Research in EEES

Students in EEES must make significant headway in, and combine insights from, more than one scientific discipline. However, the program is flexible enough to enable students to bring together the expertise most important for their areas of interest.

For example, a student aiming to understand the structure of the Earth's interior using intensive computational methods might design a study plan that includes high level mathematics, numerical modeling, and geophysical imaging techniques. A student especially interested in water management in intensively managed landscapes might integrate water flow analysis and modeling, geophysical imaging, geostatistics, and satellite remote sensing of changes in agricultural intensity and land use. A student interested in marine carbon cycling might become expert in and use knowledge and tools from numerical modeling, marine biogeochemistry and geochemistry, oceanography, and satellite imaging.

In all of these examples, students would need to call on strengths from more than one department within the School of Earth Sciences , and ultimately would be much more appropriately labeled "Earth scientists" than disciplinary geophysicists, geologists, or petroleum engineers. The key to this program is its academic flexibility and its ability to tap into an increasingly interdisciplinary faculty, particularly within the School of Earth Sciences, but also among the greater Stanford community.