New faculty embody talent, ambition, growth of school

In the two years since the launch of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, faculty, staff, and students have strived to help create a future where humans and nature can thrive in concert and in perpetuity.

That aspiration revolves around priorities outlined by Dean Arun Majumdar, including broadening access to sustainability education, engaging with the world, developing core values, supercharging research and innovation, and relentlessly fostering and recruiting diverse talent.

The school’s rapid growth to 158 faculty members, up from 140 in September 2022, has created a dynamo of knowledge, influence, and inspiration. In technology, a dynamo is an electrical generator; in planetary science, it’s the theory of how celestial bodies generate magnetic fields – in other words, a magnetic powerhouse.

“As part of a carefully formed hiring strategy, the school has been immensely successful in recruiting leading researchers and scholars doing truly innovative work,” Majumdar said. “All told, we are fostering strengths in all the relevant fields of research and education in sustainability to a degree that is unique in the world.”

When the school was founded in September 2022, it committed to hiring as many as 60 new faculty in critical areas of research, including climate science, energy, and environmental justice. Since then, 18 new faculty members have joined the school, including eight from July to September 2024. Their expertise spans physics, climate science, disaster preparedness, policy, materials science, decision-making, and more.

The most recent hires especially bolster the school’s newest departments, Oceans and Environmental Social Sciences. The growing community is focused on deepening knowledge of Earth, climate, and society, and creating solutions to sustainability challenges.

“Our future and present issues are multifaceted, so we need to come into these issues armed with diverse expertise,” said Christine Baker, who joined in July as an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, a joint department with the School of Engineering. “The idea of doing that makes me more optimistic about the future.”

While some of the new hires fit squarely within one discipline, the school aims to be a catalyst for approaching science with diverse viewpoints.

“There’s so much to change that it opens the possibility of discussions on a wide range of issues, and there’s always a lot of potential in the synergies found in those conversations,” said Hélène Benveniste, who joined the school in August as an assistant professor of environmental social sciences and the Steven and Roberta Denning Faculty Fellow in Global Governance for Sustainability.

Many of the new hires also hold appointments with the school’s Precourt Institute for Energy and Woods Institute for the Environment, which connect scholars across Stanford and with external stakeholders. Faculty and staff are working toward launching a third institute focused on sustainable societies, which would aim to accelerate the world’s transition to more sustainable and fair societies through partner-engaged research that informs and propels large-scale change.

“I currently travel the world teaching workshops on my group’s methods, our experiments, our software, and our data analysis,” said Colin Ophus, an associate professor of materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering and a center fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy. “Education is as important as research. No method we develop is worth anything unless we can teach it to the next generation. For that, Stanford is the best possible place and an amazing opportunity for me.” 

Learn more about the eight new faculty who have joined since July 2024:

Five additional faculty will be starting in 2025 in the departments of Environmental Social Sciences, Geophysics, Oceans, and Earth and Planetary Sciences. Learn more about faculty who have joined since the school’s launch in September 2022:

Read more profiles about our faculty