printable version$30 million gift jump starts effort for environment
The Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Institute for the Environment eventually will be housed in the planned environment and energy building, shown in this 2005 architect’s rendering.
Ward W. Woods
Stanford University trustee Ward W. Woods, '64, and his wife, Priscilla, have committed $30 million to the Stanford Institute for the Environment, institute leaders announced Tuesday.
The gift is designed to support innovative environmental programs and collaborative research that lead to significant advances in environmental science and policy. In recognition of the gift, the institute will be renamed the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
"Stanford has long been recognized for its broad strengths in environmental scholarship," university President John Hennessy said. "The Woodses' generous gift builds on that foundation and enables us to expand our efforts."
The Woods Institute is the cornerstone of the campuswide Initiative for Environmental Sustainability, which was launched in 2004 to promote an environmentally sustainable world where human needs are met while protecting and restoring the Earth's natural resources. To accomplish this goal, the initiative promotes work at the intersection of traditional disciplines by attracting faculty and students from every school, laboratory and institute on campus. The Woods gift brings total contributions to the initiative to more than $40 million.
Leadership and serviceA Stanford donor and active volunteer for decades, Ward Woods was president and chief executive officer of Bessemer Securities LLC, a privately held investment company, from 1989 until his retirement in December 1999. He is a member of the university Board of Trustees and chair of the Stanford Management Company's board of directors. From 1996 to 2002, he served on the board of visitors of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
"Through his leadership and service to the university, Ward has done much to contribute to its excellence," Hennessy said. "He has a great appreciation for what it takes to nurture innovation. The Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford will serve as an incubator, pioneering multidisciplinary solutions to environmental challenges and educating the next generation of leaders on these issues."
In addition to his support for the university, Ward Woods has given time, money and expertise to environmental causes for many years. He serves as a trustee and chairman of the executive committee of the Wildlife Conservation Society and as a director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
Priscilla Woods, a clinical social worker, is actively involved in community affairs in Idaho, serving on the boards of the Sun Valley Ski Education Foundation and Citizens for Smart Growth. She has been a trustee of Radcliffe College and Outward Bound.
"Solving the world's urgent environmental problems takes bold ideas from leaders and experts in many fields and involves collaboration of researchers from diverse disciplines," Ward Woods said. "Most of all, it takes a conviction that these problems are largely solvable and a tough-minded commitment to seeking the solutions that gain traction in the real world. Stanford's preeminence as a research university and history of multidisciplinary cooperation provide the best academic combination for addressing these problems."
Working solutionsThe Woods Institute focuses on four environmental areas in which Stanford has the greatest expertise and is thus likely to do the greatest good, according to institute leaders: freshwater resources; energy and climate systems; land use and conservation; and oceans and estuaries.
"The ultimate goal of the Woods Institute is to produce working solutions to major environmental challenges," explained institute co-director Barton H. "Buzz" Thompson Jr., the Robert E. Paradise Professor in Natural Resources Law. "To achieve this goal, interdisciplinary teams of experts at the institute actively collaborate with the private and public leaders who will implement the solutions. The Woods gift will enable the institute to work on a broader set of issues and with more groups around the world."
Special programsPart of the gift will be used to further three institute programs: Environmental Venture Projects (EVP), Strategic Collaborations, and Environmental Management and Leadership.
Through EVP, multidisciplinary faculty teams receive seed money for innovative, promising research projects that are difficult to fund in their initial stages through traditional sources. EVP already supports more than a dozen projects, including an effort by engineers and medical faculty to develop new membrane technology that will allow rural communities in developing countries to purify drinking water cheaply.
"Many multidisciplinary proposals with the greatest potential for finding solutions to complex environmental challenges can have difficulty getting outside funding because they do not easily fit into existing programs," said institute co-director Jeffrey Koseff, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and the Michael Forman University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. "This infusion of the Woods gift will help us accelerate support for this sort of high risk, potentially transformative, collaborative research."
The institute's Strategic Collaborations program is designed to bring Stanford faculty together with outside organizations—including government agencies, industry leaders and other research institutions—to address major sustainability challenges. The Woods gift will go toward two such efforts:
The planned Environmental Management and Leadership Program will help provide environmental scientists with leadership and management skills. The program builds on the success of the institute's Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, which trains scientists to communicate and interact more effectively with policymakers and the media.
"Academic scientists and engineers often lack the leadership and communication skills to interact with and provide decision-makers the knowledge they need to address sustainability challenges," said Pamela Matson, the Chester Naramore Dean of the School of Earth Sciences. "The Woods gift will let us launch several new leadership training efforts that will be tremendous learning opportunities for our faculty and students, as well as for others around the world."
For more information about the Woods gift and the Initiative for Environmental Sustainability, visit the web at http://environment.stanford.edu/.
