Changemakers

The Stanford community overflows with curious thinkers, makers, doers, and boundary pushers. Meet some of them.

Olympics bound

Asher Hong, ’26

Gymnastics

At the age of three, while other kids in Plano, Texas, were building forts and playing with Play-Doh, Asher Hong was climbing door frames. He wanted to be Spider-Man.

Seventeen years later, Hong holds records Peter Parker never dreamed of. This past spring the rising junior helped the Stanford men’s gymnastics team win its fifth consecutive NCAA championship, while claiming individual titles on three events. As a member of the men’s senior national gymnastics team, he was the all-around champion at the 2023 U.S. Championships. (This followed a third-place finish in 2022, and Hong credits his improvement to Stanford’s team-first approach.)

Hong is at the forefront of a wave of gymnasts—which includes his younger brothers Xander and Kiefer, both members of the junior national team—who are attempting to return the U.S. men's program to prominence.

Maggie Steffens, ’17, MS ’18

Water polo

Maggie Steffens dreamed of being an Olympic soccer player, but she also loved swimming, basketball, and gymnastics. Her solution? Water polo, which combined elements of each.

At Stanford, she led the women’s water polo team to three NCAA championships. Outside of the pool, Steffens earned a bachelor’s in science, technology, and society as well as a master’s in management, science, and engineering. (She wasn’t the only Steffans in the Stanford pool. Her older sister, Jessica, helped bring the Cardinal to the NCAA championships, and played for the 2008 and 2012 Olympic teams.)

Steffens has only extended her family’s legacy, earning golds in the 2012, 2016, and 2020 Olympics. She was named most valuable player in both the London and Rio Games, and went on to become the sport’s all-time leading scorer. As Team USA captain, Steffens is hoping for a fourth straight gold medal, something no water polo team—men’s or women’s—has achieved.

Valarie Allman, ’17

Track and field

Blame the pasta. Prior to high school, Valarie Altman’s heart had been set on dance. She even toured the country with a traveling dance program. But in ninth grade she found herself drawn to track and field—and then to the offer of a free spaghetti meal for anyone who tried their hand at discus throwing. By graduation she held the state record.

Allman went on to be a six-time All-American at Stanford, while earning a bachelor’s in product design. She claimed gold during her Olympic debut at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics and holds the North American discus throw record as well as 27 of the 30 longest distances for American women in the sport’s history. She heads to Paris this summer with fresh bronze and silver wins from the 2022 and 2023 World Athletics Championships, respectively.

Looking back, she has said, “that was the best spaghetti dinner of my entire life.”

Jonathan Tan, ’27

Swimming

Jonathan Tan’s parents had him learn to swim at age five—it was purely a safety thing. But by age eight, he was swimming competitively. Now 22, Tan is one of Singapore’s best swimmers.

He has spent the past few years distinguishing himself at the Southeast Asian Games and other international competitions, having narrowly missed qualifying for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Despite extended breaks from training—he had to fulfill his national service requirement—Tan won gold medals in the 50m and 100m freestyle events at the 2023 Southeast Asian Games, qualifying for the 2024 Olympics in the process.

After his national service, Tan enrolled at Stanford in 2023, where he is preparing for a career in finance. He says that the more competitive crop of swimmers in the United States motivates him, and he hopes to win a medal for his home country in his Olympic debut this summer.

On campus

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.”

Langston Buddenhagen, ’25, MA ’25

Undergraduate student

Having graduated from high school mid-pandemic, Langston Buddenhagen, '25 decided to take a gap year — which he dedicated largely to public service.

That led Buddenhagen to a Cardinal Quarter fellowship through the Haas Center for Public Service, which led to an internship with a district attorney, and then work at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He is now a Cardinal Quarter Peer Advisor.

“Growing up as a young man of color in a historically underserved community gave me a unique perspective into issues of inequities — and introduced me to a key way of addressing those problems, which is public service,” Buddenhagen says.

Susan Athey

Economics of Technology Professor

As founding director of Stanford’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab, Susan Athey oversees a wide swath of topics, from prescription drugs to machine learning. But ultimately the lab concerns itself with a single, all-important question:

How can technology make social impact organizations more effective?

“I’m looking for use cases that will demonstrate something generalizable, so that other organizations will be able to get an idea of what might work for them,” Athey says. "As a university, we’re preparing our students to be leaders—and for all this technological innovation to benefit society."

Thomas Jaramillo

Professor of chemical engineering and energy science & engineering

As director of the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, Thomas Jaramillo organizes his work around one urgent fact: The world’s dependence on fossil fuels will persist until alternate technologies can compete economically.

Case in point: Our production of ammonia, which is used for fertilizer, which in turn is necessary to grow food. As engineering stories go, it was a great success. But we’ve learned that the process also causes a massive amount of global CO2 emissions.

“We have to fix this,” Jaramillo says. “We need new technologies and new innovations—we have to rewrite that story with sustainability in mind.”