The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability is a school at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

focusing on

climate change In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth's climate system. Climate change in a broader sense also includes previous long-term changes to ...

and

sustainability Specific definitions of sustainability are difficult to agree on and have varied in the literature and over time. The concept of sustainability can be used to guide decisions at the global, national, and individual levels (e.g. sustainable livi ...

. It opened on September 1, 2022, as Stanford's first new school since the School of Humanities and Sciences in 1948. It will be one of the largest climate change–related schools in the United States.

Arun Majumdar Arunava Majumdar is a materials scientist, engineer, and the inaugural dean of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He was nominated for the position of Under Secretary of Energy in the United States between November 30, 2011 and May 15 ...

will be the school's first dean. Initially, the school will have 90 faculty members. It has plans to add 60 more faculty members over 10 years and construct two new buildings adjacent to the existing Green Earth Sciences and Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy buildings. It will incorporate the academic departments and interdisciplinary programs of the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, Woods Institute for the Environment, and Precourt Institute for Energy and will award both undergraduate and graduate degrees. The school will also include the

Hopkins Marine Station Hopkins Marine Station is the marine laboratory of Stanford University. It is located ninety miles south of the university's main campus, in Pacific Grove, California (United States) on the Monterey Peninsula, adjacent to the Monterey Bay Aquarium. ...

and a

startup accelerator Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubators are often ...

. Despite being Stanford's newest school, it will include the university's oldest academic department, geology. The Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering will be a joint department within the School of Sustainability and the

School of Engineering Engineering education is the activity of teaching knowledge and principles to the professional practice of engineering. It includes an initial education (bachelor's and/or master's degree), and any advanced education and specializations that ...

Funding

Stanford has raised $ for the establishment of the school, including $ from venture capitalist

John Doerr L. John Doerr (born June 29, 1951) is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the P ...

and his wife Ann, after whom the school is named. The Doerrs' gift was the largest ever given to a university for the establishment of a new school and the second largest gift to an academic institution; it makes the Doerrs the top funders of climate change research and scholarship. Other donors include

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Mana ...

cofounders

Jerry Yang Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang (born November 6, 1968) is a Taiwanese-American billionaire computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is the co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo! Inc. As of February 2022, Yang has a net worth ...

and

David Filo David Robert Filo (born April 20, 1966) is an American billionaire businessman and the co-founder of Yahoo! with Jerry Yang. His Filo Server Program, written in the C programming language, was the server-side software used to dynamically serve v ...

and their spouses, Akiko Yamazaki and Angela Filo. The Doerr School has also received funding from

ExxonMobil ExxonMobil Corporation (commonly shortened to Exxon) is an American multinational oil and gas corporation headquartered in Irving, Texas. It is the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and was formed on November 3 ...

TotalEnergies TotalEnergies SE is a French multinational integrated energy and petroleum company founded in 1924 and one of the seven supermajor oil companies. Its businesses cover the entire oil and gas chain, from crude oil and natural gas exploration and ...

Shell Shell may refer to: Architecture and design * Shell (structure), a thin structure ** Concrete shell, a thin shell of concrete, usually with no interior columns or exterior buttresses ** Thin-shell structure Science Biology * Seashell, a hard o ...

Saudi Aramco Saudi Aramco ( ar, أرامكو السعودية '), officially the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (formerly Arabian-American Oil Company) or simply Aramco, is a Saudi Arabian public petroleum and natural gas company based in Dhahran. , it is one of ...

Petrobras Petróleo Brasileiro S.A., better known by the portmanteau Petrobras (), is a state-owned Brazilian multinational corporation in the petroleum industry headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The company's name translates to Brazilian Petrole ...

, and many other oil and gas companies via the Doerr School's industry affiliates program and the Precourt Institute. Dean Majumdar has indicated that the Doerr School is open to continuing to accept funding from and to work with fossil fuel companies, drawing criticism from Stanford students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

References

External links

* {{Stanford University Doerr School of Sustainability Educational institutions established in 2022 2022 establishments in California Sustainability organizations Climate change organizations based in the United States