Nurturing Partnerships Within and Beyond Stanford

At Stanford Impact Labs (SIL), we envision a world where data-driven approaches to social problems are co-created by communities, leaders, and scholars working together to unlock solutions and make measurable and meaningful progress.

Though SIL is a special initiative that sits within the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences, our programs and funding extend to faculty, scholars, and research teams across all seven of Stanford’s schools. Our fellowships are shaped to help faculty and scholars across a diversity of disciplines explore how their research can contribute to making tractable progress against a particular social problem. 

In the year ahead, SIL is delighted to partner with Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability and the Institute for Advancing Just Societies (IAJS) to support faculty as they pursue partnership-based, solutions-focused research projects. 

The Doerr School sponsored two Stanford faculty in last year’s cohort of our Design Fellowship: Professors Krish Seetah and Jane Willenbring, whose projects focused on Malaria prevention and treatment through enhanced modeling, and supporting composters to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, respectively. 

This year, the Doerr School will once again support two faculty to participate in the fellowship: Professors Marshall Burke and Michelle Wilde Anderson (who is additionally co-sponsored by the IAJS). Professor Burke’s project seeks to support governments, nonprofits, and key actors in identifying and implementing what works when it comes to climate adaptation. Professor Anderson will be working with the civic sector, local government, and HBCUs in Jackson, Mississippi to co-create a shared understanding of the history and opportunities for addressing the city’s needs.

In addition to sponsoring Professor Anderson, the IAJS will also support Professor Guilherme Lichand’s participation in the Design Fellowship. Professor Lichand’s project seeks to support the Brazilian government to effectively deploy resources to reduce educational inequalities.

Partnership sits at the core of the approach SIL takes to pioneering new pathways for scholars both within and beyond the university. Many of our key programs are built around foundational partnerships across Stanford’s campus. Scholars in Service, for instance, now in its fifth year, is a program jointly run by SIL and the Haas Center for Public Service that supports Stanford faculty to take a period of experiential leave from the university to embed themselves within a host organization, often a government agency.

Through our postdoctoral fellowship program, SIL partners with research labs across Stanford  to appoint and train new postdoctoral students through a 50/50 cost-share model. SIL provides the curricula training and the lab provides a home for the postdoc to put the training into practice.

SIL has also partnered with campus initiatives (including the Sustainability Accelerator, Summer Session, and the Stanford Graduate Summer Institute) to provide one-off workshops focused on social impact, partnership, and testing and scaling solutions.

If you are interested in exploring ways to collaborate with SIL in supporting faculty and scholars across Stanford who are engaged in putting social science to work for society, please don’t hesitate to reach out.