Architects of discovery

Ziv Lautman started his PhD research exploring how wearable technology can help users predict and manage mental health and stress. That changed the day he received the devastating news that a close friend and colleague had suffered a sudden cardiac death. 

Lautman’s friend had been active and health-conscious—his death was a shock. Eager for answers, his family gave Lautman permission to analyze the data from his smartwatch. Lautman discovered that months before his death, a dozen of his friend's physiological metrics showed a synchronized deterioration, despite outward signs of good health. 

In that stark discovery, Lautman suddenly saw wearable devices in a new light: They represented no less than an entire movie of our health, one with potential to spot warning signs we might otherwise miss.

“It’s simple to say you want to save lives, but it’s hard to grasp the words until it’s very close to you—then you really understand the meaning of it,” Lautman says. “It became real. An early warning of that deterioration could have saved his life.”

Lautman got to work on an AI-driven “decision support system” for doctors, tracking physiological and behavioral data over time. By analyzing tiny changes in heart rate, sleep patterns, and even the way we walk over time, Lautman is building models that can detect diseases long before a patient feels a symptom.

“We’re now taking what we’ve built here into the world, into the clinic,” he says. “We’re really translating it into real-world impact.”

Lautman envisions a future where wearables offer non-invasive glucose monitoring and early detection for a wide range of conditions, from Parkinson’s to cardiovascular disease. 

“To me, Stanford is the real-world version of Hogwarts from Harry Potter,” he says. “But instead of science fiction magic, the magic is the people and their brilliance. What I really love about Stanford is everyone thinking, ‘How are we going to make an impact beyond science—on people, on the world?’”

Ziv Lautman, PhD, completed his doctoral training in Michael Snyder's lab, the Stanford W. Ascherman, MD, FACS Professor of Genetics in the School of Medicine, at the intersection of human physiology, wearable technology, and AI. He develops personalized, interpretable models using continuous biometric data to enable early disease detection and dynamic health monitoring (see his 3 Minute Thesis talk). Ziv is teaching the popular Engineering Wellness class (CHPR267) at Stanford and was awarded the Stanford Human-Centered AI Fellowship & Stanford Graduate Student Fellowship in Science and Engineering.

Wildfires cost billions of dollars to contain each year, and entire communities now routinely face seasonal evacuation alerts. Yet most research efforts focus on what happens after a fire starts: predicting its path, modeling its behavior, managing the response. 

Curious about research on preventionChangxin “Lyla” Dong found surprisingly little. And almost no researchers were exploring engineering-based pretreatments designed to stop fires before they spread.

Then she came across the work of Stanford professor Eric Appel. Instead of predicting fires or managing them after ignition, Appel was developing materials designed to prevent fires from spreading in the first place.

“I was shocked,” she says. “It was super different from anything I’d read. I knew that’s the type of work I really wanted to do.”

In her first two years as a Stanford PhD student in Appel’s lab, Dong led the development of a sprayable gel to protect vegetation and homes against wildfires. In small-scale testing, the formulation outperformed leading commercially available fire retardants and remained effective significantly longer. 

But preventing wildfires isn't a small-scale undertaking, and Dong had no clear path from the lab to the ground. 

Then she discovered the research of fellow doctoral candidate and TomKat fellow Daniel Neamati, MS ’24, PhD ’27, who was using 3D site reconstruction to monitor and manage lands after prescribed burns.

An idea took hold: Maybe Neamati could help her determine how to apply the gel at scale during prescribed burns, and use digital tools to scale up fire-retardant research.

Neamati worked just a few floors up from her in the engineering building. The two started talking, which led to sharing a co-advisorship under Professor Grace Gao and a friendship forged through fieldwork. Dong joined Neamati and his collaborators at Stanford Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve to learn how they collected field data. Neamati taught her 3D reconstruction and coding techniques that can be applied to fire-retardant efficacy at scale.  

“We are on two parallel, very different research directions, but merged because of the problem we care about,” Dong says.

Together, they developed a system to map landscapes in 3D, enabling precise application of the gel along private property boundaries to help contain fires and make prescribed burns safer. 

“That's the type of work I really want to do,” Dong says. “Not just publish good papers—I would like the world to actually use my research.” 

Dong’s and Neamati’s partnership is no fluke. It’s woven into Stanford’s fabric of interdisciplinary collaboration.

“I can reach out to different departments, and find a person with the expertise I need,” Dong says. “That’s what makes this place really amazing.”

Changxin “Lyla” Dong is a PhD candidate in materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering. As the James and Nancy Kelso Fellow in the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship program, she receives three years of funding to pursue research questions that cross traditional boundaries.

Eric Appel is an associate professor of materials science and engineering in the School of Engineering and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

Daniel Neamati is a PhD candidate in Stanford’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in the School of Engineering and a TomKat Center Graduate Fellow for Translational Research.

Grace Gao is an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics in the School of Engineering and, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering.