Changemakers

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

How can technology make social impact organizations more effective? 

A tablet application that helps nurses in Cameroon counsel patients. A program in Poland that assists women wishing to enter the IT industry. The use of machine learning to predict the treatment effects of blood pressure control. The lab starts with a specific challenge and devises a solution with broad potential.

“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.”

Seventy thousand. That’s the number of molecular products made across the globe each year—“and almost none is made sustainably,” says Thomas Jaramillo. As director of the SUNCAT Center for Interface Science and Catalysis, he seeks to change that.

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.

“Today 180 billion kilograms of ammonia are produced globally, to feed 8 billion people,” Jaramillo notes. It’s a chemical engineering success story, in many ways. 

But this process also causes a huge amount of global CO2 emissions. As Jaramillo sees it, the great successes of the past are due for a wholesale reevaluation, knowing what we know now. That’s precisely what SUNCAT does each day.

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

The first pivotal Stanford experience for Langston Buddenhagen, '25? Hitting pause. 

Having graduated from high school at a peak in the pandemic, he decided to take a gap year — which he proceeded to fill to the brim.

“I started a tutoring service, worked with the ACLU, worked for the City of Oakland’s Reimagining Public Safety Task Force, and worked with the San Francisco District Attorney's office, focusing on our over-dependence on mass incarceration,” he says.

When he did arrive on campus, those experiences led Buddenhagen to a Cardinal Quarter fellowship through the Haas Center for Public Service, which helped him return to the DA’s office as an intern, and then to 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. 

Is a career announcement forthcoming? Too soon to say, he clarifies. But these experiences have let him “see the levers of equity that we can and can’t pull through policy and service.” And in no uncertain terms they let him know “that I’m working to repair the world.”