Project: Reducing Embodied Carbon in Purchasing
Elanna Mak conducted outreach to promote the switch from plastic to recycled lab supplies and explored factors impeding sustainable alternatives for compounds.
Academic-Operational Partnerships
Stanford’s lands provide a living laboratory for groundbreaking research and innovation. Students, faculty, and operational staff collaborate to address real-world challenges, harnessing the university’s unique resources and diverse ecosystems to test theories and develop solutions that can make a lasting impact. Explore the meaningful ways researchers engage with the community and environment.
Submit Living Lab Proposals
Advance your sustainability priorities through hands-on student collaboration that drives innovation and measurable impact for your department and across campus. The Call for AY26–27 Fellowship and Internship project proposals is now closed and will reopen for AY27–28 in Fall 2026.
Project ideas from operational partners, faculty, research teams, and students are also welcome year-round to help transform Stanford’s campus into a living laboratory for sustainability. While not all ideas move forward as formal fellowship or internship placements, submissions are always valued, and some projects may be explored through pilot efforts, ad hoc collaborations, or future recruitment cycles.
Review Ideal Living Lab Project Criteria
- Advance Stanford’s operational sustainability goals with scalable, high-impact solutions that extend beyond campus.
- Address real university challenges in energy, waste, water, carbon, transportation, resilience, and other sustainability areas.
- Foster collaboration through a student fellow or intern contributing dedicated weekly hours, and when aligned with project goals, by partnering with faculty or research teams to bring complementary academic expertise.
Why Partner with Stanford’s Living Lab?
Explore the benefits of getting involved with the Living Lab Program:
Advance strategic sustainability priorities
Projects are co-developed for alignment and impact, ensuring that academic and/or student contributions directly support campus goals in areas such as zero waste, climate action, energy systems, behavior change, scope 3 emissions, food systems, land stewardship, and more.
Expand capacity and momentum
Fellows, interns, and course teams bring focused time, skills, and creativity to help pilot new ideas and move complex work forward.
Strengthen cross-campus collaboration
Living Lab projects often involve multiple departments and stakeholders, connecting academic and operational work across a broader sustainability ecosystem.
Enrich teaching, research, and scholarship
Faculty gain access to operational data, real constraints, and institutional context that support experiential teaching and applied research. Operational partners gain analytical rigor and innovative insight from academic collaborators.
Develop future sustainability leaders
Mentoring students contributes to their professional growth and brings fresh thinking, technical skill, and collaborative leadership into operational and academic teams.
Increase visibility and storytelling
Projects may be highlighted in Living Lab events, storytelling efforts, project archives, and year-end showcases, elevating the work of both academic and operational partners.
Codiga Project
Located on the Stanford campus near the Land, Buildings & Real Estate offices (LBRE), the William and Cloy Codiga Resource Recovery Center (CR2C) enables pilot testing of promising technologies for the recovery of resources (clean water, nutrients, energy, renewable materials) from wastes. LBRE, Stanford researchers, and groups outside the university collaborate to move solutions from the lab to real-world impact.
Cooler Research Project
The Cooler Research Project enhances the resilience of Stanford’s chilled water system through a collaboration between LBRE, the Energy Resources Engineering Department, and the Precourt Institute for Energy. The project experiments with chilled water load management down to individual rooms, enabling precise control and gradual demand reductions in non-critical areas while preserving critical zones.
Stanford Food Institute
The Stanford Food Institute (SFI), created by Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises (R&DE), advances a holistic approach to food by improving what we eat, how we access it, and its role in our lives. SFI educates students, faculty, and staff to promote well-being and sustainable eating, conducts cross-disciplinary research to drive innovative solutions, and fosters culinary innovation through award-winning chefs creating forward-thinking dining experiences. Building on R&DE’s sustainability legacy, SFI engages in initiatives like Drawdown Labs, REGEN1, and the Menus of Change University Research Collaborative, advancing regenerative agriculture, inclusive practices, and systemic food solutions. By uniting diverse stakeholders, SFI accelerates pathways to a nourishing, equitable, and climate-smart food future.
Seeker Project
Seeker improves building control sequences to enhance energy performance and thermal comfort for occupants. Seeker’s diagnostics provide more accurate insights into potential building upgrades by leveraging distributed sensors and modern data-driven methods, including AI and machine learning models. New datasets will be generated through experimentation for more robust modeling. The project will culminate in an automated data-driven diagnostic toolkit to detect zones operating short of optimal thermal comfort, as well as a novel experiment protocol and software.
Explore More Living Lab Research Projects
Project: Sustainable and Equitable Travel Through Website Design
Sammy Puckett, B.S. ’22, M.S. ’24, created narrative content to encourage Transportation site visitors to visualize changes for more sustainable commutes.
Project: Travel/Study Carbon Assessment and Plan
Yuan Tang, M.S. 2024, identified promising climate action plans for the Travel/Study program within the Stanford Alumni Association by analyzing emissions data.
Project: Enhancing Stanford’s EV Readiness
Nikita Salunke helped shape Stanford’s electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure as a Living Lab Fellow.
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More Ways to Get Involved
Explore staff- and faculty-specific opportunities to get involved with using Stanford as a living lab.