In the area of research, there are 13 design teams right now
that are working on detailed plans for realizing the vision.
Eight of them are working on research initiatives,
and there are five design teams working on how
to support the foundation.
One of them is working on flexible resources
to help power all areas of research
and research-based education at Stanford.
The mission of the Stanford Social X-Change
is to position Stanford as a trusted partner in working
with governments and nonprofits and philanthropic institutions.
We're working on social problems in the world,
and want to use science in powerful ways
to shape the policies that they implement, the programs
that they designed.
I'm an economist trying to find better ways
to think through the root causes of poverty.
I focus on basic capabilities, health, education.
One example is work I've done on HIV prevention
for young adolescents.
I've done work in Kenya on this topic,
so I design a curriculum that you could deliver in schools.
We compare it with what happens when they receive
the traditional curriculum.
We find that they modulate design works much better.
It reduces teen pregnancy, which is a good marker
for unprotected sex.
And importantly this pregnancy that averted
are the pregnancies that would have
happened with older partners.
So I think of Applied Social science research
as building the evidence base that decision makers need
to transform people's lives for the better.
The Social X captures a commitment
to the social sciences, and a sense
that there are innovative frontiers that
need new resources and commitments to explore.
The X-Change is about a fundamental connection
between ideas and experiences that
exist outside the university, and ideas and experiences
that exist inside our disciplines
in university that need to be brought together.
The opportunity is there to make Standford second to none
as a leader in doing problem focused research.
The four themes within our changing human experience
project are the changing human body, the changing human mind,
the changing globe, which has been pulled together
so much more than ever before.
And changing political communities.
But the great problem is how difficult
it is for us to understand what these changes mean.
We need to be able to look back to the very origins
of modern humanity in order to understand
what we're doing now, and what's likely to happen in the coming
century.
One aspect of the changing human experience is art.
And in my own research I'm particularly
focused on art made by people of color, made
by people whose experiences have not been closely studied.
People like refugees or immigrants.
For example, in my research studying the 1882 Chinese
Exclusion Act, which was the first nationality based
immigration law, has allowed me to kind of think
about the broader implications as well as causes of things
like the contested border wall between Mexico and the United
States now.
I think that artists, because they are articulating
questions and ways of being in material form,
they allow us to see not only new perspectives
on those histories, but also allow
us to understand just what it felt
like to live at a particular moment
at a particular time in a particular body.
Our project is all about pure research.
Knowledge for its own sake.
Stanford is different from most of the universities
of the world, in that there are very, very few
universities that combine absolute first rank science,
engineering, medicine departments with absolutely
first rank artistic, humanistic, social scientific departments.
Which suggests to us we have this unique opportunity
to make Stanford the place that leads
the way in the interpretation as well as the transformation
of the human experience.
The design team started by talking about,
what does it take to really translate ideas
into solid research and scholarship?
We've settled on two priorities.
One of them is the appointment of research initiative
directors, who will help select exciting research
possibilities within particular topical areas and themes.
The second initiative is to increase graduate fellowships
across the entire university.
In the modern funding landscape, it's increasingly difficult
to get funding for the most early stage, risky, high impact
ideas.
The flexible resources initiative
will help people get funding that they need in order
to get initial results to make them more
competitive for federal funding, or to work on topics where
external funding isn't available.
So if a student in a particular field
needs access to research computation,
or particular data sets, or a particular type of electron
microscope, our dream is that every scholar
would be able to access all of those resources--
not quite as easily as they can check out
a book from the library today, but almost as easily.