Gratitude to the Stanford University faculty.

A database researcher who joined Stanford in 1993, chaired Computer Science, and now leads the whole School of Engineering as its Terman Dean, with a career spent on the unglamorous, essential problem of managing data that does not fit the textbook shape.

Thank you for ImageNet and for insisting that AI stay human-centered; a generation of researchers can see because you taught machines to.

Thank you for teaching computers to understand human language with rigor and grace, and for mentoring so much of the field that followed.

Thank you for RISC and for leading Stanford with such steadiness; your 2017 Turing Award lives inside nearly every chip made today.

Thank you for making convex optimization legible and useful to the whole world, and for teaching it so generously that anyone can learn it.

Thank you for optogenetics and CLARITY; you gave neuroscience the tools to see and steer the living brain with light.

Thank you for microfluidic biology and noninvasive prenatal testing; your inventions quietly changed how medicine reads the body.

Thank you for the high-fidelity design methods that make aircraft and spacecraft real, and for training the engineers who will fly them.

Thank you for nearly three decades of applied cryptography at Stanford, and for teaching it in the open; your free online cryptography course means anyone anywhere can learn how to keep a secret.

Thank you for XGBoost, LIME, and Apache TVM; you gave working teams everywhere tools they could actually pick up and use, and you now lead the Stanford AI Lab.

Thank you for a dissertation that let interface design start from a sketch, and for co-founding HAI so that human-centered is a discipline with a home, not a slogan.

Thank you for directing CRFM toward making foundation models accessible through open source and understandable through rigorous benchmarking, so the rest of us can check the claims instead of taking them on trust.

Thank you for work that reaches from database theory to machine learning systems, and for pointing it at extrasolar neutrinos, a DNA foundation model, and the fight against human trafficking as readily as at the products it already runs inside.

Thank you for affine partitioning and the SUIF compiler, for co-writing the dragon book that taught us how compilers work, and for an OVAL lab that keeps building open-source assistants which are quantifiably factual rather than merely fluent.

Thank you for leading the Stanford Hydra project and showing that many cores on one chip would beat one faster core; that argument became Afara's Niagara, then commodity multicore, and now the machine learning hardware you build at SambaNova.

Thank you for co-founding VMware and serving as its chief scientist through its first ten years; virtualization on ordinary hardware reshaped how the world runs servers, and it began as your research on system software.

Thank you for meta-learning algorithms that let a robot pick up a new skill quickly instead of starting from nothing every time, and for the outreach camp and mentoring programs you built so that more people get to do this work.

Thank you for the ILIAD group and for treating the person in front of the robot as the hard part of the problem; your algorithms are built so autonomous systems interact with people safely and reliably rather than assuming them away.

Thank you for designing the social side of computing with care, and for asking what an interactive system does to the society that adopts it and not only to the person using it.

Thank you for RenderMan and for the shading languages that make the digital world beautiful; your 2019 Turing Award honors craft the whole industry stands on.

Thank you for The Art of Computer Programming and for TeX; you gave computer science both its literature and its type, with a 1974 Turing Award along the way.

Thank you for the dragon book and for the theory beneath databases and compilers; your 2020 Turing Award celebrates textbooks that taught us all.

Thank you for a lifetime of estimation, filtering, and signal processing, and for mentoring some eighty doctoral students who carried your ideas everywhere.

Thank you for Tcl and Tk, for the log-structured file system, and for A Philosophy of Software Design; you have retired from regular teaching and are still shipping Homa, which is exactly the example we needed.

Thank you for software-defined networking and for P4, which turned the internet back into something we can keep changing, and for placing every idea from your Stanford lab in the public domain since 1999 so anyone could use it.

A political philosopher who has spent three decades at Stanford wrestling with freedom, equality, and fairness, and who leads its largest school with a deep belief in the value of the humanities.

Thank you for teaching us to cool and trap atoms with light, a 1997 Nobel gift, and for turning that same curiosity toward energy and life.

Thank you for explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect, a 1998 Nobel insight into how many electrons can behave as something wholly new.

Thank you for the theory of inflation and the eternally self-reproducing universe; you gave us a way to imagine how everything began.

Thank you for founding bioorthogonal chemistry, a 2022 Nobel achievement, letting us do chemistry inside living cells without disturbing life itself.

Thank you for seeing single molecules one at a time, a 2014 Nobel breakthrough that broke the diffraction limit and brought the very small into focus.

Thank you for laser-based studies of chemical reactions and for decades of teaching that made physical chemistry come alive for so many students.

Thank you for the mathematics of shuffling and randomness, and for showing that a magician's eye and a mathematician's rigor belong together.

Thank you for the deep number theory behind Fermat's Last Theorem and the Langlands program; your work reaches to the foundations of mathematics.

Thank you for revealing how the developing brain wires itself through activity, and for building Bio-X into a home for interdisciplinary science.

A 2020 Nobel laureate whose auction designs put spectrum and markets to better use for the public, a teacher whose ideas turn theory into things that genuinely work.

A 2012 Nobel laureate whose market design has matched kidney donors to patients and students to schools, showing how economics can save lives and serve people directly.

One of the most influential political thinkers of our era, whose study of political order, trust, and identity helps a generation think seriously about the future of democracy.

A tireless scholar and advocate for democracy worldwide whose clear-eyed writing on freedom and its fragility has taught and inspired reformers on every continent.

The psychologist behind the growth mindset, whose research on why people succeed has helped countless students and teachers believe that ability can be grown.

A MacArthur Fellow whose rigorous research on race and bias in policing, schools, and workplaces turns social psychology into real tools for fairer institutions.

Thank you for Speech and Language Processing, the book a generation of us learned NLP from, and for co-creating one of the first massively open online courses so that the learning was never limited to people who could get to campus.

Thank you for discovering superfluidity in helium-3 as a young researcher, a 1996 Nobel discovery, and for a lifetime of careful, joyful experiment.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the founding whose deep readings of the Constitution and its makers help Americans understand where their institutions came from.

A two-time Pulitzer finalist whose vivid histories of the American West, railroads, and the environment changed how we understand the making of the nation.

A brilliant, fearless essayist and scholar of the novel who has taught English at Stanford since 1983, writing about literature and life with wit and unusual candor.

A beloved philosopher of language and mind, co-founder of situation semantics, whose warmth and humor made hard questions about the self a joy to think through.

Thank you for capturing RNA polymerase in the act of reading our genes, a 2006 Nobel achievement that showed us transcription atom by atom.

Thank you for uncovering the molecular machinery of synapses, a 2013 Nobel discovery of how neurons speak to one another in split-second time.

Thank you for discovering RNA interference, a 2006 Nobel breakthrough that gave biology a way to switch single genes off and reshaped medicine.

A Stanford graduate and John Bates Clark Medal economist who led the GSB before becoming the university's thirteenth president, championing discovery and the pioneering spirit that defines Stanford.

A distinguished scholar of constitutional and international law who, as Stanford's chief academic officer, has stood firmly for open inquiry and free expression across the whole university.

A former Stanford provost, Secretary of State, and Soviet scholar who now leads the Hoover Institution and still teaches, bringing rare experience in statecraft back to the classroom.

The first woman to lead Stanford GSB, a scholar of organizations and change who is guiding the school to prize human skills and thoughtful leadership in an age of AI.

A pioneering economist bridging causal inference and machine learning, the first woman to win the John Bates Clark Medal, whose work helps people use data honestly and well.

A 2021 Nobel laureate whose methods for drawing causal conclusions from real-world data have quietly reshaped how a generation of researchers asks what actually works.

A candid, evidence-driven scholar of power and organizations who has taught at the GSB since 1979 and pushes leaders to face how workplaces really treat people.

A leading contracts and law-and-economics scholar whose steady leadership as dean keeps Stanford Law rigorous, humane, and focused on purpose.

A leading voice on voting rights and the Constitution, a Supreme Court advocate and mentor who has devoted her career to making democracy work for every citizen.

A founding figure of American legal history whose sweeping, humane scholarship shows how law lives in ordinary people's lives, not just in the courts.

One of the nation's most influential education scholars and founder of the Learning Policy Institute, whose lifelong work aims at equitable, empowering schooling for every child.