Spring 2023 Grants
With a dedicated focus on bolstering the backbone of our educational ecosystem—the individuals who directly nurture and guide our students, including faculty members, instructors, mentors, and student staff—a total of fifty proposals originating from thirteen distinct departments across four Schools have been successfully funded through the Spring 2023 Funding Programs.
Examples of funded projects include:
- materials, tools, and assistant support for successful making@stanford 2022-23 pilot courses in Geophysics and Silversmithing
- materials for courses in costume design, photography, haptics, and bio-making
- assistant support for a new Anthropology IntroSem
student staffing support across several programs and making spaces
Updates on funded courses, projects, and new programs will be available below as they are implemented.
BIOE 261: 3D Bioprinting Laboratory
This class had 13 students, represented by undergrads, masters, and PhD students, learn through a series of workshops. Student assembled 3D bioprinters, then learned how to use them in bio applications by printing a tri-leaflet heart valve, printing into tissue, and staining human tissues to assess cell behavior in printed inks among other workshops. Final student group projects ranged from building electronic sensors to enable automated nozzle alignment, to designing and making low-cost 3D printed auger dispensers, to 3D printing human heart cells to form a beating bio-pump with a valve.
Enlargers for Photography Lab Dark Room
This grant awarded funding for enlargers in the Art Department's Photography Lab. This lab supports a variety of core art studio classes and higher level conceptual photography classes. Materials were also funded for one of the core photo classes, ARTSTUDI 170: Light and Shadow.
Expanded Curriculum in Physical Interaction Design and Musical Acoustics
The CCRMA Max Lab supports the making of musical instruments, where students pair understanding in music and composition with physical making. The cornerstone class, MUSIC250A, continues to dazzle with a wide range of unique student projects, now with expanded access to design and making elements for their instruments.
World of Wearable Art -2024
An exploration of how art and clothes intersect. Rana Regina, our alien frog princess was entered into the World of Wearable Art, an international wearable art competition in New Zealand. Making@stanford provided essential materials and support for students to create this garment as well as sample other ideas.
Printmaking Mentors
Thanks to making@stanford, we were able to hire our very first printmaking studio mentors. Printmaking involves intricate processes and setup, and having mentors available to answer questions has enabled students to swiftly dive into ambitious printing techniques, fostering a strong sense of community within the printmaking studio.
Expanded Radio Frequency Experiments and Projects for Applied Physics 207
This grant supported new equipment and instruments for students to explore radio-frequency techniques. Class projects included a demonstration of Spread-Spectrum Communication methods, and the grant supported new RF cavities and oscillators to explore the Pound-Drever-Hall method of locking an oscillator to an external resonator.
Engineering microbes to build bioplastics
The BIOE 44: Fundamentals for Engineering Biology Lab course collaborated with a team of making mentors to engineer cells to build bioplastics and explore the sustainable polymer manufacturing space. Excitingly, the student teams collected initial evidence that the bioplastics produced by the engineered microbial strains may have longer polymer chains and higher molecular mass compared with the output from an initial production strain, a design goal the teams were hoping to achieve as this increased length improves the commercial properties of the material.