Five faculty research teams will receive a total of $781,691 over the next two years for projects designed to solve some of the world's most serious sustainability challenges, from salmon farming in Chile to farmland irrigation in California. The five teams include 22 faculty members representing a broad cross-section of disciplines at Stanford-including history, biology, anthropology, business, engineering and law.
This year's grants were selected from an initial pool of 28 letters of intent submitted to an EVP faculty committee led by Woods Institute senior fellows Chris Field, a professor of biology, and David M. Kennedy, a professor of history.
"Having served on the selection committee for three years, I'd say this was the strongest applicant pool yet," said Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History. "I was especially gratified to see some compelling projects that have not only excellent science but also robust social science and public policy components-something we have been trying to encourage."
Twenty-nine EVP grants totaling $3.9 million have been awarded since the annual program was established in 2004. The Woods Institute plans to issue a new call for proposals in the autumn quarter of 2008.
"Two considerations distinguish EVP grants from others," added Kennedy, co-director of Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West. "They are designed to bring together researchers from various disciplines that do not habitually collaborate, and they are intended to put the research teams on the path to devising usable solutions to real-world problems. Most of the successful proposals this year are anchored in specific geographic locales, but the ones we found most impressive were those that held the prospect of identifying solutions that would be applicable beyond the immediate area of interest."
Here are the five projects awarded EVP grants this year:
Principal investigator: Zephyr Frank (History).
Research team: Roz Naylor (Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies), Richard White (History), Meg Caldwell (Law School), Harold Mooney (Biology).
Principal investigator: Fiorenza Micheli (Biology, Hopkins Marine Station).
Research team: Doug Bird (Anthropology), Rob Dunbar (Environmental Earth System Science), William Durham (Anthropology).
Principal investigator: Alexandria Boehm (Civil and Environmental Engineering).
Research team: Scott Fendorf (Environmental Earth System Science), Rosemary Knight (Geophysics), Deborah Sivas (Law).
Principal investigator: William Durham (Anthropology).
Research team: William Barnett (Graduate School of Business), Meg Caldwell (Law School), Rodolfo Dirzo (Biology).
Principal investigators: David Brady (Political Science), Richard Luthy (Civil and Environmental Engineering).
Investigators: Tammy Frisby (Political Science), Perry McCarty (Civil and Environmental Engineering), Gregory Simon (History and Environmental Earth System Science), Thomas Weber (Management Science and Engineering), Walter Falcon (Woods and Freeman Spogli institutes).
News Service website: http://www.stanford.edu/news/
Stanford Report (university newspaper): http://news.stanford.edu
Most recent news releases from Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/html/releases.html
To change contact information for these news releases:
news-service@lists.stanford.edu
Phone: (650) 723-2558
COMMENT:
Chris Field, Department of Biology: cfield@dge.stanford.edu , (650) 462-1047 ext. 201
David M. Kennedy, Department of History: (650) 723-0351, dmk@stanford.edu
RELEVANT WEB URL:
WOODS INSTITUTE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT