Thinker, Maker, Coder: Try

You could write 10 stories about the centennial of the School of Engineering. In fact, the School is—in a series rolling out online. Even that will be a mere glimpse of the breadth of Stanford Engineering accomplishments. The task is, of course, more impossible in an eight-page magazine article. But who else will tell you about the dean’s trumpet playing? Happy 100th, School of Engineering. We can only scratch the surface, but we’ll toot your horn.

One Hundred Years (Plus)

Stanford was a school for engineering decades before it had a School of Engineering. Even as Leland Stanford waited to take his teenage son’s body home from Europe in 1884, the grieving former governor was mulling the possibility of memorializing him with a “school or institution for civil and mechanical engineers on my grounds in Palo Alto.” His railroading days had convinced him that too few engineers merited their titles. That vision would soon expand to a university with science, arts, and humanities. But engineering remained core. At the university’s dawn, five of the 15 faculty members were engineering professors, and 141 of the 559 students were enrolled in engineering, at the time divided into civil and mechanical departments. Electrical soon followed. 

Shake, Rattle, and Roll

Stanford Engineering quickly gained distinction through professors such as mechanical engineer William Durand, Class of 1907, Engr. ’08, a master of propeller design and later a pioneer in aeronautics, who would come to be known as the “dean of American engineering.” Durand, celebrated for his devotion to students and the university, was among a small committee of professors who led Stanford’s recovery response after the 1906 earthquake. Cyril Elwell, Class of 1907, Engr. ’08, meanwhile, rallied his classmates to fix the electrical damage. That didn’t stop him from getting kicked off campus for experiments to create a wireless telephone. He’d been using the tower of the ruined library as an antenna. Newspapers delighted in suggesting that the trustee who’d evicted him was a stakeholder in a communications company that stood to lose if Elwell succeeded. In 1909, Elwell founded the Federal Telegraph Company, the first venture-backed electronics company out of Stanford. Its work led to advances in radio and television, and Elwell is among the earliest exemplars of a now-familiar archetype: the Stanford engineer-entrepreneur.

CUTTING-EDGE: The engineering corner, early 1900s; one of Durand’s propellers, 1927; inside the Product Realization Lab, 2011; TidyBots in the new Robotics Center, 2024. (Photos from top: Stanford Special Collections and University Archives; Berton W. Crandall/Stanford Special Collections and University Archives; Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service; Andrew Brodhead)

Strength in Union

Stanford’s engineering departments—including newcomer mining and metallurgy—remained happily independent into the 1920s. When the idea of unifying arose, the leaders of each department opposed a move that seemed to promise little besides more red tape and less power, according to a history by William Nix, MS ’60, PhD ’63, a professor emeritus of materials science and engineering. Nevertheless, Stanford president Ray Lyman Wilbur, Class of 1896, MA ’97, MD ’99, convened a committee to investigate. Wilbur was by nature an organizer—during his presidency, he created nine Stanford schools, from Law to Letters. And engineering was then in the hot seat. Despite—or perhaps because of—ever-increasing course requirements, many engineering students nationwide were graduating with a grasp of neither scientific fundamentals nor practical skills, according to a 1918 Carnegie Foundation report. The Stanford committee claimed it was virtually impossible to provide an ideal undergraduate engineering education in four years. The crowded curriculum was already scaring away students, notably natural leaders.

Unity offered a remedy. It would allow for more efficient intro courses, built on common fundamentals, and enable a better-organized professional graduate degree, known as the degree of engineer. It also promised esprit de corps. Like no less than the 13 American colonies, Stanford’s engineering departments would prosper more together than they had apart, the report predicted. “In organic union there is strength.” The Board of Trustees concurred. The Stanford School of Engineering was born on May 15, 1925. 

What’s a Robot?

There are throughlines that stretch from the school’s founding to its present. Students in the Product Realization Lab pour molten metals into sand castings as they did in the Stanford  Student Shops of yore, though the laser cutters are recent additions. They can still pursue degrees in the departments of civil (now civil and environmental,  and joint with the Doerr School of Sustainability), electrical, and mechanical engineering—though the range of each has expanded—as well as in relative newbies aeronautics and astronautics, bioengineering (joint with the School of Medicine), chemical engineering, computer science, management science and engineering, and materials science and engineering. And 100 years after the Stanford Daily first used the word robot, defining it for readers (“a kind of creature much like a human, except for the lack of the most human instincts”), in 2024, the school opened its 3,000-square-foot Stanford Robotics Center, with such creatures that can make your bed—perhaps not the most human of instincts—and much more.

Sparks Fly

The school launched with a jolt. In the summer of 1925, work started on the Harris J. Ryan High Voltage Laboratory, named for the electrical engineering professor who was a pioneer in the field. It would open with a fiery public demonstration of its 2.1-million-volt capacity, reportedly “the highest voltage ever obtained at commercial frequency.” Built at a cost of nearly $500,000 (a cool $9 million today), with support from the City of Los Angeles and a bevy of power companies, the lab would work to overcome the challenges of transmitting electricity across the vastness of the West. Despite the energetic debut, the school’s early decades were marked by uncertainty. Enrollment sputtered during the Depression. And the vaunted aeronautics program—developed by Durand within mechanical engineering—was bankrupt by the late ’30s.

The Terman Factor

Nevertheless, the seeds of the School of Engineering’s rise were already in place. Fred Terman, Class of 1920, Engr. ’22, had joined the engineering faculty in 1925 and cultivated a reputation for brilliance and self-discipline that would carry through his career. “He never told a joke as far as anybody knows,” professor emeritus of electrical engineering James Gibbons, MS ’54, PhD ’56, the school’s dean from 1984 to 1996, recalled in a 1995 oral history. “Nobody can remember him laughing very much. He was a very serious man.” As an electrical engineering professor in the ’30s, Terman wrote a defining textbook, Radio Engineering, and mentored the likes of David Packard, ’34, Engr. ’39, and William Hewlett, ’34, Engr. ’39. And as department chair, he built a world-class electrical engineering department. 

Fred Terman (Photo: Courtesy Stanford News Service)

During World War II, Terman headed to Harvard’s Radio Research Lab, where he led research into the emerging era of electronic warfare. The experience opened his eyes to the fact that Stanford was missing out on the federal research funding going to universities like MIT, Caltech, and Columbia. Returning to Stanford as dean after the war, Terman pushed the School of Engineering to take advantage of the government’s rapidly expanding Cold War research budget, a move that would transform the university’s research capacity. In 1946, total government commissions were $127,599 for the entire university. A decade later, Department of Defense contracts alone brought in $4.5 million. Terman led the school into solid-state electronics, making Stanford an academic leader in the emerging world of integrated circuits, or microchips. And he fostered an increasingly tight bond with industry through things like the Honors Cooperative Program, which welcomed working electrical engineers who wanted to earn a master’s degree part-time. (Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang, MS ’92, the co-founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia, is among the program’s most famous alums.) Terman—who was Stanford provost from 1955 to 1965—also championed the Stanford Research Park, née Stanford Industrial Park, which leased Stanford-owned land on the edge of campus to technology companies, including Varian Medical Systems and Hewlett-Packard.

Without Terman, the history of Stanford Engineering—and that of the university itself—would look totally different, says Charles Petersen, a historian at Stanford’s Silicon Valley Archives. “If anything, he’s underrated in his importance,” he says.

Departments de Novo

The school’s growth occasioned a raft of new departments, from aeronautics (later aeronautics and astronautics) in 1957 to chemical engineering in 1960 to bioengineering, a joint effort with the School of Medicine, in 2002. Bioengineering came decades later than it did at many universities, says Jim Plummer, MS ’67, PhD ’71, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and dean from 1999 to 2014. For years, the prevailing view at Stanford had been that what others labeled bioengineering was in fact the medical application of more traditional disciplines. If electrical engineers created new medical imaging technology, hinging on electrical engineering principles, they didn’t need to be in a new department, he says. Ditto mechanical engineers working on many medical devices. But by the turn of the millennium, advances in areas like genetics and proteomics were creating a truly new engineering realm as biology became an increasingly quantitative science, he says. Sharing the department with the School of Medicine was a bet on keeping all parties invested. “We’ve got a world-class medical school right across the street,” Plummer says. “It would be better if our medical school owns part of this new effort as opposed to just being an interested observer. I’m a big believer in owners versus renters.”

BLUE-SKY THINKING: Alexandria Boehm, professor of civil and environmental engineering, sampling ocean water, 2002; Lyndia Wu, MS ’14, PhD ’17, fitting a dummy with a mouthguard for an impact experiment, 2014; a computer lab, 1985; McCarthy playing computer chess, 1966; a design engineering class at Lake Lag, 1969. (Photos from top: Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service (2); Stanford News Service; Chuck Painter/Stanford News Service; Stanford Special Collections and University Archives) 

The Rise of CS

The school’s growth has been mostly steady. In 1974, 11.4 percent of Stanford’s declared undergraduate student body studied engineering. In 2024, it was around 40 percent. The grad population studying engineering rose from 25 percent to 37 percent during the same period. But there was one big jump. Enrollment ramped up in the late aughts, Plummer says, partly in response to a shift in the zeitgeist. Students were increasingly interested in making an impact on global concerns of their generation, including climate change, energy issues, and health problems. Engineering was a tool that would enable them to do so. 

And within engineering, one addition has driven population growth over all others: computer science, which emerged from mathematics to become a graduate department in the School of Humanities and Sciences in 1965. Only after it moved to Engineering in 1985 did Stanford begin offering an undergrad CS degree, a move that had to overcome internal resistance. A 1983 Daily article quoted a math professor and a CS lecturer saying that students came to Stanford to learn things that last a lifetime—a threshold the fast-moving, unstable world of computer programming failed to meet.

There’s surface truth to that. Computer science department chair Mehran Sahami, ’92, MS ’93, PhD ’99, has taught his intro CS courses in four different programming languages over 30 years. But the bedrock ideas about approaching problems and designing solutions have not shifted. “The principles that are provided in that class to students have remained pretty much the same,” he says. “That’s what our program does; it provides that foundation.”

Mehran Sahami (Photo: Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service)

CS has reigned as Stanford’s most popular major for more than a decade with no sign of slowing. In 2023–24, Stanford granted a record 341 bachelor’s degrees in computer science, more than 2 ½ times the number conferred in human biology—the second most popular. CS also topped the list for master’s degree; it was fifth in doctorates. 

Silicon Valley is clearly core to the lure. Sahami has a graph comparing the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index with the number of CS majors at Stanford, and the correlation is strong. But the department has also invested in strategies that have strengthened its popularity. When CS enrollment dipped following the dot-com bust of 2000–02, the department reformed its curriculum to allow more flexibility and creativity. Today, many CS majors come to Stanford intending to study something else only to find themselves captivated by the CS 106 courses, where even neophytes design basic video games and search engines.

“We have some of the original Google source code, which we can actually show them from when it was a project here, and say, ‘Look, you can understand this because you’ve learned enough in this class,’” Sahami says. “It transforms students from consumers of technology to producers of technology. That’s hugely empowering.”

Its popularity is not simply a matter of demand but also of unusual supply. Many universities have combatted ballooning CS interest with caps or new requirements designed to force some students out of the department. Stanford’s CS department has no prerequisites for introductory courses and no limit on the number of students who can declare the major. That’s born of a belief that CS gives people the power to change the world, Sahami says, particularly at a university where students can combine it with other disciplines from medicine to sustainability. Enrollment limits would only punish those with the least prior exposure to the field. “If you didn’t do any computing in high school, if you never took a computer science class and you show up at Stanford, and you’re interested in computer science, you can be a successful computer scientist,” he says. “That means we’re not going to cap who comes into the class or limit it in any way.”

How long will CS reign? The rise of generative artificial intelligence—with its power to create code upon request—has raised concerns that coding will soon lose relevance. Sahami isn’t worried, in part because Stanford’s emphasis on multidisciplinary work gives students a vision beyond the technical. “We’re training some people who are going to be leaders in the field and really exceptional at what they do,” he says.

Musical Interlude

You don’t have to play a musical instrument to be dean of the School of Engineering, but apparently it helps. Three of the most recent five deans could run a mean scale. Gibbons was a jazz trombonist. Professor of materials science and engineering and of physics Persis Drell, dean from 2014 until she became university provost in 2017, relaxed by playing cello in string quartets. And current dean Jennifer Widom, a professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, almost dedicated her professional life to music. Her undergraduate degree is in trumpet performance from the Jacobs School of Music, a conservatory at Indiana University. It was only as a junior, when she took a course on computer applications for music, that her future shifted.

Jennifer Widom (Photo: Stanford Engineering)

Widom is too much the empirical engineer to assign much meaning to the trio of musical deans, but she says her background matters. “I do think that has an influence on my desire to collaborate a lot with humanities and social sciences,” she says. It gives her credibility with faculty in the humanities and informs the way she sees the university’s components reinforcing one another. Had she gone to a traditional conservatory, one not within a university, her life would have been totally different, she says. Engineering is only part of a whole. In 2023, the school teamed with the Hoover Institution to launch Stanford Emerging Technology Review, combining their respective technical and policy expertise to examine real-world implications of cutting-edge tech, an issue of ever-rising importance. “We are completely unique in being a top engineering school in a liberal arts university with professional schools, including the Medical School,” Widom says. “And we take advantage of that every day.”

Women and Engineering

By the time the Engineering School formed in 1925, it had been two years since Laura Austin Munson, Class of 1923, Engr. ’31, had become Stanford’s first woman to earn a degree in engineering. Not that the committee recommending creating the school registered this fact. Its report has multiple references to men and “boys of strong initiative.” There are no such references to women. (Ironically, the report was bundled alongside another declaring the general superiority of female frosh because of their more difficult pathway into Stanford. The university capped female enrollment at 500 from 1899 to 1933, followed by a 40 percent limit until 1973.)

In 1931, Munson became the first woman to earn the school’s degree of engineer. The same year, she began working on two of the most iconic civil engineering projects in the West: the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and Hoover Dam. In general, however, the School of Engineering remained a male bastion. In 1960, after a dozen years as a lecturer,  Irmgard Flügge-Lotz became the school’s first female professor, in aeronautical engineering and engineering mechanics. And in 1962, electrical engineer Irene Carswell Peden, MS ’58, PhD ’62, became the first woman to earn a doctorate from the school. But by the early 1970s, Stanford had conferred only 190 engineering degrees on women.

That has changed. In 2013, women made up 31 percent of engineering undergrads. A decade later, the share was 40 percent. The master’s population showed a similar trend, going from 26 percent to 38 percent. Once upon a time, Widom says, intro CS classes had all-female sections for women who “felt like they didn’t want to be sitting with guys who said, ‘I’ve been coding since I was 12.’” Those days are done. “It’s so mixed now at that level that everybody’s comfortable,” she says. “There’s no longer a feeling, actually, that women are special, which is a good thing.”

Female faculty have also become more common. In the past eight years, the share of faculty that is female has risen from 15 percent to 25 percent, largely due to a doubling in the assistant professor ranks, from 21 percent to 43 percent. “For a student, it really means a lot to see someone that you’re, like, ‘Oh, this is who I can become,’” says senior Connie Hong, a mathematical and computational science major who is earning a co-terminal master’s degree in management science and engineering and is an officer in the Stanford Society of Women Engineers.

Think like an Engineer

When Drell—an experimental physicist and former director of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory—was offered the engineering deanship, she paused. She would be the first dean not from the school, the first dean who was not an engineer, and the first dean who was a woman. That sounded like three strikes, she told Stanford’s then-president, John Hennessy, a former dean of the school himself.

“No, no, no, no, no, you don’t understand,” Hennessy said in return, according to an oral history Drell did in 2020. “They’re engineers.” And indeed, Drell says she was welcomed with open arms. “They’re just—yeah, they’re very sort of results-oriented,” she said. “If I could convince them that together we could do something, that was all that it took.”

At the heart of engineering, she says, is “the mindset that you’re not just going to admire a problem. You’re going to do something to solve it”—a sensibility she could comfortably mesh with.

There are different ways to solve a problem. One of the Engineering School’s modern contributions to campus thought has come through its Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, universally called the d.school. For two decades, the d.school has attracted students from across the university to collaborate on projects using design thinking, whose tenets include immersing yourself in users’ experience to understand their needs and challenges.  

David Kelley, MS ’78, the institute’s founder, says the stereotypical engineers and designers with whom he once worked didn’t relish leaving the office. “You’d take them out to do the interviews about trying to figure out what’s meaningful, to try and solve problems, and they wouldn’t want to get out of the car, a lot of them,” he says. He insisted. By opening the aperture on a problem, he believes, you might see it in an entirely new way, or realize the actual problem is something else entirely.

That’s valuable in designing widgets but also in projects taking on societal challenges. D.school projects have been aimed at making air travel more enjoyable, minimizing drunk driving, and improving K–12 education. Nevertheless, Kelley says the institute’s heart—from focusing on doing hard things to prototyping and then pursuing real-world solutions—is entirely in engineering. There’s no other place at Stanford he can imagine the d.school belonging.

MACHINE LEARNING: Flügge-Lotz, 1950s; the Stanford Solar Car Project, 2013; the humanoid robotic diver OceanOne, 2016; a miniature ore-treating plant in the mining lab; Stephanie Nanette Newdick, MS ’22, PhD ’23, with ReachBot, a space-exploration prototype, 2023. (Photos from top: Jose Mercado/Stanford News Service; Linda A. Cicero/Stanford News Service; Osada/Seguin/DRASSM/Stanford University; Berton W. Crandall/Stanford Special Collections and University Archives; Andrew Brodhead)

Whither Mining? (It Withered)

While Stanford Engineering has mostly waxed for the past 100 years, it has occasionally waned. Exhibit A: metallurgy and mining, not only one of its founding departments but the domain of the school’s first dean, Theodore Hoover, Class of 1901, and older brother to the 31st president of the United States, Herbert, Class of 1895, both of whom were mining magnates. It’s hard to imagine now, when the only mining most students might consider is of data, but Stanford students once competed on mine rescue teams and headed to Gold Country to tramp down shafts with their surveying and sampling gear. 

And yet, there was an ongoing tug of war between those who thought mining and metallurgy belonged with engineering and those who thought it belonged to geology, Nix says. In 1947, the geologists won. Mining and metallurgy moved to the new School of Mineral Sciences, a forerunner to the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. In 1960, the Engineering School staged a partial retrieval, pulling metallurgy back and giving it a new name: materials science. A field once centered on removing metals from ore and preparing them for smelting had pressing new applications as the United States hurried to catch the Soviet Union in the Space Race. Today, the department is focused on atomic- and molecular-level manipulations to enable new materials for applications from medicine to solar power.

Mining, meanwhile, faded as its new school became more environmentally centered, says Erik Sperling, ’03, MS ’05, an associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences. But perhaps the topic is returning. Last summer, Sperling led students to mines in Montana for a Sophomore College course called Mining and the Green Economy, which he’s adapting into a full-quarter offering next year. “I think we will see a resurgence in future years not just in Stanford students in mining, but in students working to make mining—or more broadly, natural material supply—more socially conscious and environmentally friendly,” he says. 

Which is all to say, who knows what the next 100 years will bring? 

Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. Email him at sscott3@stanford.edu.