Fellowships	$	15 million
Program support	$	5 million
	$	20 million

IPER is Stanford’s new interdisciplinary PhD program on environment and resource issues at the interface of science and policy. Funding for IPER is the most critical and immediate need in the area of environment and resources, and IPER has been given the highest priority for fundraising by the Provost’s Committee on the Environment. While IPER and the undergraduate, interdisciplinary Earth Systems Program are housed in the School of Earth Sciences, both are considered core programs of the new Institute for the Environment.

Professorships	$	24 million
Fellowships	$	10 million
Program support	$	3 million
	$	37 million

Professorships: The School of Earth Sciences has nationally and internationally recognized strengths in areas with great potential for interdisciplinary exploration and great promise for the development of workable solutions to some of society’s most pressing problems.

To build on those strengths, the school plans to recruit faculty members in these areas:
• earthquake and volcano research, linking this expertise with the development of new risk-assessment techniques that will help to mitigate the devastating consequences of natural hazards to communities around the world;
• computational geosciences, seeking ways to use new and existing computational and analytical tools in non traditional ways, such as applying geophysical data and approaches used in the exploration and simulation of petroleum reserves to water resource research, ocean carbon modeling, and climate prediction; and
• four interdisciplinary areas related to energy, global systems, climate, and environmental modeling, contributing significantly to the school and Stanford’s environmental initiative.

Fellowships: The creation of high-visibility, interdisciplinary, postdoctoral fellowships will allow Stanford to attract the best young PhDs finishing degrees each year who are interested in new ways of working to address global challenges. Such fellowships have been established at a number of leading research universities, and also provide an opportunity to evaluate future faculty members who will lead in interdisciplinary teaching and research. These postdoctoral scholars will bring a unique combination of youth and scientific accomplishment, and the inspired idealism that will help to drive innovative research and collaboration.

As with undergraduate students, Stanford applies a need-blind admissions policy for graduate students. The primary criteria for admission are superior academic achievement and a potential to contribute to the academic and professional communities and to society as a whole. The competition is intense, and only the top candidates are admitted. For these top applicants, when choosing from among the nation’s finest graduate schools, funding is a significant consideration. In order to attract the most sought-after students, Stanford must provide competitive funding, primarily in the form of fellowships. Graduate fellowships will support students working with faculty at the boundaries of traditional disciplines and in entirely new areas. These students will be critical participants in the effort to build new linkages across campus, helping faculty to identify interests shared with colleagues in other parts of the university.

Many complex problems in Earth systems and in energy and environment research will yield only to numerical analysis and numerical modeling. Until recently, lack of computation power and Earth systems data at appropriate resolutions and in sufficient coverage prevented rapid
progress in understanding and modeling Earth systems processes at anything but small scales. Today, computational capacity and the availability of large amounts of data from a variety of sources offer incredible new opportunities for understanding how the world works and how human activities interact with the environment.

The School of Earth Sciences proposes to create a multidisciplinary computational center for research on energy, the Earth system, and the environment. The center will focus on the development of integrated numerical models of complex geo-processes, and the advanced data analysis and visualization of large geo-datasets for use by faculty throughout Stanford and colleagues at the nearby U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories. Accomplishing these goals will require a large computer cluster with at least 500 CPUs, built with cost-effective computational nodes based on mass-produced technology (a large cluster is necessary in order to take a qualitative step forward in the type of computational problems that can be tackled, and to demonstrate a serious commitment to computational geosciences to prospective students, faculty, and sponsoring agencies). This advanced visualization environment will foster interdisciplinary cooperation by enabling the sharing of common Earth “views” and the building of shared Earth models. In addition to hardware, software, and space, the center will require three technical staff (a numerical analyst, a system manager, and a visualization and Earth modeling analyst) and funding for collaborative research projects; seminars, symposia, and workshops; visiting scholar expenses; and course development and other educational programs.

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