and they do to some extent but they don't know what's right for you to do as well as you can figure out what's right for you to do. That's my primary piece of advice. Deborah? Yeah, I completely agree with that. Being a graduate student's really different than being an undergrad because you are writing your own life here. I mean, undergrad, you make some choices but a lot of things are already structured for you. Here, you've gotta decide for yourself what is the orienting project that's going to be meaningful to you and that's actually something nobody can do for you. You've gotta do it yourself but you can get help and so I think the other thing about being the author of your own life is but don't think you have to do it totally alone. You've got VPGE, you've got departments, you've got advisors, you've got resources here that are, we're all committed, enthusiastic about your succeeding and thriving here so the other piece of advice I'd give is don't be afraid to ask people for help, advice, information, not that they can answer the ultimate question about what you should write your thesis on or what you should do with your life or whether you should go into an academic career or a non-academic, those are questions you have to answer for yourself but people are here to help deliberate with you and provide information and provide resources so you make the best decision you can. And I just say to that point, be proactive. Don't wait for things to come to you. This place has millions of opportunities available to you but they aren't necessarily gonna come and knock on your door so go after them, ask questions as was just said, they'll yield tremendous benefits to you. Stacy? I'm gonna get a little more personal back to Rune's question and say that I was actually I think the counter example of everything we're telling you to do now is interdisciplinary, see what's out there. I was unbelievably narrow as a PhD student in chemistry to the point of the chemistry question. I took my minimum six classes that I was just in the lab doing my research and I took advantage of none of these things we're telling you to do. And I guess I'm proof that you don't have to be brought in interdisciplinary as a graduate student to still go on and do interesting things but were I to do it differently I probably would open my eyes a little bit more than I did and look around and take advantage of other things. What I thought interdisciplinary was when I was a PhD student in chemistry was taking a physics class or a double E. I certainly didn't take anything in economics or policy or anything like that. I was just really deeply interested in the science and the scientific question that I was trying to answer and it had some application but it seemed just the type of thing you might write to a funding agency. Now I'm all about the application my career has completely turned and I probably would have served myself better having done a little bit more looking out but you can still be successful. I don't want everybody to think you have to do all of the things we're talking about. There is a place for every one of your trajectories here at Stanford. Some of you just want to get really deep into a research area if you're in the PhD program and other ones really want to learn many different things. Well I was in a PhD program in economics in graduate school and so I actually I've often wondered what it was I would tell myself I was starting again and I'm actually not totally sure if I had been myself again I probably wouldn't have listened. I mean I think for me the thing about I found about graduate school was it was the I was in a PhD program at MIT for three years. I never had a period in my life when I learned more. I just it was like I was just absorbing so much information and I hadn't really done economics before that it was it was incredible just as an intellectual experience. It was also just incredibly hard and isolating and I was depressed like half the time and in retrospect I was doing well but I didn't feel that way at the time I just looked around and everyone seemed like they had figured it out and I felt like I was flailing and I had no idea what I was gonna write my dissertation on or if it was gonna work out or if I was gonna get a job and that was really really tough and I guess I wish someone had just sort of said something to me at the beginning like don't worry everyone feels this way and when they're doing a PhD program and it works out for almost all of them and that wasn't really the way I felt in Gradual and that was true by the way even though it was a great wonderful environment and I had lots of people and friends around it was just it's so individualistic for those of you who are gonna get into doing your own research as a PhD student it's very individualistic it has to be you have to deliver basically and that's really hard and so I think just trying to just remember that everyone around you is also going through that even if they're not saying it that probably would have helped me as a PhD student. Right, well these are very very very busy people and they brought so much diversity and depth in the discussion let's give them a big round of applause for the time out here. Thank you so much, thank you so much.