POLITICAL SCIENCE MAJOR NAMED RHODES SCHOLAR
Daniel D. Shih, a senior with varied experience as a political and community activist, is among the 32 men and women named 2010 Rhodes Scholars from the United States.
Shih, who plans to do graduate work in comparative politics while at the University of Oxford this year, took more than a year off from Stanford to work for the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. The political science major also helped found the Stanford Sweat-Free Campaign, which attempts to improve working conditions at factories producing University apparel, and he has worked with the Chinese Progressive Association, a community-organizing group in San Francisco.
Shih's honors thesis, which draws on field research in Venezuela, is on Sino-Venezuelan economics and political relations. Rhodes Scholarships provide all expenses for two or three years of study at Oxford.
PLANS FOR AMBITIOUS REDUCTION IN ENERGY USE
Efforts are under way to dramatically cut Stanford's energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions over the next 10 years. The Energy and Climate Plan, which in that time span could put the University's carbon impact as much as 20 percent below the 1990 level, comes with a $250 million price tag for reconfiguring heating and cooling operations. But cost savings in areas including energy and water are projected to be more than $600 million from 2010 to 2050, following repayment of the capital investment.
A team led by Joe Stagner, above, executive director of the department of sustainability and energy management, developed the plan over two years. Implementation will start with energy conservation and heating-cooling changes, but the University also is looking ahead to renewable energy and new energy management technology.
ASSISTANT POLICE CHIEF RETIRES
Nick Brunot has retired from a 42-year career at Stanford that began with a job as a police photographer and ended with the role of assistant police chief. Brunot was hired as a deputy sheriff in 1971 and subsequently promoted to sergeant, lieutenant and captain. He was named assistant chief in the spring of 2008.
MEDICAL SCHOOL LAUNCHES STIMULUS WEBSITE
The School of Medicine, describing the effect of recent federal money as "a kind of renaissance for research programs," has created a website about the benefits of the federal stimulus program (www.med.stanford.edu/stimulus). As of mid-December, the school had received about $86 million for 134 projects under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It's estimated that 200 jobs will have been created or preserved by the middle of this year, and some research, for example an investigation of a lung disease in premature infants, is expected to proceed far faster than previously anticipated.
FOUR NAMED MARSHALL SCHOLARS
Four recent Stanford graduates are beginning studies at U.K. universities as Marshall Scholars and a fifth will be a Mitchell Scholar at the University of Limerick in Ireland.
The Marshall Scholars are Andrew Baratz Ehrich, '09, Anne Kalt, '07, Emily Warren, '08, and Michael Wilkerson, '09. They were among 35 Americans selected for the graduate-study scholarships. Fagan Harris, '09, is one of 12 Mitchell Scholars.
EARTH OCEAN WAS COOLER SOONER
Life may have spread across the Earth far sooner than generally believed, according to an analysis by Stanford researchers who think the planet's global ocean was cooler—and more conducive to the diversification and proliferation of photosynthetic life forms—than previously thought.
A paper describing the study, which examined ocean rocks that are 3.4 billion years old, indicates that temperatures could not have been more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit, rather than as high as 185. The lead author is Michael Hren, PhD '07, a graduate student at the time of the analysis, and the coauthors are Mike Tice, PhD '06, also a graduate student during the research, and Page Chamberlain, professor of environmental earth systems science. Hren is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan; Tice is a professor at Texas A&M.
Lower ocean temperatures would allow organisms that could not exist in hot hydrothermal conditions to survive. It is also likely that Earth's atmosphere was much different than today.
