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What would it mean to redesign how higher education drives the creation of meaningful solutions to real problems?
What if we boiled society’s biggest problems down into tractable questions—and equipped researchers and practitioners with resources and training to tackle them together?
That’s been the premise—and the promise—of Stanford Impact Labs since its creation.
Diverse teams making better, faster progress on social problems that matter to us all: Food insecurity. Educational inequality. Unsafe drinking water. Chronic disease. Racial disparities.
With a long history of transforming how higher education works, Stanford is uniquely positioned to take on problems with the urgency they require.
We’ve built our expertise and broken down barriers between fields. Now, it’s time to push beyond the bounds of the university to better serve society.
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SIL investments support problem-focused teams of leading scholars, researchers, and practitioners that assemble expertise from across the university and external partners who grapple with these issues every day, including government agencies, school districts, police departments, community-based advocacy organizations, and private sector companies.
SIL-run programs help Stanford faculty and students build the skills and capabilities required to strengthen their public impact. Our goal is to create a diverse community of scholars who are committed to research that has a positive impact on society.
Academia can run the risk of considering social ills in abstract, scientific terms. Leaders in government, nonprofits, or business may be better positioned to solve them, yet face barriers to using the best that science has to offer in their decision making.
We are growing a culture of public impact at Stanford to both analyze these problems and help solve them. By directly engaging Stanford’s research in solving complex social problems, we can accelerate solutions for the communities most in need of them.
Our new cohort of Public Impact Professors across the university will model the integration of research, education, and impact. We are also enabling faculty to embed in government and nonprofit organizations, where they can share research expertise and learn about the practical realities those organizations face. Stanford students will be able to see the power of public impact-focused research as they work with and learn from these professors.
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Stanford Impact Labs’ investment strategy springs from our founding agenda: to enable teams of Stanford scholars to work with the public, social, and private sectors to tackle social problems using human creativity, rigorous evidence, and innovative technology.
Our approach allows us to take bold bets on big problems. We make staged and sequenced investments to catalyze impact labs at different phases in generating new evidence and practical, scalable solutions. We prioritize investments that can improve the lives of historically oppressed or marginalized communities.
While organizations like the National Institutes for Health provide substantial funding for STEM research, there has been comparatively little federal or private support to advance social science research for the benefit of society. SIL is changing that, and in the process, modeling how the social sciences can help discover and scale solutions to complex societal problems.
When we invest, we expect to see a return–not in money, but in outcomes that improve people’s lives. While not every investment will be successful, those that do yield breakthroughs will have an outsized impact on really challenging problems.
$50K for 10 months
Faculty working in a cohort to design and launch new impact labs with partners in government, business, nonprofit, and community organizations
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Up to $350K for a maximum of 2 years
Labs work deeply to understand problems alongside our external partners
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Up to $650K for a maximum of 3 years
Labs run at least one R&D cycle of solutions-focused research with external partners
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Up to $5M for a maximum of 5 years
Track A: Scaling insights into programs or policies
Track B: Run multiple R&D cycles identifying insights across a common agenda
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With cutting-edge tools and more data than ever, researchers are poised for impact. By informing that research with practical experience, real progress has never been more possible.
With data and research insights, social scientists can step in as ideal partners to craft more effective solutions.
In the way life sciences and engineering turn academic discovery into new technologies and medical advances, our model helps to transform fundamental insights about human behavior into scalable solutions that can improve the lives of millions of people.
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Solutions to society’s biggest problems aren’t born in a seminar room—they take shape in real-world collaborations. Here are some of the people hard at work.
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See how people across Stanford are investing in partnerships between leading social science scholars and practitioners, or applying a startup mentality to social equity issues.
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An epidemiologist is on a mission to reduce pollution where past efforts have failed—and end an environmental health nightmare.
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For American Muslims, suicide represents a taboo within a taboo. Rania Awaad— a psychiatrist, faith leader, and Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellow—set out to change that.
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How GeoMatch is revolutionizing resettlement efforts.
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Residents of the wildfire-choked San Joaquin Valley desperately want something done about their air quality—but they want researchers to approach the work in a new way.
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A new online tool is radically transforming how to identify struggling young readers.
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isthe momentWe don’t measure impact by what happens at Stanford. We measure it by what happens beyond Stanford. Solutions felt by all require help from all. When we come together across disciplines, expertise, and life experience, we make progress. It’s real. And it’s happening right now.
As our momentum builds, so does the velocity of our impact. Join us.
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The scope of Stanford’s vision matches the scope of the challenges we face. Because Stanford has built excellence in an unusually broad range of fields, and because we’ve connected those fields.