Stanford University

How to better harness big data for international education research

-

International Education Initiative (IEI) Instructional Workshop 

IEI is a new cross-campus initiative to increase dialogue and collaboration around international education at Stanford. 

About the Topic: There is a wide variety of readily available secondary data sources that can be harnessed to provide rich descriptions and often meaningful causal explanations of interesting educational phenomenon in developing countries. Some of the larger data sources such as TIMSS, PIRLS or PISA are widely known, but in addition to these, many other under-utilized national and cross-national datasets are also available.

In this brief workshop I hope to a) introduce alternative secondary data resources that are useful and relevant for educational research b) discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of working with such large-scale data.

About the Speaker: Amita Chudgar is an Associate Professor of Educational Administration and Education Policy. As an economist of education, her long-term interest focus is on ensuring that children and adults in resource-constrained environments have equal access to high-quality learning opportunities irrespective of their backgrounds. 

 

Lunch will be served.

Sponsored by: Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford Graduate School of Education, Rural Education Action Program, Center for Education Policy Analysis 

Encina Hall East Wing, 5th Floor, Falcon Lounge

Amita Chudgar Visiting Scholar, Graduate School of Education
Workshops

Diamond: Facing up to the democratic recession

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

In the 25th anniversary edition of The Journal of Democracy, CDDRL Director Larry Diamond reflects on the current democratic recession and why this trend is so troubling.

Diamond, who serves as the founding co-editor of The Journal of Democracy, argues that the world is in a mild but protracted democratic recession, which raises alarm due to the rate of democratic failures and where they are occurring. In surveying global empirical trends, Diamond cites 25 breakdowns of democracy since 2000 that were not the cause of military coups but rather the slow erosion of democratic rights and procedures.

Another worrisome trend for Diamond is the declining freedom in a number of countries and regions since 2005. This is most notable in Africa where corruption and the abuse of power are leading to the decline of the rule of law and political rights across the region. It is also affecting countries of global strategic importance with large populations and economic influence– from Taiwan to Mexico – and leading to the resurgence of authoritarianism in Russia and China. Diamond also looks to the U.S. where the dysfunction and breakdown of American democracy sets a bad precedent for the rest of the world. 

Diamond concludes on an optimistic note, stressing that strong public support for democracy may reverse many of these troubling trends and help sustain longer-term democratic progress.

img 9597 From left to right: Thomas Carothers, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Hertie School of Governance (Berlin); Marc Plattner, National Endowment for Democracy; Larry Diamond, Stanford University; Steven Levitsky, Harvard University; and Lucan Way, University of Toronto.

 

 

Hero Image
img 9821
Larry Diamond speaks to a large audience in Washington, D.C., for the 25th anniversary of the Journal of Democracy. Other speakers at the event included: Thomas Carothers (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (Hertie School of Governance-Berlin), Marc Plattner (National Endowment for Democracy), Steven Levitsky (Harvard University), and Lucan Way (University of Toronto).
Scott Henrichsen
All News button
1

The Tropical Oil Crop Revolution: Food, Feed, Fuel, and Forests

Paragraphs

Over the last two decades global production of soybean and palm oil seeds have increased enormously. Because these tropically rainfed crops are used for food, cooking, animal feed, and biofuels, they have entered the agriculture, food, and energy chains of most nations despite their actual growth being increasingly concentrated in Southeast Asia and South America. The planting of these crops is controversial because they are sown on formerly forested lands, rely on large farmers and agribusiness rather than smallholders for their development, and supply export markets. The contrasts with the famed Green Revolution in rice and wheat of the 1960s through the 1980s are stark, as those irrigated crops were primarily grown by smallholders, depended upon public subsidies for cultivation, and served largely domestic sectors.  

The overall aim of the book is to provide a broad synthesis of the major supply and demand drivers of the rapid expansion of oil crops in the tropics; its economic, social, and environmental impacts; and the future outlook to 2050. After introducing the dramatic surge in oil crops, chapters provide a comparative perspective from different producing regions for two of the world's most important crops, oil palm and soybeans in the tropics. The following chapters examine the drivers of demand of vegetable oils for food, animal feed, and biodiesel and introduce the reader to price formation in vegetable oil markets and the role of trade in linking consumers across the world to distant producers in a handful of exporting countries. The remaining chapters review evidence on the economic, social, and environmental impacts of the oil crop revolution in the tropics. While both economic benefits and social and environmental costs have been huge, the outlook is for reduced trade-offs and more sustainable outcomes as the oil crop revolution slows and the global, national, and local communities converge on ways to better managed land use changes and land rights. 

THE TROPICAL OIL CROP REVOLUTION
Food, Feed, Fuel, and Forests
by Derek Byerlee, Walter P. Falcon, and Rosamond L. Naylor
will be published by Oxford University Press on November 10, 2016
$74.00 | 304 Pages | 9780190222987
All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Oxford University Press
Authors
Rosamond L. Naylor
External Purchase Links
External URL

Digital Humanitarians

-

Abstract

The overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to humanitarian response as the lack of information. Making sense of this flash flood of information, "Big Data", is proving an impossible challenge for traditional humanitarian organizations; so they’re turning to Digital Humanitarians: tech-savvy volunteers who craft and leverage ingenious crowdsourcing solutions with trail-blazing insights from artificial intelligence. Digital Humanitarians take online collective action to the next level—particularly when spearheading relief efforts in countries ruled by dictatorships. This talk charts the rise of Digital Humanitarians and concludes with their collective action in repressive contexts.

 

Speaker Bio

Patrick Meier is the author of the book " Digital Humnitarians: How Big Data is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response." He directs QCRI's Social Innovation Program where he & his team use human and machine computing to develop "Next Generation Humanitarian Technologies" in partnership with international humanitarian organizations. Patrick was previously with Ushahidi and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He has a PhD from The Fletcher School, Pre-Doc from Stanford and an MA from Columbia. His influential blog iRevolutions has received over 1.5 million hits. Patrick tweets at @patrickmeier.

**** NOTE LOCATION****

School of Education

Room 128

Patrick Meier Director of Social Innovation at QCRI

Class Debate

-

The final class will pose nine questions, each question digging into
each of the nine topics covered over the quarter.  Pizza at 6pm!

Bechtel Conference Center, EncinaHall

Helen Stacy

**CANCELLED** At the "End of History" Still Stands Democracy

-

This event has been cancelled. We will update our website once the new date has been determined.

Francis Fukuyama

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

0
Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
yff-2021-14290_6500x4500_square.jpg

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
Read More
CV
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label
Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI); Resident in FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law; Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science Speaker Stanford University
Seminars

A new crop modeling technique confirms that wheat yields are vulnerable to rising temperatures

Authors
News Type
News
Date
Paragraphs

To predict how agriculture will be affected by future climate change, scientists often rely on a single crop model – a computer simulation of how a specific crop’s yield responds to temperature changes. By combining 30 such models into a single study, and comparing each model against data from existing experimental wheat fields around the world, a team of researchers including Stanford professor David Lobell have developed a more powerful and accurate way to predict future wheat yields.

In a new analysis published in Nature Climate Change, the team’s results support previous work suggesting that wheat yields around the world are sensitive to rising temperatures. Using the new method of analysis, the team estimates an average six percent future yield loss for every one degree Celsius rise in global mean temperature.

“Combining 30 models gives us a much greater ability to predict future impacts and understand past impacts,” said Lobell. “This is a clear step forward.”

Lobell is professor of environmental earth system science in the School of Earth Science at Stanford and the deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

The estimated six percent yield loss for every degree increase is equivalent to about a quarter of the current volume of wheat traded globally in 2013. Yields at some sites, notably those in Mexico, Brazil, India and Sudan, show simulated wheat yield losses of more than 20 percent - in Sudan’s case, more than 50 percent - under a scenario in which global mean temperature rises by two degrees Celsius.

With higher temperatures also comes an increase in the variability of wheat yields, both by location and between years. More fluctuation in wheat yields could mean greater global price volatility for the staple crop.

Approximately 70 percent of the wheat produced today is grown either on irrigated plots or in rainy regions. The research team accounted for this factor by focusing its simulations on multiple regional-specific varieties of wheat that are commonly grown under these conditions.

The new paper includes several suggestions for avoiding some of the predicted yield losses. For example, some varieties of wheat are more heat tolerant than others, and farmers in the places hardest hit by rising temperatures could switch varieties to capitalize on this heat resistance. The effects of rising temperatures could also be managed, in part, by adjusting sowing and harvesting dates, or changing the way fertilizers are applied to crops.

 

Contact: David Lobell, dlobell@stanford.edu

Hero Image
wheat closeup
All News button
1

CDDRL Senior Honors Program Information Session

-

This event is open to Stanford undergraduate students only. 

The Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is currently accepting applications from eligible juniors due February 27, 2015 who are interested in writing their senior thesis on a subject touching upon democracy, economic development, and rule of law (DDRL) from any university department. CDDRL faculty and current honors students will be present to discuss the program and answer any questions.

For more information on the CDDRL Senior Honors Program, please click here.

 

CDDRL Class of 2015 Class of 2015 in front of the White House with Francis Fukuyama.

 

[[{"fid":"217337","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"SHP15 Info Session Flyer","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"SHP15 Info Session Flyer","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","pp_lightbox":false,"pp_description":false},"type":"media","attributes":{"height":1056,"width":870,"class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]

Francis Fukuyama

Encina Hall, C148
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

0
Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Director of the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
Research Affiliate at The Europe Center
Professor by Courtesy, Department of Political Science
yff-2021-14290_6500x4500_square.jpg

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), and a faculty member of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also Director of Stanford's Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy, and a professor (by courtesy) of Political Science.

Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues in development and international politics. His 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man, has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His book In the Realm of the Last Man: A Memoir will be published in fall 2026.

Francis Fukuyama received his B.A. from Cornell University in classics, and his Ph.D. from Harvard in Political Science. He was a member of the Political Science Department of the RAND Corporation, and of the Policy Planning Staff of the US Department of State. From 1996-2000 he was Omer L. and Nancy Hirst Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at George Mason University, and from 2001-2010 he was Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University. He served as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics from 2001-2004. He is editor-in-chief of American Purpose, an online journal.

Dr. Fukuyama holds honorary doctorates from Connecticut College, Doane College, Doshisha University (Japan), Kansai University (Japan), Aarhus University (Denmark), the Pardee Rand Graduate School, and Adam Mickiewicz University (Poland). He is a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Rand Corporation, the Board of Trustees of Freedom House, and the Board of the Volcker Alliance. He is a fellow of the National Academy for Public Administration, a member of the American Political Science Association, and of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is married to Laura Holmgren and has three children.

(October 2025)

Global Populisms

A new project examining the global surge in populist movements and what it means for established democratic rules and institutions.
Read More
CV
Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label
Honors Program Director

Didi Kuo

Encina Hall, C150
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305

0
Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
didi_kuo_2023.jpg

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

Hide publication sections
Off
Date Label
Mentor

Can Sustainable Intensification Feed the World?

-

If we are to feed by 2050 a growing population that is increasingly adopting western style diets we will  have to intensify food production - producing more but on the same amount or less of land and with the same  amount or less of water. Moreover this has to be done in a sustainable manner, i.e. with much lower environmental impact and greater resilience. We can do this with ecological approaches, genetic approaches and socio-economic approaches. Each has its pros and cons.

Sir Gordon Conway is a Professor of International Development at Imperial College, London and Director of Agriculture for Impact, a grant funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on European support of agricultural development in Africa.

From 2005-2009 he was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for International Development. Previously he was President of The Rockefeller Foundation and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex. 

He was educated at the Universities of Wales (Bangor), Cambridge, West Indies (Trinidad) and California (Davis).  His discipline is agricultural ecology.  In the early 1960's, working in Sabah, North Borneo, he became one of the pioneers of sustainable agriculture.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2004 and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2007. He was made a Knight Commander of the Order of Saint Michael and Saint George in 2005.  He was recently President of the Royal Geographical Society.

He has authored The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for all in the 21st century (Penguin and University Press, Cornell) and co-authored Science and Innovation for Development (UK Collaborative on Development Sciences (UKCDS)).  His most recent book One Billion Hungry: Can we Feed the World? was published in October 2012. 

Can Sustainable Intensification Feed the World?
Download pdf

Oksenberg Conference Room
Encina Hall, 3rd floor
616 Serra St.
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305

Directions and parking information are available here. 

Professor Sir Gordon Conway Speaker

Rosamond L. Naylor

The Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki
Environment and Energy Building
Stanford University
473 Via Ortega, Office 363
Stanford, CA 94305

(650) 723-5697 (650) 725-1992
0
Senior Fellow, Stanford Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
William Wrigley Professor of Earth System Science
Senior Fellow and Founding Director, Center on Food Security and the Environment
Roz_low_res_9_11_cropped.jpg PhD

Rosamond Naylor is the William Wrigley Professor in Earth System Science, a Senior Fellow at Stanford Woods Institute and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, the founding Director at the Center on Food Security and the Environment, and Professor of Economics (by courtesy) at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in Economics and Environmental Studies from the University of Colorado, her M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics, and her Ph.D. in applied economics from Stanford University. Her research focuses on policies and practices to improve global food security and protect the environment on land and at sea. She works with her students in many locations around the world. She has been involved in many field-level research projects around the world and has published widely on issues related to intensive crop production, aquaculture and livestock systems, biofuels, climate change, food price volatility, and food policy analysis. In addition to her many peer-reviewed papers, Naylor has published two books on her work: The Evolving Sphere of Food Security (Naylor, ed., 2014), and The Tropical Oil Crops Revolution: Food, Farmers, Fuels, and Forests (Byerlee, Falcon, and Naylor, 2017).

She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America, a Pew Marine Fellow, a Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics, a member of Sigma Xi, and the co-Chair of the Blue Food Assessment. Naylor serves as the President of the Board of Directors for Aspen Global Change Institute, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for Oceana and is a member of the Forest Advisory Panel for Cargill. At Stanford, Naylor teaches courses on the World Food Economy, Human-Environment Interactions, and Food and Security. 

CV
Hide publication sections
Off
Rosamond L. Naylor Chair

David Lobell

Energy and Environment Building
473 Via Ortega
Stanford CA 94305

(650) 721-6207
0
Professor, Earth System Science
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR)
Affiliate, Precourt Institute of Energy
shg_ff1a1284.jpg PhD

David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Earth System Science and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).

Lobell's research focuses on agriculture and food security, specifically on generating and using unique datasets to study rural areas throughout the world. His early research focused on climate change risks and adaptations in cropping systems, and he served on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report as lead author for the food chapter and core writing team member for the Summary for Policymakers. More recent work has developed new techniques to measure progress on sustainable development goals and study the impacts of climate-smart practices in agriculture. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (2010), a Macarthur Fellowship (2013), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences (2022) and election to the National Academy of Sciences (2023).

Prior to his Stanford appointment, Lobell was a Lawrence Post-doctoral Fellow at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He holds a PhD in Geological and Environmental Sciences from Stanford University and a Sc.B. in Applied Mathematics from Brown University.

Lobell Lab

A project to advance the science that guides investment in food security and crop productivity, and to effectively communicate this science to a broad audience.
More Information

G-FEED: Global Food, Environment and Economic Dynamics

An interdisciplinary group working cooperatively to understand the relationship between society and the environment by examining regional and global scale phenomena using statistical analyses of real world data.
More Information
CV
Hide publication sections
On
Date Label
David Lobell Moderator
Lectures
Food and Nutrition Policy Symposium Series
Subscribe to Russia and Eurasia