Thematic Workshops 2026-2027

This session is designed to be a conversation among SIL-funded teams about how to turn research insights into lasting change at a larger scale: whether that's licensing a new technology, partnering with a nonprofit to deliver a program, shifting a policy window, or changing how a system or practice works day-to-day. We’ll start by looking at a framework for different strategies to move from research to broader impact, then hear from the group.

Come ready to share what your team is trying (or considering), what's working, and where you're stuck, and to exchange ideas whether you work in public health, climate change, education, or another impact area.

Join us for a conversation featuring guest speaker Sonia Barragan, Executive Director of Research Administration at the Stanford School of Humanities & Sciences. We’ll talk through the workflow across the various offices involved in sponsored research, and practical guidance for faculty and staff, including what makes a project more complex, and what to expect regarding timelines for research administration set-up at the front-end of a project.

Every research partnership eventually raises the same question: Who owns the relationship? Join us for an informal lunch roundtable discussing how research labs balance individual ownership and management of a partnership — typically held by the PI or point person — with collective responsibility of that relationship across the broader lab. Come ready to share how your team navigates this, and to hear how others are managing it too.

Lunch will be provided for participants who RSVP at least 1 week in advance.

In this session we invite guest speaker Adam Gorlick, former Director of Communications at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), to share examples and lessons learned from helping translate research findings into public communications, with the aim of influencing public policy conversations and processes.

Adam will answer questions about positioning your work for real-world relevance, and will reference examples from other Stanford research-to-policy impact projects.

We will send out a brief survey before the workshop to collect specific discussion questions from registered attendees.

What happens to your intellectual property once your research starts moving toward real-world impact? A guest speaker from Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) will walk through OTL’s role and process in supporting Stanford academics, and answer questions about IP protection and open-sourcing for social impact projects coming out of Stanford.

Whether you're thinking about patents, licensing, or making your work freely available for broader use, this session will help you understand your options — and who at Stanford can help.

AI tools can show up in many ways, but what strategies actually save you time and effort? Over lunch, we'll compare notes across labs: What has become a helpful way to use AI tools in your team's operations? What skills have you built in your lab? How do you integrate across different platforms? Come with one example of a win, a dud, or an open question to share with the group.

Lunch will be provided for participants who RSVP at least 1 week in advance.