Discovery Grants expand our vision of sustainability research

What can plant fossils reveal about surviving extreme climate change? How do pathogens affect one another within the same host? How are shipwrecks impacting ocean ecosystems?

Researchers are pursuing these questions and more through 10 projects that have been awarded $1.42 million in Stanford Doerr Discovery Grants. Launched in 2023, the Discovery Grants program supports cutting-edge, knowledge-driven fundamental research, with a high priority on creative approaches to exploring new areas. 

One project funded in this round will explore how groups of animals behaving collectively, like bird flocks and insect swarms, can be understood as forms of matter. Another will seek to understand the mechanics of different types of earthquakes using machine learning. Others will investigate how pressure influences solid-state battery performance, the long-term environmental impacts of installing underwater barriers to block vulnerable ice sheets from warm seawater, how haze from wildfires affects plants, and the behavioral and psychological science of climate impacts.

“Discovery Grant research plays a critical role in driving scientific progress and innovation, creating new knowledge, opening doors to new approaches, and expanding our vision of what is possible in sustainability research,” said Arun Majumdar, dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “These grantees epitomize the powerful work happening at the school and across the university to continually expand the frontiers of our understanding of the world.”

Foundational, curiosity-driven research is an essential part of the school and the basis for future innovation. The two-year Discovery Grants from the Doerr School of Sustainability support efforts to advance understanding of Earth, life, and engineered systems. 

The 2025 project titles and principal investigators (PIs) are listed here. For full descriptions, visit the 2025 Discovery Grants page.

Assessing our anthropogenic oceans
PI: Krish Seetah, Associate Professor of Environmental Social Sciences, of Oceans, and of Anthropology and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

Fuel for survival: Plant energy reserves through time and turmoil
PI: C. Kevin Boyce, Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences

An active matter framework for collective animal behavior
PI: Nicholas Ouellette, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The psychology of climate solutions: Effects of an immersive documentary
PIs: Madalina Vlasceanu, Assistant Professor of Environmental Social Sciences, and Sara Constantino, Assistant Professor of Environmental Social Sciences

A machine learning approach to seismic source classification
PI: Greg Beroza, Professor of Geophysics

Building a computer vision tool to quantify the biomass of skeletal marine animals, algae, and protists across the past 600 million years
PI: Jonathan Payne, Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment

All-solid-state lithium battery in diamond anvil cell – a cell within the cell
PI: Wendy Mao, Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences and of Photon Science 

Real-time simulations via hybrid numerical-machine learning algorithms
PIs: Barbara Simpson, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Eric Darve, Professor of Mechanical Engineering; and Catherine Gorlé, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The effectiveness and long-term impact of installing underwater barriers in front of vulnerable ice sheets
PI: Earle Wilson, Assistant Professor of Earth System Science

Elucidating the community context of entomopathogens for more effective biological control
PI: Tadashi Fukami, Professor of Biology and of Earth System Science

Learn more about Discovery research at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability