Stanford Momentum

This is the moment.

Learn how Stanford’s community of thinkers, makers, doers, and boundary pushers is shaping our future. Join us to do even more.

New ways of thinking:Preparing Citizens

We are preparing students to live, work, and serve as thoughtful citizens through groundbreaking new curricula, enhanced resources, and financial aid.

Education for a life of purpose

Civil society is fraying a bit. COLLEGE has a fix.

The second envelope
For political science professor Michael McFaul, getting admitted to Stanford was only the first step.
Ethics on the brain
Three Embedded Ethics Fellows describe what’s top of mind as they work with today’s computer science students—tomorrow’s technologists, innovators, and leaders—and what gives them hope for the future.
Cardinal rules
Andrew Luck, ’12, MA ’23, reflects on what student-athletes get, and what they give.

Move ideas to action:Accelerating Solutions

Learning. Health. Social Impact. Sustainability. We’re prioritizing on-campus accelerators that prioritize off-campus partnerships—and impacting the widest populations with the greatest need.

The most wicked problems

How Daniel Ho is nudging government into the 21st century.

Reading the room
A new online tool is radically transforming how to identify struggling young readers.
Outrunning the next pandemic
Give the world one vaccine and we’re immune to one disease. Accelerate the creation of new medicines and you give the world a different future.

Seek knowledge:Catalyzing Discovery

At Stanford, our faculty and students are driven by curiosity. Because our humanity depends on it.

It’s like herding atoms

Monika Schleier-Smith is connecting the building blocks of reality in patterns that could revolutionize computing and reveal the structure of space and time.

Experiments without experimenting
Guido Imbens uses data science to search for cause and effect in the wild.
Using machine learning to help refugees succeed
How GeoMatch is revolutionizing resettlement efforts.

Our planet, our home:Sustaining Life

Finding a way for humans and nature to thrive together must be our top priority. Across Stanford, efforts are underway to safeguard our environmental future.

Battery (super) power

Yi Cui is harnessing the power of nanoscience to grow extremely small structures—which play a huge role in the clean energy transition.

From human health to climate health
Molecular engineers are using lessons gleaned from biology to help save the planet.

Thinkers.
Makers. Doers.
Boundary Pushers.

The Stanford community overflows with curious people unafraid to try, change, and try again. Meet some of them.

Kai Mottley
Undergraduate
“Climate change is the main issue of my generation,” says Kai Mottley, ’26. “I feel like I have a responsibility to do something about it.”
Rising sea levels and threats to the endemic species of his home state of Hawai'i are driving the longtime surfer to action.
Mottley hopes his interests in entrepreneurship and energy will combine with his love of the ocean to propel him toward new solutions. “The idea of creating something novel, useful, and important—such as a startup in ocean energy or marine renewable energy—sounds like a fulfilling challenge,” he says.
Yuhe Faye Wang
IDEAL Provostial Fellow
“In an era of sharply rising inequality, it’s vital to properly account for how race is embedded into our economic systems,” says Yuhe Faye Wang, an IDEAL Provostial Fellow within Stanford’s history department.
Wang’s research explores the role of race in 19th-century Supreme Court decisions that bolstered protections for corporations—protections that were originally intended to ensure the rights of newly emancipated Black Americans, and later Chinese non-citizens.
“If we want to properly understand why these inequalities exist and persist, we must pay close attention to how race and capitalism became further entangled through the post-Reconstruction expansion of corporate power.”
Lisa Goldman Rosas
Assistant Professor, School of Medicine
“Health equity means that all people have the potential to live their most healthy lives,” says Lisa Goldman Rosas, principal investigator at Stanford Medicine’s Food for Health Equity Lab.
As assistant professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford School of Medicine, Goldman Rosas researches how increased access to healthy food, like locally grown fruits and vegetables, impacts chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease within communities.
She hopes her work with local health centers and partners will provide critical evidence of food-as-medicine programs to policymakers—and help determine how to scale these programs to benefit more people.
Jodi Anderson, Jr.
Researcher, Stanford Accelerator for Learning
“There's a deep sense of pride in being part of the generation that’s actively shaping the future,” says Jodi Anderson, Jr., ’22, MA ’22, a researcher for the Stanford Accelerator for Learning (SAL).
Anderson is helping early-stage educational technology entrepreneurs access resources to implement and rapidly scale ideas—and create equitable, diverse, and responsive learning solutions. Anderson views accelerators as powerful vehicles for social change, noting the role of SAL in helping launch two justice technology startups, Rézme and PipeDreamers.
“It is quite miraculous. Teams are bringing solutions across the world,” he says. “No single person could do that on their own.”