Josh Lappen winner of 2018 Deans' Award

The department is happy to announce that Josh Lappen (Classics BA, Civil & Environmental Engineering MS) is the winner of  2018 Deans’ Award. 

Josh Lappen is a coterm pursuing a B.A. in Classics and an M.S. in Atmosphere/Energy Engineering. He has focused primarily on climate, energy, and natural resource policy at the state and federal levels, conducting research on interstate grid management and authoring a series of journalistic projects on climate justice, coal history, and federal public lands management. In his junior year, he attended the COP21 international climate negotiations in Paris as a researcher attached to the California state delegation. He also wrote a comparative study on the history of federal coal leasing for the Department of the Interior which has been widely used by both government officials and outside researchers. Josh’s intellectual interests have led him to fields as diverse as maritime archaeology and marine biology, and to a variety of advisory and advocacy roles on campus. Recently, he served on the Research Working Group of Stanford’s Long-Range Planning Process. As a student organizer with Fossil Free Stanford, he helped lead numerous actions over four years, including a week-long sit-in which mobilized over 1,000 students, faculty, and staff for fossil fuel divestment. While at Stanford, he has won several awards for his journalistic and academic writing. Next year, he will continue his studies in environmental history at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar. Two of Josh’s mentors, Professors Jody Maxmin and Joshua Landy, applaud him for distinguishing himself as a “journalist, a Legislative Intern, a Policy Director, a Research Assistant, and an environmental activist,” and praise him as a “genuine intellectual…caring passionately about the environment and combining a powerful intellect with an immensely calm and generous demeanor.”

The list of all of the 2018 Deans' Awardees.