Back to School Class Biographies
All Back to School Classes are available on a first-come, first-served basis on the day of the class.
Be sure to arrive early!
Ralph J. Castro
Associate Dean & Director, Stanford Office of Alcohol Policy & Education
Addressing Alcohol Issues at Stanford: An Overview and Parent Perspectives
Session III: Saturday 2:30—3:30 p.m.
Ralph Castro serves as the Associate Dean of Student Affairs and the Director of the Stanford Office of Alcohol Policy and Education. Ralph is the co-leader of Stanford's National College Health Improvement Project to Address Risk Drinking campus team. He has worked in the field of college alcohol and drug prevention work for over 15 years and has published in journals and presented at numerous national conferences on the subject. Ralph is a nationally recognized expert in the field of college alcohol prevention work and has served on several national committees and work groups.
Lance Choy
Director of Career Development Center and Assistant Vice Provost
Career Talk
Session II: Saturday 1:00—2:00 p.m.
Lance Choy has worked at the University of California, Berkeley's and Golden Gate University's career centers before coming to Stanford University. At Stanford he has worked in several different roles including liaison to the School of Engineering and liberal arts career counselor. Lance has been the Director of the Career Development Center since 2000.
Larry Diamond
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution & Freeman Spogli Institute; Director, Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law; Peter E. Haas Faculty Co-Director, Haas Center for Public Service
Foreign Policy Challenges for the Second Obama Administration
Session II: Saturday 1:00—2:00 p.m.
Larry Diamond is Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford, and Faculty Co-Director of the Haas Center for Public Service. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. His book The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World explores the sources of global democratic progress and stress and the future prospects of democracy.
Diamond is professor by courtesy of political science and sociology at Stanford University, where he teaches courses on democratic development. In 2007, he was named Teacher of the Year by the Associated Students of Stanford University for teaching that "transcends political and ideological barriers." That year he also received Stanford's Dinkelspiel Award for "his inspired teaching and commitment to undergraduate education" and "for the example he sets as a scholar and public intellectual."
Larry Diamond received all of his degrees from Stanford University, including a B.A. in 1974, an M.A. in 1978, and a Ph.D. in Sociology in 1980. He taught Sociology at Vanderbilt University from 1980-85 before joining the Hoover Institution.
Christopher Gardner
Associate Professor of Medicine, Stanford Prevention Research Center (a division of the Department of Medicine)
Solutions to the Omnivore's Dilemma: Stealth Health
Session III: Saturday 2:30—3:30 p.m.
Dr. Gardner holds a PhD in Nutrition Science from UC Berkeley and is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Stanford. He currently serves on the Nutrition committee of the American Heart Association. His primary research focus for the past decade has been randomized controlled nutrition intervention trials funded by the National Institutes of Health (e.g., soy, garlic, antioxidants, ginkgo, omega-3 fats, vegetarian diets, weight loss diets), testing the effects of these on chronic disease risk factors (e.g., blood cholesterol, weight, blood pressure, insulin). These studies have involved over 1200 research participants and the results of these studies have been published in major medical journals bringing national and international attention to his research.
Recently his nutrition interests have shifted to two new areas. The first is to approach helping individuals make healthful improvements in diet through motivators beyond health, piggybacking on ongoing social movements around animal rights and welfare, climate change, and social justice, and their relationships to food; stealth health. The second is to focus less on individual behaviors, and more on a food systems approach that addresses the quality of food provided by schools, hospitals, worksites, senior centers, food banks, prisons, etc. and taking advantage of the many complementary disciplines represented on the Stanford campus, such as business, education, law, earth sciences, engineering, the humanities, and his home school of medicine.
Hank Greely
Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics
Ethical and Legal Challenges from the Cutting Edges of Bioscience: Whole Genome Sequencing, Predicting Alzheimer's Disease, "De-Extincting" the Dodo, and the End of Sex
Session II: Saturday 1:00—2:00 p.m.
Hank Greely (BA '74) specializes in the ethical, legal, and social implications of new biomedical technologies, particularly those related to neuroscience, genetics, or stem cell research. He frequently serves as an advisor on California, national, and international policy issues. He is chair of California’s Human Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee and served from 2007-2010 as co-director of the Law and Neuroscience Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Active in university leadership, Professor Greely chairs the steering committee for the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and directs both the law school’s Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford Interdisciplinary Group on Neuroscience and Society. In 2007 Professor Greely was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1985, Greely was a partner at Tuttle & Taylor, served as a staff assistant to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, and as special assistant to the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense. He served as a law clerk to Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Greely is also a professor (by courtesy) of genetics at Stanford School of Medicine.
John Mitchell
Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor of Computer Science and (by courtesy) Electrical Engineering; Vice Provost for Online Learning
Online Teaching and Learning, On and Off the Farm
Session I: Saturday 10:30—11:30 a.m.
John Mitchell is the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the School of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science. He was named Vice Provost for Online Learning in August. Earlier, as a special assistant to the president, Prof Mitchell chaired a university committee on online education and organized the release of a number of free online courses on various platforms. As a result of his June seed grant program, Stanford funded over 20 experimental faculty activities for 2012-13 that will develop and deploy new online teaching and learning activities in on-campus or externally available courses. As a professor of computer science, John’s research interests include programming languages, computer security, mathematical logic, and web technology.
Clifford I. Nass
The Thomas More Storke Professor and Professor, by courtesy, of Computer Science, of Education, of Law, of Sociology
The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What We Can Learn About Ourselves from Our Machines
Session II: Saturday 1:00—2:00 p.m.
Clifford Nass is the Thomas M. Storke Professor, with appointments in Communication; Computer
Science; Education; Law; Science, Technology, and Society; Sociology; and Symbolic Systems. He is Director of the CHIMe Lab and the Revs Program at Stanford University. Clifford Nass earned a B.A. cum
laude in mathematics (1981) and a Ph.D. in sociology (1986), both from Princeton University.
Nass's newest book is The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What We Can Learn About Ourselves from Our Machines; his two previous books are The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places (Cambridge University Press) and Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship (MIT Press), which won the International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award for 2007. He is author of over 125 papers on the psychology of technology and statistical methodology.
His research has been applied to over 250 media products and services for companies including Microsoft, Toyota, Nissan, Philips, Sony, Time-Warner, Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity. Nass is also a professional magician.
Andrew Ng
Director, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab; Associate Professor of Computer Science
Building Smart Machines: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and the Human Brain
Session III: Saturday 2:30—3:30 p.m..
Andrew Ng's research is in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Through building very large scale cortical (brain) simulations, he is developing algorithms that can learn to sense and perceive without needing to be explicitly programmed. Using these techniques, he has developed sophisticated computer vision algorithms, as well as a variety of highly capable robots, such as by far the most advanced autonomous helicopter controller, that is able to fly spectacular aerobatic maneuvers. His group also developed ROS, which is today by far the most widely used open-source robotics software platform. In 2011, he also taught an online Machine Learning class to over 100,000 students, leading to his co-founding Coursera, which is offering high quality online courses.
Carole Pertofsky
Director, Health Promotion Services at Vaden Health Center
Frederic Luskin
Director, Stanford Forgiveness Project; Senior Consultant, Health Promotion Services at Vaden Health Center
Emotional Health and Well-Being of Stanford Students
Session I: Saturday 10:30—11:30 a.m.
Dr. Fred Luskin and Carole Pertofsky, M.Ed. sponsored Stanford's first "Happiness Within Reach" conference in 2011 and they co-teach a Stanford course, “The Pursuit of Happiness and Health”. In this course, students are exposed to the psychological and medical research that examines the causes and impediments to happiness. Students will consider how research has answered the questions such as: What is happiness? Is it possible? What holds us back from it? Students also are asked to engage in a personal quest to discover meaning, purpose and pleasure in their Stanford experience and beyond.
Carole Pertofsky is Director, Stanford's Student Wellness and Health Promotion Services, and “I Thrive@Stanford” program. She is passionate about supporting students to reach their full potential by engaging them in teaching, learning and leadership opportunities. As a result of her own personal journey with breast cancer, she co-founded "Spiritual Tools for Healing" Center, a cancer survivors support network located in the East Bay. In addition, Pertofsky's work includes coaching/counseling individuals to appreciate and enhance the life journey at every stage of life. She leads workshops at the Esalen Institute, the Stanford Women's Healthy Living Retreat, and higher education venues.
Dr. Luskin's is a Senior Consultant in Health Promotion and the Director of the Forgiveness Projects at Stanford and the author of the best selling books "Forgive for Good" and "Forgive for Love". He is a senior teacher for Stanford’s CCARE program as well as the Director of Wellness Education for Be Well. He is also a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Sofia University. His forgiveness work combines lecture with a hands-on approach to the ancient tradition of forgiveness. His nine steps to forgiveness have helped troubled individuals and groups all over the world. Dr. Luskin presents lectures, workshops, seminars and trainings throughout the United States on stress management, forgiveness and emotional competence.
Janice Ross
Professor, Dept. of Theatre and Performance Studies; Director of Dance Division
Taking Dance to Prison: Using the Arts for Social Change with Juvenile Hall Inmates
Session II: Saturday 1:00—2:00 p.m.
Janice Ross, Professor, Theatre and Performance Studies Department, and Director, Dance Division, at Stanford University, has a BA with Honors from UC Berkeley and MA and PhD degrees from Stanford. She is the author of Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (UC Press 2007), San Francisco Ballet at 75 (Chronicle Books 2007) and Moving Lessons: Margaret H’Doubler and The Beginning of Dance in American Education (University of Wisconsin 2001). Her forthcoming book, The Great Rehearsal: Ballet as Resistance in Soviet Russia examines ballet as a site of cultural resistance in the USSR and it will be published next year. Her awards include Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships .Her research interests include Dance in Prisons and the arts and social change. Her articles on dance have appeared in The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times among other publications.
Ramón Saldívar
Burke Family Director of the Bing Overseas Studies Program; Hoagland Professor of Humanities & Sciences; Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education; Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Professor, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Study Abroad
Session III: Saturday 2:30—3:30 p.m.
Ramón Saldívar, is professor of English and Comparative Literature and holds the Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities and Sciences chair at Stanford University and the Bass Fellow in Undergraduate Education.
His teaching and research focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century comparative literary studies, literary theory, the history of the novel, transnationalism, American cultural studies, the literature of the Americas, and Chicano/a and U.S. Latina/o studies.
He is author of the books Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce (Princeton, 1984) and Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Wisconsin, 1990). His most recent book, The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (Duke, 2006),was awarded the Modern Language Association Prize for best book in the area of US Latina/Latino and Chicana/Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. In 2011, Professor Saldívar was awarded the National Humanities Medal, the highest honor in the humanities, by President Barack Obama in a ceremony at the White House. He has been nominated by President Obama to a position on the National Humanities Council.
Professor Saldívar is currently working on a new project, tentatively titled “Race, Narrative Theory and Contemporary American Fiction.”
St. Lawrence String Quartet
Stanford Ensemble in Residence
Haydn Quartets Make You Smarter
Session I: Saturday 10:30—11:30 a.m.
Established in 1989, the St. Lawrence String Quartet (SLSQ) has developed an undisputed reputation as a truly world class chamber ensemble. The quartet performs over 120 concerts annually worldwide and calls Stanford University home, where the group is Ensemble in Residence since 1998. This residency includes working with music students as well as extensive collaborations with other faculty and departments using music to explore a myriad of topics. Recent collaborations have involved the School of Medicine, School of Education, and the Law School. In addition to their appointment at Stanford, the SLSQ are visiting artists at the University of Toronto. The foursome's passion for opening up musical arenas to players and listeners alike is evident in their annual summer chamber music seminar at Stanford and their many forays into the depths of musical meaning with preeminent music educator Robert Kapilow.
The SLSQ continues to build its reputation for imaginative and spontaneous music-making, through an energetic commitment to the great established quartet literature as well as the championing of new works by such composers as John Adams, Osvaldo Golijov, Eziquiel Vinao, and Jonathan Berger. The SLSQ's recordings have been honored with the coveted German critics award, Canada’s Juno Award (for their release of Schumann’s 1st and 3rd quartets), and two Grammy nominations (for their landmark Yiddishbbuk CD).
Violist Lesley Robertson is a founding member of the group, and hails from Edmonton Alberta. Cellist Christopher Costanza is from Utica, NY and joined the quartet in 2003. Violinists Geoff Nuttall and Scott St. John both grew up in London Ontario; Geoff is a founding member and Scott joined in 2006. Depending on concert repertoire, the two alternate the role of first violin. All four members of the quartet live and teach at Stanford.
Robert I. Sutton
Professor, Stanford Department of Management Science & Engineering
From the Few to the Many: Scaling-Up Excellence
Session I: Saturday 10:30—11:30 a.m.
Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School. He is co-founder of the Center for Work, Technology and Organization, which he co-directed from 1996 to 2006. Sutton is also co-founder of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and the Hasso Planter Institute of Design (which everyone calls “the d school”), a multi-disciplinary program at Stanford that teaches and spreads “design thinking." He is an IDEO and a Professor of Organizational Behavior, by courtesy, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Sutton received his Ph.D. in Organizational Psychology from The University of Michigan and has served on the Stanford faculty since 1983.
Sutton studies the links between managerial knowledge and organizational action, innovation, and organizational performance. He has published over 125 articles and chapters in scholarly and applied publications. Sutton’s book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (Business Plus, 2007), was described by Publisher’s Weekly as “meticulously researched” and “direct and punchy” and is a The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Amazon.com (as the #1 non-fiction book), and BusinessWeek bestseller. His latest book, Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to be Best… and Learn from the Worst (Business Plus, 2010) is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. His current book project (with Hayagreeva Rao) is tentatively titled Scaling-Up Excellence. His books have been translated in over 20 languages.
Risa H. Wechsler
Assistant Professor, Stanford University Department of Physics, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology
Dark Matter: The Search for 85% of the Mass in the Universe
Session I: Saturday 10:30—11:30 a.m.
Dr. Risa Wechsler is Assistant Professor in the Physics Department at Stanford University, and in the Department of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. She is a member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC). She works in theoretical cosmology and astrophysics. Her primary interests are in galaxy formation and the development of structure in the universe, and in how astronomical observations can constrain the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
She has been awarded a Terman Fellowship and the Hellman Faculty Scholarship. Dr. Wechsler received her B.S. in physics with a minor in mathematics from MIT and her Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was a postdoctoral research associate at University of Michigan and University of Chicago as a Hubble Fellow and Fermi Fellow.