Stanford University
Leland Stanford Junior University, popularly known as Stanford University or simply Stanford, is an American private research university standing on an 8,180 acre of land in Stanford, California. near Palo Alto. This university is strategically located northwest of Silicon Valley, northwest of San Jose and Southeast of San Francisco.
The university was founded in 1891 and was named after the son of its founder Leland Stanford, a politician and railroad tycoon, who together with his wife, Jane Lathrop, established the school as a coeducational and non-denominational university. However, financial woes plagued the newly established school when its founder died in 1893 and much of its campus was devastated during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
In 1945, Frederick Terman, who was appointed as Dean of the university’s College of Engineering, supported teachers and alumni’s entrepreneurialism to build self-sufficient local industry in what later became Silicone Valley. Terman also led the creation of the then-known Stanford Industrial Park, which today is known as the Stanford Research Park.
Notable companies like Lockheed Corporation, General Electric, Varian Associates, Hewlett-Packard and Eastman Kodak have moved in. By the early 70’s, the university became home to a linear accelerator, was one of the recipients of the original four ARPANET nodes, and had changed itself into a major research university in the field of computer science, mathematics, natural science and social sciences.
Currently, Stanford is organized into seven schools, which include the schools for Humanities and Sciences and Earth Sciences. It is also home to several professional schools like Business, Education, Law, Medicine and Engineering.
The School of Engineering, in particular, has been the university’s core in terms of its education and research programs. Founded in 1925 and with more than eight decades of notable innovations, it has helped foster the development of technology in the state of California and is instrumental in more than 800 companies.
Among the projects made by the department were autonomous vehicles and drones, robots that were used in films, medical robots that help doctors perform delicate procedures and machines that hover above ground.
Recently, at the Robot Block Party held at Stanford’s Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Lab, inventors, researchers and students showed off their wares, including a robot that danced to the music of the late pop icon, Michael Jackson. The annual showcase brought a lot of robot enthusiasts and robots alike to the San Francisco Bay Area.
