From The Doerr School of Sustainability
At
7.2.24
New research provides the clearest evidence to date that a rapid burst of evolution 540 million years ago could have been caused by a small increase in oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere and shallow ocean waters.
Scientists have found evidence for the sudden appearance of most animal body plans in the fossil record in rocks formed during the Cambrian period (541 to 485 million years ago), such as those pictured here in the Illtyd Formation in Yukon, Canada. | Erik Sperling
The Cambrian explosion, a rapid burst of evolution 540 million years ago, may have been triggered by only a small increase in oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere and shallow ocean waters, according to a July 2 study in Nature Geoscience from an international consortium of scientists from more than 50 institutions.
Fig. 1: Spatial–temporal weighted bootstrapped means of key geochemical proxies from sampled shales.
a, Molybdenum concentrations in euxinic shales. b, Uranium concentrations in anoxic shales. c, Mo/TOC ratios in euxinic shales. d, U/TOC ratios in anoxic shales. e, Proportion of anoxic shales that are euxinic on the basis of iron speciation. f, TOC in all shales. Box and whisker plots illustrate the distribution of 1,000 weighted bootstrapped means per 25 Myr time bin. Central box lines correspond to the median of the distribution for each time bin; lower/upper box boundaries correspond to the 25th and 75th percentiles, respectively; lower/upper whiskers correspond to the smallest/largest value no further than 1.5 times the interquartile range from the lower/upper box boundary, respectively; points indicate outliers from the whisker range. The weighting algorithm inverse weights samples on the basis of their spatial and temporal proximity to other samples in the time bin 25*. Histograms show the number of lithostratigraphic units used in the bootstrap analyses for each time bin. Data treatments for each panel are described in Extended Data Table 1*. Geological time periods: T, Tonian; Cr, Cryogenian; E, Ediacaran; Cm, Cambrian; O, Ordovician; S, Silurian; D, Devonian; C, Carboniferous.
Fig. 2: Statistical reconstructions of deconvolved marine biogeochemical signals for key geochemical proxies in sampled shales.
a–d, Partial dependence plots illustrate the marginal effect of geologic time on Mo (a), U (b), proportion of euxinic depositional environments (c) and TOC (d) when all other variables expected to influence the incorporation of these proxies into fine-grained sedimentary archives are held constant. Dark grey envelopes represent the 25th to 75th percentiles of the distribution of interpolated partial dependence plot values from 100 Monte Carlo random forest analyses (each with tuned random forest hyperparameters) for each time step; light grey envelopes represent the 5th to 95th percentiles of the same distributions. See Extended Data Table 1* for full model predictor variables. Shaded blue regions illustrate three distinct inferred states of the ocean–atmosphere system.
*Science paper reference. See the science paper
See the science paper for further instructive material with images.
“Cambrian animals likely did not require as much oxygen as scientists used to believe. We found minor increases in oxygenation that are at the correct magnitude to drive big changes in ecology,” said Erik Sperling, associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, who leads the consortium.
The study reconciles conflicting data sets from around the world and provides the clearest evidence so far that only a small increase in oxygen occurred around the time of the Cambrian explosion. Moreover, the researchers found evidence that oxygen levels in the deep ocean did not approach those in modern seas until about 140 million years after the Cambrian explosion – much later than previously thought.
“There was at least some increase in atmospheric oxygen around 540 million years ago, which impacted the oxygen availability in shallow marine environments where most marine biodiversity was hosted,” said lead study author Richard Stockey, PhD ’22, a University of Southampton paleobiologist who worked on the research as part of his doctoral thesis in Sperling’s group at Stanford. “But from a global perspective, we didn’t see the full oxygenation of the oceans to near modern levels until about 400 million years ago, around the time that we see the appearance of large forests on land.”
Cambrian rocks in the Mural Formation in Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada. | Erik Sperling
Just enough oxygen
For decades, scientists have theorized that the Cambrian explosion was prompted by a sudden rise in atmospheric oxygen, which brought oxygen in the ancient ocean close to modern levels. But evidence for this has been scattered and, in some cases, contradictory.
“It’s one of these major evolutionary questions,” said Sperling. “We have 4 billion years of evolutionary history where not much is showing up in the rock record, and then within 20 or 30 million years, we get this burst of new body plans.” In a geological blink, animals evolved hard shells, primitive backbones, and other precursors to life forms we see today.
While the researchers found only a small increase in atmospheric oxygen at the time of the Cambrian explosion, it may not have taken much to propel the evolutionary leaps seen in the fossil record. Most animals were living in shallow water at the time, and mixing caused by wind and waves would have oxygenated these areas even as the deeper ocean remained unchanged.
“It’s not a huge increase in oxygen, but it might be enough to cross critical ecological thresholds, based on what we see in modern areas with naturally low oxygen,” Sperling said.
Black shales in the Ediacarian Nadaleen Formation in Yukon, Canada. A Stanford-led consortium of scientists studied black shale archives through geological time and determined that oceans reached modern levels of oxygenation in the Devonian period, around the time of a rapid diversification of plant life on land. | Jared Gooley
Unearthing the answers
To investigate changes in oxygen over 700 million years of Earth’s history, Stockey and Sperling examined data showing levels of the metals uranium and molybdenum in black shale, a sedimentary rock formed in low-oxygen or anoxic (no oxygen) environments on the bottom of ancient oceans.
In low-oxygen environments, these trace elements get pulled out of the seawater and accumulate in sediment. If large swaths of the ocean are anoxic, the amount of molybdenum and uranium in black shale should be low, because these scarce metals are being continuously pulled out of seawater and buried across a large area. If, on the other hand, there are only a few anoxic areas in the ocean, more molybdenum and uranium are available in the seawater and should be concentrated in black shale in higher amounts.
Previous research has found an increase in trace metal concentrations in black shale right around the time of the Cambrian explosion. However, other signals can interfere with these concentrations, Stockey said. Local increases of organic carbon in black shale, for example, can increase the amount of molybdenum and uranium that is present in a particular sample. Stockey applied statistical and machine learning techniques to analyze geochemical data from black shale samples at a much larger scale and tease apart the signals in the rocks. Then he used oceanographic models to estimate oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere and sea.
“We found that changes in organic carbon in black shale have driven a lot of the changes in trace metals that scientists have been seeing for the last 15 or 20 years,” said Stockey. “It’s not until 140 million years after the Cambrian explosion, in the Devonian period, that we see trace metals increasing at a rate that would indicate whole ocean oxygenation.”
Fossil trilobites from the Cambrian Mural Formation in Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada. | Erik Sperling
A consortium for geochemical data
The black shale data were compiled as part of the Sedimentary Geochemistry and Paleoenvironments Project, a research consortium launched by Sperling in 2015 to bring together geochemical data in a standardized database for large-scale analysis. While this consortium approach of compiling, reconciling, and analyzing data is common in other fields – Sperling took inspiration from how biomedical research consortia study diseases – this consortium is the first of its kind in geology.
“It’s a very different approach than we’ve used in the field before,” Sperling said. “Each individual research group, including ours, is still going out to the field and getting a snapshot of what’s going on, but then we need to all come together to analyze things.”
The analytical toolkit that Stockey developed for this work could help researchers understand not only ancient oxygen levels but also temperature, food supply, and other potential drivers of early evolution. Consortium members are also collecting new data to fill in periods of geologic time that are undersampled and conducting analyses that expand into older and younger time intervals.
“To harness the power of these more advanced data science approaches, particularly for geological data, we need everyone to be speaking the same language,” Stockey said. “This community-driven data science approach has allowed us to be way more confident about how we reconstruct Earth’s evolution in space and time.”
See the full article here.
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The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability draws on a deep understanding of Earth, climate, and society to create solutions at a global scale, in collaboration with partners worldwide. Together, we strive to create a future where humans and nature thrive in concert and in perpetuity.
The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability is a school at Stanford University focusing on climate change and sustainability.
It opened on September 1, 2022, as Stanford’s first new school since the School of Humanities and Sciences in 1948. It will be one of the largest climate change–related schools in the United States.
Arun Majumdar was the school’s first dean. Initially, the school had 90 faculty members. It has plans to add 60 more faculty members over 10 years and construct two new buildings adjacent to the existing Green Earth Sciences and Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy buildings. It will incorporate the academic departments and interdisciplinary programs of the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, Woods Institute for the Environment, and Precourt Institute for Energy and will award both undergraduate and graduate degrees. The school will also include the Hopkins Marine Station and a startup accelerator. Despite being Stanford’s newest school, it will include the university’s oldest academic department, geology. The Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering will be a joint department within the School of Sustainability and the School of Engineering.
Stanford has raised $1.69 billion for the establishment of the school, including $1.1 billion from venture capitalist John Doerr and his wife Ann, after whom the school is named. The Doerrs’ gift was the largest ever given to a university for the establishment of a new school and the second largest gift to an academic institution; it makes the Doerrs the top funders of climate change research and scholarship. Other donors include Yahoo! cofounders Jerry Yang and David Filo and their spouses, Akiko Yamazaki and Angela Filo. The Doerr School has also received funding from ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, Shell, Saudi Aramco, Petrobras, and many other oil and gas companies via the Doerr School’s industry affiliates program and the Precourt Institute. Dean Majumdar has indicated that the Doerr School is open to continuing to accept funding from and to work with fossil fuel companies, drawing criticism from Stanford students, faculty, staff, and alumni.
Leland and Jane Stanford founded Stanford University to “promote the public welfare by exercising an influence on behalf of humanity and civilization.” Stanford opened its doors in 1891, and more than a century later, it remains dedicated to finding solutions to the great challenges of the day and to preparing our students for leadership in today’s complex world. Stanford, is an American private research university located in Stanford, California on an 8,180-acre (3,310 ha) campus near Palo Alto. Since 1952, more than 54 Stanford faculty, staff, and alumni have won the Nobel Prize, including 19 current faculty members.
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university located in Stanford, California. Stanford was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who had died of typhoid fever at age 15 the previous year. Stanford is consistently ranked as among the most prestigious and top universities in the world by major education publications. It is also one of the top fundraising institutions in the country, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.
Leland Stanford was a U.S. senator and former governor of California who made his fortune as a railroad tycoon. The school admitted its first students on October 1, 1891, as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. Stanford University struggled financially after the death of Leland Stanford in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, provost Frederick Terman supported faculty and graduates’ entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what would later be known as Silicon Valley.
The university is organized around seven schools: three schools consisting of 40 academic departments at the undergraduate level as well as four professional schools that focus on graduate programs in law, medicine, education, and business. All schools are on the same campus. Students compete in 36 varsity sports, and the university is one of two private institutions in the Division I FBS Pac-12 Conference. It has gained many NCAA team championships, and Stanford has won the NACDA Directors’ Cup for many years. In addition, Stanford students and alumni have won many Olympic medals including many gold medals.
A number of Nobel laureates, Turing Award laureates, and Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Stanford as students, alumni, faculty, or staff. In addition, Stanford is particularly noted for its entrepreneurship and is one of the most successful universities in attracting funding for start-ups. Stanford alumni have founded numerous companies. Stanford is the alma mater of presidents of the United States, a number of living billionaires, and a number of astronauts. It is also one of the leading producers of Fulbright Scholars, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, and members of the United States Congress.
Stanford University was founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford, dedicated to Leland Stanford Jr, their only child. The institution opened in 1891 on Stanford’s previous Palo Alto farm.
Jane and Leland Stanford modeled their university after the great eastern universities, most specifically Cornell University. Stanford opened being called the “Cornell of the West” in 1891 due to faculty being former Cornell affiliates (either professors, alumni, or both) including its first president, David Starr Jordan, and second president, John Casper Branner. Both Cornell and Stanford were among the first to have higher education be accessible, nonsectarian, and open to women as well as to men. Cornell is credited as one of the first American universities to adopt this radical departure from traditional education, and Stanford became an early adopter as well.
Despite being impacted by earthquakes in both 1906 and 1989, the campus was rebuilt each time. In 1919, The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace was started by Herbert Hoover to preserve artifacts related to World War I. The Stanford Medical Center, completed in 1959, is a teaching hospital with over 800 beds. The DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), established in 1962, performs research in particle physics.
Land
Most of Stanford is on an 8,180-acre (12.8 sq mi; 33.1 km^2) campus, one of the largest in the United States. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula, in the northwest part of the Santa Clara Valley (Silicon Valley) approximately 37 miles (60 km) southeast of San Francisco and approximately 20 miles (30 km) northwest of San Jose. In 2008, 60% of this land remained undeveloped.
Stanford’s main campus includes a census-designated place within unincorporated Santa Clara County, although some of the university land (such as the Stanford Shopping Center and the Stanford Research Park) is within the city limits of Palo Alto. The campus also includes much land in unincorporated San Mateo County (including the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve), as well as in the city limits of Menlo Park (Stanford Hills neighborhood), Woodside, and Portola Valley.
Non-central campus
Stanford currently operates in various locations outside of its central campus.
On the founding grant:
Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve is a 1,200-acre (490 ha) natural reserve south of the central campus owned by the university and used by wildlife biologists for research.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is a facility west of the central campus operated by the university for the Department of Energy. It contains the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, 2 miles (3.2 km) on 426 acres (172 ha) of land. Golf course and a seasonal lake: The university also has its own golf course and a seasonal lake (Lake Lagunita, actually an irrigation reservoir), both home to the vulnerable California tiger salamander. As of 2012 Lake Lagunita was often dry and the university had no plans to artificially fill it.
Off the founding grant:
Hopkins Marine Station, in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892., in Pacific Grove, California, is a marine biology research center owned by the university since 1892.
Study abroad locations: unlike typical study abroad programs, Stanford itself operates in several locations around the world; thus, each location has Stanford faculty-in-residence and staff in addition to students, creating a “mini-Stanford”.
Redwood City campus for many of the university’s administrative offices located in Redwood City, California, a few miles north of the main campus. In 2005, the university purchased a small, 35-acre (14 ha) campus in Midpoint Technology Park intended for staff offices; development was delayed by The Great Recession. In 2015 the university announced a development plan and the Redwood City campus opened in March 2019.
The Bass Center in Washington, DC provides a base, including housing, for the Stanford in Washington program for undergraduates. It includes a small art gallery open to the public.
China: Stanford Center at Peking University, housed in the Lee Jung Sen Building, is a small center for researchers and students in collaboration with Beijing University [北京大学](CN) (Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University (CN) (KIAA-PKU).
Administration and organization
Stanford is a private, non-profit university that is administered as a corporate trust governed by a privately appointed board of trustees with a maximum membership of 38. Trustees serve five-year terms (not more than two consecutive terms) and meet five times annually. A new trustee is chosen by the current trustees by ballot. The Stanford trustees also oversee the Stanford Research Park, the Stanford Shopping Center, the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University Medical Center, and many associated medical facilities (including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital).
The board appoints a president to serve as the chief executive officer of the university, to prescribe the duties of professors and course of study, to manage financial and business affairs, and to appoint nine vice presidents. The provost is the chief academic and budget officer, to whom the deans of each of the seven schools report.
As of 2018, the university was organized into seven academic schools. The schools of Humanities and Sciences (27 departments), Engineering (nine departments), and Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (four departments) have both graduate and undergraduate programs while the Schools of Law, Medicine, Education and Business have graduate programs only. The powers and authority of the faculty are vested in the Academic Council, which is made up of tenure and non-tenure line faculty, research faculty, senior fellows in some policy centers and institutes, the president of the university, and some other academic administrators, but most matters are handled by the Faculty Senate, made up of 55 elected representatives of the faculty.
The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is the student government for Stanford and all registered students are members. Its elected leadership consists of the Undergraduate Senate elected by the undergraduate students, the Graduate Student Council elected by the graduate students, and the President and Vice President elected as a ticket by the entire student body.
Stanford is the beneficiary of a special clause in the California Constitution, which explicitly exempts Stanford property from taxation so long as the property is used for educational purposes.
Endowment and donations
In the 2018 NACUBO-TIAA survey of colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, only Harvard University, the University of Texas System, and Yale University had larger endowments than Stanford.
In 2006, President John L. Hennessy launched a five-year campaign called the “Stanford Challenge”, which reached its $4.3 billion fundraising goal in 2009, two years ahead of time, but continued fundraising for the duration of the campaign. It concluded on December 31, 2011, having raised a total of $6.23 billion and breaking the previous campaign fundraising record of $3.88 billion held by Yale. Specifically, the campaign raised $253.7 million for undergraduate financial aid, as well as $2.33 billion for its initiative in “Seeking Solutions” to global problems, $1.61 billion for “Educating Leaders” by improving K-12 education, and $2.11 billion for “Foundation of Excellence” aimed at providing academic support for Stanford students and faculty. Funds supported a large number of new fellowships for graduate students, a number of newly endowed chairs for faculty, and some new or renovated buildings. The new funding also enabled the construction of a facility for stem cell research; a new campus for the business school; an expansion of the law school; a new Engineering Quad; a new art and art history building; an on-campus concert hall; a new art museum; and a planned expansion of the medical school, among other things. In 2012, the university raised $1.035 billion, becoming the first school to raise more than a billion dollars in a year.
Research centers and institutes
DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Stanford Research Institute, a center of innovation to support economic development in the region.
Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government.
Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, a multidisciplinary design school in cooperation with the Hasso Plattner Institute of University of Potsdam [Universität Potsdam](DE) that integrates product design, engineering, and business management education).
Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, which grew out of and still contains the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project.
John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Center for Ocean Solutions
Together with University of California-Berkeley and University of California-San Francisco, Stanford is part of the Biohub, a new medical science research center founded in 2016 by a $600 million commitment from Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and pediatrician Priscilla Chan.
Discoveries and innovation
Natural sciences
Biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) – Arthur Kornberg synthesized DNA material and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 for his work at Stanford.
First Transgenic organism – Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were the first scientists to transplant genes from one living organism to another, a fundamental discovery for genetic engineering. Thousands of products have been developed on the basis of their work, including human growth hormone and hepatitis B vaccine.
Laser – Arthur Leonard Schawlow shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn for his work on lasers.
Nuclear magnetic resonance – Felix Bloch developed new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements, which are the underlying principles of the MRI.
Computer and applied sciences
ARPANET – Stanford Research Institute, formerly part of Stanford but on a separate campus, was the site of one of the four original ARPANET nodes.
Internet—Stanford was the site where the original design of the Internet was undertaken. Vint Cerf led a research group to elaborate the design of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that he originally co-created with Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) in 1973 and which formed the basis for the architecture of the Internet.
Frequency modulation synthesis – John Chowning of the Music department invented the FM music synthesis algorithm in 1967, and Stanford later licensed it to Yamaha Corporation.
Google – Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford. They were working on the Stanford Digital Library Project (SDLP). The SDLP’s goal was “to develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and universal digital library” and it was funded through the National Science Foundation, among other federal agencies.
Klystron tube – invented by the brothers Russell and Sigurd Varian at Stanford. Their prototype was completed and demonstrated successfully on August 30, 1937. Upon publication in 1939, news of the klystron immediately influenced the work of U.S. and UK researchers working on radar equipment.
RISC – ARPA funded VLSI project of microprocessor design. Stanford and University of California- Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. The Stanford MIPS would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeley RISC gave its name to the entire concept, commercialized as the SPARC. Another success from this era were IBM’s efforts that eventually led to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture, PowerPC, and Power ISA. As these projects matured, a wide variety of similar designs flourished in the late 1980s and especially the early 1990s, representing a major force in the Unix workstation market as well as embedded processors in laser printers, routers and similar products.
SUN workstation – Andy Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation, which led to Sun Microsystems.
Businesses and entrepreneurship
Stanford is one of the most successful universities in creating companies and licensing its inventions to existing companies; it is often held up as a model for technology transfer. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing is responsible for commercializing university research, intellectual property, and university-developed projects.
The university is described as having a strong venture culture in which students are encouraged, and often funded, to launch their own companies.
Companies founded by Stanford alumni generate more than $2.7 trillion in annual revenue, equivalent to the 10th-largest economy in the world.
Some companies closely associated with Stanford and their connections include:
Hewlett-Packard, 1939, co-founders William R. Hewlett (B.S, PhD) and David Packard (M.S).
Silicon Graphics, 1981, co-founders James H. Clark (Associate Professor) and several of his grad students.
Sun Microsystems, 1982, co-founders Vinod Khosla (M.B.A), Andy Bechtolsheim (PhD) and Scott McNealy (M.B.A).
Cisco, 1984, founders Leonard Bosack (M.S) and Sandy Lerner (M.S) who were in charge of Stanford Computer Science and Graduate School of Business computer operations groups respectively when the hardware was developed.
Yahoo!, 1994, co-founders Jerry Yang (B.S, M.S) and David Filo (M.S).
Google, 1998, co-founders Larry Page (M.S) and Sergey Brin (M.S).
LinkedIn, 2002, co-founders Reid Hoffman (B.S), Konstantin Guericke (B.S, M.S), Eric Lee (B.S), and Alan Liu (B.S).
Instagram, 2010, co-founders Kevin Systrom (B.S) and Mike Krieger (B.S).
Snapchat, 2011, co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy (B.S).
Coursera, 2012, co-founders Andrew Ng (Associate Professor) and Daphne Koller (Professor, PhD).
Student body
Women comprised 50.4% of undergraduates and 41.5% of graduate students. The freshman retention rate has been 99%.
The relatively low four-year graduation rate is a function of the university’s coterminal degree (or “coterm”) program, which allows students to earn a master’s degree as a 1-to-2-year extension of their undergraduate program.
As of 2010, fifteen percent of undergraduates were first-generation students.
Athletics
Stanford had 16 male varsity sports and 20 female varsity sports, 19 club sports and about 27 intramural sports. In 1930, following a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, the athletic department adopted the mascot “Indian.” The Indian symbol and name were dropped by President Richard Lyman in 1972, after objections from Native American students and a vote by the student senate. The sports teams are now officially referred to as the “Stanford Cardinal,” referring to the deep red color, not the cardinal bird. Stanford is a member of the Pac-12 Conference in most sports, the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation in several other sports, and the America East Conference in field hockey with the participation in the inter-collegiate NCAA’s Division I FBS.
Its traditional sports rival is the University of California-Berkeley, the neighbor to the north in the East Bay. The winner of the annual “Big Game” between the Cal and Cardinal football teams gains custody of the Stanford Axe.
Stanford has had at least one NCAA team champion every year since the 1976–77 school year and has earned many NCAA national team titles since its establishment, the most among universities, and Stanford has won many individual national championships, the most by any university. Stanford has won the award for the top-ranked Division 1 athletic program—the NACDA Directors’ Cup, formerly known as the Sears Cup—annually for the past twenty-four straight years. Stanford athletes have won medals in every Olympic Games since 1912, winning a large number of Olympic medals in total, many of them gold. In the 2008 Summer Olympics, and 2016 Summer Olympics, Stanford won more Olympic medals than any other university in the United States. Stanford athletes won 16 medals at the 2012 Summer Olympics (12 gold, two silver and two bronze), and 27 medals at the 2016 Summer Olympics.
Traditions
The unofficial motto of Stanford, selected by President Jordan, is Die Luft der Freiheit weht. Translated from the German language, this quotation from Ulrich von Hutten means, “The wind of freedom blows.” The motto was controversial during World War I, when anything in German was suspect; at that time the university disavowed that this motto was official.
Hail, Stanford, Hail! is the Stanford Hymn sometimes sung at ceremonies or adapted by the various University singing groups. It was written in 1892 by mechanical engineering professor Albert W. Smith and his wife, Mary Roberts Smith (in 1896 she earned the first Stanford doctorate in Economics and later became associate professor of Sociology), but was not officially adopted until after a performance on campus in March 1902 by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
“Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman”: Stanford does not award honorary degrees, but in 1953 the degree of “Uncommon Man/Uncommon Woman” was created to recognize individuals who give rare and extraordinary service to the University. Technically, this degree is awarded by the Stanford Associates, a voluntary group that is part of the university’s alumni association. As Stanford’s highest honor, it is not conferred at prescribed intervals, but only when appropriate to recognize extraordinary service. Recipients include Herbert Hoover, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Lucile Packard, and John Gardner.
Big Game events: The events in the week leading up to the Big Game vs. UC Berkeley, including Gaieties (a musical written, composed, produced, and performed by the students of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society).
“Viennese Ball”: a formal ball with waltzes that was initially started in the 1970s by students returning from the now-closed Stanford in Vienna overseas program. It is now open to all students.
“Full Moon on the Quad”: An annual event at Main Quad, where students gather to kiss one another starting at midnight. Typically organized by the Junior class cabinet, the festivities include live entertainment, such as music and dance performances.
“Band Run”: An annual festivity at the beginning of the school year, where the band picks up freshmen from dorms across campus while stopping to perform at each location, culminating in a finale performance at Main Quad.
“Mausoleum Party”: An annual Halloween Party at the Stanford Mausoleum, the final resting place of Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. A 20-year tradition, the “Mausoleum Party” was on hiatus from 2002 to 2005 due to a lack of funding, but was revived in 2006. In 2008, it was hosted in Old Union rather than at the actual Mausoleum, because rain prohibited generators from being rented. In 2009, after fundraising efforts by the Junior Class Presidents and the ASSU Executive, the event was able to return to the Mausoleum despite facing budget cuts earlier in the year.
Former campus traditions include the “Big Game bonfire” on Lake Lagunita (a seasonal lake usually dry in the fall), which was formally ended in 1997 because of the presence of endangered salamanders in the lake bed.
Award laureates and scholars
Stanford’s current community of scholars includes:
Many Nobel Prize laureates
Many members of the National Academy of Sciences
Many members of National Academy of Engineering
Many members of National Academy of Medicine
A large number of members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Many recipients of the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology
Recipients of the National Humanities Medal
Members of American Philosophical Society
Fellows of the American Physics Society (since 1995)
A number of Pulitzer Prize winners
A large number of MacArthur Fellows
Some Wolf Foundation Prize winners
A Few ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners
A number of AAAI fellows
Some Presidential Medal of Freedom winners
