From The School of Engineering At Stanford University: “The future of greenhouse gases” Matteo Cargnello
From The School of Engineering
At
6.2.23
A chemical engineer explains why he thinks a better approach to greenhouse gases in the sky is to turn them into other chemicals.
Can we transform greenhouse gases into benign chemicals? | zhongguo/iStock.
Guest Matteo Cargnello approaches the challenge of greenhouse gases from a different perspective.
He doesn’t study how harmful chemicals got in the skies, or even the consequences. Instead, Cargnello is using his skills as a chemical engineer to turn them into other benign or useful chemicals. So far, he’s turned greenhouse gases into valuable industrial chemicals, polymers, renewable fuels, and even ethanol. Useful products from greenhouse gases, that’s the dream, Cargnello tells Russ Altman.
The future of greenhouse gases. Stanford.
28 minutes.
Matteo Cargnello: Take CO2 and create more complex molecules. For example, hydrocarbons. So then we could make fuels like gasoline that powers our cars from CO2 and hydrogen, and, uh, make our fuels less damaging for the atmosphere.
Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything, and I’m Russ Altman.
Today, Matteo Cargnello will tell us how his lab is developing new materials to catalyze the transformation of greenhouse gases into benign chemicals like water, nitrogen, and even alcohol. It’s the future of greenhouse gases.
We have all heard about greenhouse gases. These are the chemicals that enter the atmosphere and create an insulation layer around the earth. Although many of these gases are naturally occurring, the rate at which they’re being produced has remarkably increased in the last 200 years, and now they’ve accumulated to the point where the planet is heating up.
Global temperatures are increasing and threaten lots of changes to both land, sea, and air as a result. So that makes a double challenge. First, we wanna reduce our creation of these gases, but secondly, we need to figure out ways to remove them from the atmosphere. Matteo Cargnello is a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University.
His group creates new materials that can catalyze the transformation of greenhouse gases into benign chemicals. These main greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide. Methane and nitrous oxide. He’s also creating methods to store these gases, either for productive use or just to keep them away.
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Mateo, let’s start out with a very simple question.
What is the problem that your research is trying to help solve?
Matteo Cargnello: Thank you Russ, for having me here. The problem is kind of like very simple to explain. Uh, it’s of course much harder to, uh, solve. It’s the problem of greenhouse gas emissions and reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
That can be done in several, many different ways. It’s through energy usage, through avoiding greenhouse gases from getting into the atmosphere in first place, and also being able to capture those greenhouse gases that are already in the atmosphere. So all of that is. What I’m trying to solve and, uh, at the end of the day, it’s about reducing global warming and all the problems associated with it.
Russ Altman: Great. So for people, I think everybody has heard this phrase “greenhouse gases” and we sometimes hear about specific gases. But I think it would be useful as we start for you to tell me like what the major targets are of these gases and what are our opportunities to kind of improve this situation?
Or is the cat already out the cow already out of the barn and there’s nothing to be done?
Matteo Cargnello: Yeah. By the way, cows are very important in this discussion too, but we can get to that later. Probably many people know that one of the main, um, uh, culprits of this problem is a gas called carbon dioxide, CO2. Uh, this is the gas that has increased in concentration tremendously in the last 150 years since the Industrial Revolution.
And, uh, the problem is that this particular gas traps heat from, uh, the sun, uh, within the atmosphere. And this increases the temperature of the planet with all the consequences that, uh, we are, uh, probably aware of in terms of catastrophic disasters, ocean warming, increasing of ocean levels. Uh, it’s not just CO2 though.
One thing that is important to keep in mind is that CO2 is the main one that is anthropogenic. It means that human beings increase the concentration of these gas. There are others as well that we are, uh, working on, um, as well as CO2. For example, methane is the second most prevalent, greenhouse gas and, uh, nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere.
So there’s a variety, a few of them that are extremely important to controlling concentration. But absolutely, CO2 is by far the one that is the most relevant.
Russ Altman: Now. Um, do those other, you just mentioned methane, uh, does it a act in the same way in terms of like, uh, sealing in the heat or are there other negative consequences that it has that are different from the CO2?
Matteo Cargnello: Yeah, in principle, when we, uh, think about global warming. The, uh, principle by which these molecules act in increasing the temperature in the atmosphere is very similar in the sense that they trap the heat, that comes from the sun. Their effect though, uh, can last, uh, for different, uh, periods of time.
CO2 has an effect that can last for many, many decades because of the stability of this molecule. Uh, methane, uh, lasts for less than CO2 because it gets converted into other molecules in the atmosphere. But for example, it has an immediate larger effect than CO2 that is equivalent to roughly 20 to 80 times dead of CO2, uh…
Russ Altman: oh
Matteo Cargnello: …with nitrogen oxide that’s even higher.
Uh, so this is the so-called greenhouse gas, uh, power of, um, or potential of these gases that is varied. So it really depends in terms of time and intensity, but overall, the effect by which they warm the atmosphere is similar.
Russ Altman: So let me just ask one more kind of setting up of the, of the whole discussion, which is what are the major sources for these three gases that, uh, I think we all have a rough idea that combustion engines produce something and, but why don’t you just kind of give us a rundown of what the major sources are?
Matteo Cargnello: Yeah. There are natural processes that, uh, involve these gases and they’ve been around, uh, even before humanity was around on this planet. But clearly there are, um, artificial processes that increase or change the concentrations and the equilibria around this specific gases. And when it comes to CO2, the main source is, uh, human activities, especially energy generation, combustion of, uh, Oil and uh, related products for energy generation.
Uh, in term, when it comes to methane, it’s, uh, the activity of extracting oil and, uh, agriculture and, um, uh, farming. Those are huge, uh, sources of methane. And when it comes to nitrogen.
Russ Altman: This is where the cows come in?
Matteo Cargnello: It’s when the cows come in, and that’s, uh, a big issue because that methane is, despite being dilute in the atmosphere, it’s about 200 times less concentrated than CO2, but because of its higher global warming potential, then it turns out to be a big offender when it comes to, uh, global warming. Um, so these are, there are these natural sources, but certainly, uh, farming, agriculture those are huge sources of methane and, uh, nitrogen oxides.
Russ Altman: Okay, so now let’s get into your work and it’s very exciting because my understanding is you’re using the principles of chemistry to actually try to remediate all of these compounds. Um, what is the gen, what is the approach there? Tell us, uh, enough chemistry so that we can see both the challenge and the promise.
Matteo Cargnello: Yeah. So there’s two facets, uh, in my research, uh, work.
On one side because the emission of greenhouse gases come from the generation of energy and, uh, when it comes to energy generation, we’re talking about converting chemical species into others that would release with the release of energy that we can utilize, then we can, um, find out ways to, uh, run this chemical processes with less energy consumption.
Which means that is then directly giving us the opportunity to reduce the, uh, energy emissions, uh, or the greenhouse gas emissions, sorry, from, from energy generation. So that’s, uh, essentially an indirect pathway to reduce the greenhouse gas emission.
Russ Altman: Sure.
Matteo Cargnello: On the other side, we can find chemical processes to convert these molecules such as methane into others that would be less damaging to the atmosphere. And that’s another facet.
And the third one is, can we use chemical principle to directly grab these molecules from the atmosphere and store them and sequester them into appropriate reservoirs that could, uh, then last for a long time so that it don’t get back into the atmosphere. So it’s the chemistry of these small molecular compounds that is either in their conversion into others with lower emissions or directly converting them to remove them from the atmosphere.
Russ Altman: So that was a great overview and I know that, I don’t know if it’s for all three of these challenges, prefer at least some of them you’re also creating new materials, so-called nano materials that have special properties.
And a lot of people hear about nanoscience and maybe they’re thinking about computers or other things, but it’s very interesting to find out that this might have implications also for chemical catalysis and global warming. So what’s the connection between nano materials? Why are they special?
Matteo Cargnello: Mm-hmm. Yeah, nano materials are very special.
And by the way, we started, uh, as humanity. I mean we started working on this chemical processes at industrial scale using nanomaterials long before we recognize that these materials are nano.
Russ Altman: Huh?
Matteo Cargnello: That are small, small scale. And the reason why that’s the case is because when we want to run chemical transformations on molecules, then we need to have materials that interact with these molecules and to the highest possible extent.
And the way to do that is to reduce the size of the materials. To the level of a few atoms, because then these materials will show the highest efficiency in interacting with these gauges molecules.
So that’s why we need to use materials that are very small at the nanometer scale in order to make them very efficient for, uh, interacting with, uh, molecules in these chemical processes?
Russ Altman: Is it basically a surface area situation that if you have tiny things, if you have a large volume, but if it’s all tiny particles, then they have a lot of opportunity to interact with like the air around them.
Matteo Cargnello: Exactly.
Russ Altman: Is that the idea?
Matteo Cargnello: So the usual, uh, comparison or analogy we make is that if you take a cube, uh, that has macroscopic dimensions, most of those of the material in the cube will be in the internal space, volume of the material, and that will not be able to interact with the atmosphere, which is in the end what we’re trying to do. But when we start cutting down this, uh, cube into smaller and smaller pieces or bits, then we are able to expose more of the surface area, uh, which is one of the primary needs for, um, materials that we want to use for chemical transformations.
Russ Altman: Okay. So what kind of chemical transformations, like what are we turning the CO2 into? I know, for example, that plants can turn it into sugar. Uh, yeah. Uh, and also what are we turning the meth methane into? I’m doubting that you’re making sugar, but I don’t want to pre-judge.
Matteo Cargnello: Well, there’s, there are different pathways that are imagined in the, in our field in order to turn CO2 into something useful.
Uh, there are some. Let’s say low hanging fruit in terms of compounds that can be made, such as carbon monoxide, which is one step away from CO2. Carbon monoxide is actually a poison. It’s very toxic for human beings it can kill us. But in the chemical industry, it’s a very crucial building block to prepare a variety of compounds, fuels, in other chemicals.
So CO is one. Uh, we can, however, one, some of the most interesting compounds are those that have carbon, carbon bonds. So if you can take CO2 and create more complex molecules, for example, hydrocarbons, so then we could make fuels like gasoline that powers our cars from CO2 and hydrogen and, uh, make our fuels less damaging for the atmosphere, uh, in…
Russ Altman: it’s almost like recycling the fuels?
Matteo Cargnello: …exactly. Although it’s not the best way we have in order to reduce the, um, amount of green or CO2 that we put into the atmosphere but it’s a way to go. And more recently, um, I’m excited to share with you that we’ve also been making ethanol, which is basically alcohol from CO2.
So I …
Russ Altman: now you’re talking.
Matteo Cargnello: …yeah, exactly. So I joke with my students, they were making booze from air. So in principle, the idea is to take CO2 from the atmosphere and hydrogen from sustainable renewable processes and make ethanol.
The reason why we want to make ethanol is because, first of all, it can be used as a fuel. It’s already used in some countries as a hundred percent, uh, fuel for internal combustion engines, but it can also be used as a sustainable chemical for the production of a variety of important building blocks in the in industries for polymers, for example, in other applications.
So there’s clearly a variety of things that we can do with CO2 but there’s a few ones in particular that are relevant when we want to solve the problem of CO2 emissions.
Russ Altman: So let me go on a little tangent because this is very exciting and I just wanna make sure I kind of see the, kind of the use case. So you, as you develop these chemistries, can you do it like on the land in a factory or are you gonna have to get this stuff up into the sky to interact with all of the CO2 and for the other reactions, the methane or is that not necessary?
This can all be done like terrestrially. I I’m just wondering how, what your vision is for how this gets scaled once you develop all the technologies.
Matteo Cargnello: Uh, it depends on the final goal. There are actually researchers that are looking at the possibility of running this chemistry in the sky, in the atmosphere.
Uh, for us, when we think about chemical engineering and producing chemicals from CO2, uh, we see it as an opportunity to do it, um, on land. So the idea is to…
Russ Altman: Yes.
Matteo Cargnello: …try and grab that CO2 from the atmosphere or from seawater, by the way. We can talk about that later on.
Russ Altman: Ah.
Matteo Cargnello: But then doing it in a factory and making useful chemicals then could replace other chemicals that we’re using today that come from fossil fuels.
That will be really the vision and, uh, the, the dream.
Russ Altman: Gotcha. And, uh, and, and before, before I went on that tangent, I wanted to also ask about methane. What are the kinds of things that we would, might be able to turn methane into?
Matteo Cargnello: Yeah. Methane is a very interesting compound. Together with, uh, some colleagues, uh, from Stanford a few years ago, uh, we did some calculations on the methane concentration in the atmosphere and realized that, or demonstrated that if we were to magically remove methane from the atmosphere, we would be back to the greenhouse gas potential at, of like 1850.
So methane is a big offender.
Russ Altman: Huh
Matteo Cargnello: now the question is what do we do though, given the fact that it’s such, that’s such low concentration in the atmosphere?
So there are some ideas that we’re working on to turn methane into CO2. Uh, and now one will say, okay, why CO2? Well, because methane is 20 to 80 times more powerful than CO2. So even being able to convert that methane to CO2 would reduce the greenhouse gas potential of gases in the atmosphere and really help us, uh, solve, uh, this problem.
So that’s one idea that we are working on.
Russ Altman: Yes. It actually makes sense if it’s 20 or 30 times worse and you can turn a methane into one or two CO2 s and now you’re also developing CO2 remediation.
You have created a pipeline towards, uh, towards a solution.
Matteo Cargnello: Right.
Russ Altman: I just wanted to make sure, by the way, Um, is the carbon monoxide and these other things that you’re turning, um, the CO2 into, are they gonna have the same greenhouse house problems or is the idea to capture them and store them so that they never get into the amosphere?
Matteo Cargnello: uh, exactly. So this is an important point that, um, you mentioned. We have to ensure that whatever conversion we, uh, work on, it is we convert CO2 into, first of all, a useful chemical compact, but on the other side, we have to ensure that carbon is not going to end up in the atmosphere right away because otherwise any chemical process requires energy.
And energy in principle means that we are, uh, emitting CO2 in using energy. So if we use energy and emit CO2 to make a chemical that would turn back into CO2 right away, that’s not a great way to solve this problem. So CO is. Um, so some of these gases, um, are not as, um, powerful as greenhouse gases as CO2, but we have to ensure that we turn them into compounds that, uh, would allow us to at least semi permanently store CO2 in chemical bonds that are not going to end up, uh, in the atmosphere again.
So I emphasize the ethanol, for example, in polymers because in principle, uh, polymers that we use, um, all every day and they’re all around us are a way to semi permanently store carbon.
Although we have. Lots of other problems with plastics for sure, but that’s also why in principle, turning CO2 into fuels that we use, uh, right away directly is not the best way to remediate, uh, this issue. So there’s very many considerations around the use and storage and, um, conversion of CO2. And we’re just discussing the tip of the iceberg essential.
So the key to this, Matteo, is catalysis. And so I think it’s now time for you to tell us about the chemistry. What is Catalysis and what is the chemistry of catalysis?
Matteo Cargnello: Yes, catalysis is a very crucial, uh, science in allowing us to fight global warming catalysis. The definition is that catalyst accelerates the rate of a chemical reaction. Now, the weight works is that any chemical reaction in order to occur as to overcome with some energy barrier.
So we need to give it a kick in order for that to start. Now, a catalyst is a substance in principle, in my case, a nanomaterial, that would allow this, um, this reaction to start with a lower energy of activation. And it is clear then to imagine that when we, uh, think about less energy to run chemical transformations, we’re talking immediately, we are thinking immediately about reducing the CO2 footprint. Uh, of, uh, some of these chemical processes.
And so then the trick or the important part of my research is in finding the appropriate materials that would work as the most efficient catalyst for the processes that involve greenhouse gases.
Russ Altman: Now we all have a car with a catalytic converter, uh, and a lot of them are being stolen.
Does this relate to the work that you are doing, or is it entirely different kind of catalysis?
Matteo Cargnello: Absolutely yes. I, uh, I think catalytic converter is one of the most important inventions of the last century. Uh, we, if we are familiar with photos from cities in the US from the seventies, there was, uh, there were high concentrations of smog and pollution.
And, uh, really the invention of the Cali converter allowed us to have, um, uh, better, clearer skies and, uh, better, um, air that we breathe in the cities and these devices take, um, uh, pollutants and toxic gases such as hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides, and turn them into harmless compounds that we can breathe, such as, uh, nitrogen, uh, CO2 and, uh, and water. Uh, and this is an incredibly important, uh, discovery that allowed us to make these materials with this very, very high efficiency for turning these gases.
The fact is that most of these materials, most of these, uh, cali, um, or cali converters in particular, uh, work with, um, precious metals.
Such as platinum, palladium, and roadium. And these metals are very, very precious and that’s the reason why Cali converters get stolen, because they’re very valuable.
Russ Altman: And they’re not using nanomaterials is my guess. But you are?
Matteo Cargnello: They are. No, even in Cali converters we have nanomaterials.
Russ Altman: Okay.
Matteo Cargnello: So again, in order to increase the efficiency of these, uh, metals in particular to work on, uh, gasses, uh, compounds and convert those, we need to make them very, very small and tiny.
And these particles are in the order of like, uh, 5 to 50 nanometers in size. Which is about, uh, a thousand times, uh, smaller than the diameter of one of our hair. That’s the size that we’re talking about.
And it is important to recognize that this, uh, materials play a crucial role in, not just in cali converters, but in many, many industrial processes that we run at the million ton scale on a daily basis.
And it’s all based on the, and these small, tiny particles, uh, that we use as catalyst.
Russ Altman: Yes. So when you’re building these nano materials, is it correct that you’re actually in, are you, uh, integrating some of these precious metals into the nano materials that you build? And then we talked before about the importance of making sure that the surface area is appropriate for the, for making a large volume.
Uh, is that the kind of work that you’re doing?
Matteo Cargnello: Yeah, exactly. So we use a so-called bottom up approach. A chemical approach that would allow us to start from single individual atoms of a material and build the materials atom by atom with, uh, a precision that would allow us to tune the properties of these materials because whether the particle is a certain size or another matter tremendously for the final efficiency and selectivity of these materials.
So we’re using these chemical tools. They would allow us to, uh, build the materials atom, by atom and really get to on one side, under the fundamental understanding of how the size and morphology of the nanomaterials matter for a final application as well as engineering the properties of these materials.
Russ Altman: Yes, I can imagine that in addition to making sure that it can catalyze the reaction that you want to happen, there are all kinds of operating conditions in terms of temperature and pressure and all those other things that you have to make sure you get it just right to optimize the reactions.
Matteo Cargnello: Correct. Exactly.
And these conditions will also affect the performance of the catalyst. So we also need to study how the material is going to get affected by the operating conditions and make it last for a long time, which is one of the main issues. For example, in Cali Converters, we don’t want, uh, the people to have to replace that expensive Cali Converter every 10,000 miles.
It has to last at least 150,000 miles, if not more.
Russ Altman: Right. Okay, great. Well, in the last two minutes, I want to change topics cuz I know that you’ve also written and done work with seawater and you might, people might not think of seawater as a big issue or a big opportunity. Where does seawater come into your, uh, professional life?
Matteo Cargnello: Yeah, seawater is a project that we are starting to consider now and we go back to capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. That is like one of the biggest challenges that we have to really solve as a humanity and in this generation. So the fight that seawater is a storage medium for CO2. The CO2 from the atmosphere gets dissolved into the ocean water. And then we can try and take the CO2 from seawater rather than the atmosphere.
The reason why that’s appealing is on one side, the concentration of CO2 is higher in seawater than it is in the atmosphere.
Russ Altman: Oh, that’s interesting.
Matteo Cargnello: Yeah, because seawater is a liquid and the atmosphere is a gas, so we can, uh, process less volumes of seawater to get to extract the same amount of CO2.
On the other side, uh, the CO2 is not just the only. Um, if you want resource that we can harvest from seawater, there’s other compounds that are very important, uh, chemical compounds for industry and for processes. So we could in principle utilize, uh, seawater not just as a reservoir of CO2, but also to extract other important components such as lithium salts, for example, that are so critical for lithium ion batteries.
So now there’s quite a few researchers around the world, uh, focusing their attention on the, uh, seawater and, uh, the resources that we can extract from it.
Russ Altman: And is it possible that you’ll actually be doing catalysis in the water or, uh, and would it be water? I guess my question is, does the principles that you use, uh, for the, uh, non-aqueous, um, catalytic reactions do I, my guess is they have to be modified, but they still might be applicable in water?
Matteo Cargnello: It’s possible there are some ideas in doing chemistry on the seawater or doing chemistry. With the CO2 that is removed from the seawater.
So one of the dreams I think that many people have is to have potentially these floating islands that can capture renewable energy. For example, with solar panels, to power the processes to extract these important compounds, CO2, lithium matters from seawater, and then process them on this island and then, Using that to feed, um, and then populations, uh, on the coast and transport that.
So that’s one vision of how we could have this, uh, islands to remediate greenhouse gas emissions and global warming in hopefully not too long from now.
Russ Altman: Very exciting. So these are catalytic converters, not just for your car, but catalytic converters really for the earth and for the environment.
Matteo Cargnello: Absolutely.
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The Stanford University School of Engineering has been at the forefront of innovation for nearly a century, creating pivotal technologies that have transformed the worlds of information technology, communications, health care, energy, business and beyond.
The school’s faculty, students and alumni have established thousands of companies and laid the technological and business foundations for Silicon Valley. Today, the school educates leaders who will make an impact on global problems and seeks to define what the future of engineering will look like.
Mission
Our mission is to seek solutions to important global problems and educate leaders who will make the world a better place by using the power of engineering principles, techniques and systems. We believe it is essential to educate engineers who possess not only deep technical excellence, but the creativity, cultural awareness and entrepreneurial skills that come from exposure to the liberal arts, business, medicine and other disciplines that are an integral part of the Stanford experience.
Our key goals are to:
Conduct curiosity-driven and problem-driven research that generates new knowledge and produces discoveries that provide the foundations for future engineered systems
Deliver world-class, research-based education to students and broad-based training to leaders in academia, industry and society
Drive technology transfer to Silicon Valley and beyond with deeply and broadly educated people and transformative ideas that will improve our society and our world.
The Future of Engineering
The engineering school of the future will look very different from what it looks like today. So, in 2015, we brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including mid-career faculty, students and staff, to address two fundamental questions: In what areas can the School of Engineering make significant world‐changing impact, and how should the school be configured to address the major opportunities and challenges of the future?
One key output of the process is a set of 10 broad, aspirational questions on areas where the School of Engineering would like to have an impact in 20 years. The committee also returned with a series of recommendations that outlined actions across three key areas — research, education and culture — where the school can deploy resources and create the conditions for The Stanford University College of Engineering to have significant impact on those challenges.
Leland and Jane Stanford founded Stanford University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.
Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.
The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained 126 NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for 24 consecutive years, beginning in 1994–1995. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won 270 Olympic medals including 139 gold medals.
As of October 2020, 84 Nobel laureates, 28 Turing Award laureates, and eight Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies, which combined produce more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, roughly equivalent to the 7th largest economy in the world (as of 2020). Stanford is the alma mater of one president of the United States (Herbert Hoover), 74 living billionaires, and 17 astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.
Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.
Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.
Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.
Land
Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.
Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.
Non-central campus
Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.
On the founding grant:
Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land.
Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.
Off the founding grant:
Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations:
Unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.
Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession.
In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.
The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.
China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University(CN) KIAA-PKU).
Administration and organization
Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually. A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).
The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report. Persis Drell became the 13th provost in February 2017.
As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.
The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.
Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.
Endowment and donations
The university’s endowment, managed by the Stanford Management Company, was valued at $27.7 billion as of August 31, 2019. Payouts from the Stanford endowment covered approximately 21.8% of university expenses in the 2019 fiscal year. In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University, the University of Texas System, and Yale University had larger endowments than Stanford.
In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the Stanford Challenge, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported 366 new fellowships for graduate students, 139 new endowed chairs for faculty, and 38 new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.
Research centers and institutes
DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory,
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design -Stanford Engineering, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with University of California-Berkeley and University of California-San Francisco, Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.
Discoveries and innovation
Natural sciences
Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.
Computer and applied sciences
ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.
Internet. Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.
Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.
Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.
Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.
RISC [Reduced Instruction Set Computer microprocessor architecture] – DARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and The University of California-Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, the PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.
Businesses and entrepreneurship
Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.
The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.
Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.
Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:
Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco Systems, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).
Student body
Stanford enrolled 6,996 undergraduate and 10,253 graduate students as of the 2019–2020 school year. Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. In the same academic year, the freshman retention rate was 99%.
Stanford awarded 1,819 undergraduate degrees, 2,393 master’s degrees, 770 doctoral degrees, and 3270 professional degrees in the 2018–2019 school year. The four-year graduation rate for the class of 2017 cohort was 72.9%, and the six-year rate was 94.4%. The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.
As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.
Athletics
As of 2016 Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.
Its traditional sports rival is the University of California-Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.
Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned 126 NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won 522 individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning 270 Olympic medals total, 139 of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Traditions
The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs.The University of California-Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.
Award laureates and scholars
Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:
19 Nobel Prize laureates (as of October 2020, 85 affiliates in total)
171 members of the National Academy of Sciences
109 members of National Academy of Engineering
76 members of National Academy of Medicine
288 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
19 recipients of the National Medal of Science
1 recipient of the National Medal of Technology
4 recipients of the National Humanities Medal
49 members of American Philosophical Society
56 fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
4 Pulitzer Prize winners
31 MacArthur Fellows
4 Wolf Foundation Prize winners
2 ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
14 AAAI fellows
2 Presidential Medal of Freedom winners
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