Stanford Facts: Faculty

The Stanford Faculty

David Starr Jordan was appointed president in March 1891, and by June his first faculty -- 15 men of "youth and scholarly promise" -- had accepted appointments. Jordan sought professors who combined abilities for teaching and research, and he wrote, "Mr. Stanford wants me to get the best. He wants no ornamental or idle professors."

Today, Stanford has 1,829 tenure-line faculty, senior fellows and center fellows at specified policy centers and institutes, and Medical Center-line faculty. Fifty-five percent of the faculty have earned tenure. Faculty at Stanford are expected to be among the best teachers and researchers in their fields. There are 403 faculty members appointed to endowed chairs. Twenty-seven Stanford faculty have won the Nobel Prize since the university's founding.

Stanford's current community of scholars includes:

Living Nobel Laureates

Kenneth J. Arrow
Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics, shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics for pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory.
Gary S. Becker
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics for extending the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior.
Paul Berg
Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry, shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his fundamental studies of the biochemistry of nucleic acids, with particular regard to recombinant DNA.
Steven Chu
Professor in the Departments of Physics and Applied Physics, shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.
Andrew Fire
Professor in the Departments of Pathology and of Genetics, shared the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries related to RNA interference.
Roger Kornberg
Professor in the Department of Structural Biology, won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in understanding how DNA is converted into RNA, a process known as transcription.
Robert B. Laughlin
Professor in the Departments of Physics and Applied Physics, shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect, in which electrons flowing in a semiconductor subjected to strong electromagnetic fields act like a liquid made up of “particles” with an electrical charge that is a fraction of that of an electron.
Douglass North
Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics for work in economic history that applied economic theory and quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional change.
Douglas Osheroff
Professor in the Department of Physics, shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of superfluidity in helium-3.
Martin Perl
Professor Emeritus at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the tau lepton.
Burton Richter
Professor Emeritus at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the psi particle and for pioneering work in high-energy physics.
Myron S. Scholes
Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business, shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Economics for a new method to determine the value of derivatives.
William Sharpe
Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business, shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to the theory of price formation for financial assets, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM).
A. Michael Spence
Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics, shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Professor Emeritus in the Department of Economics, and A. Michael Spence, Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business, shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information.
Richard E. Taylor
Professor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics for investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons that have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.

Stanford Pulitzer Prize Winners

David M. Kennedy
2000, History
Jack Rakove
1997, History
James Risser
1976, 1979, National Reporting
Carl N. Degler
1972, History
Faculty Profile
* Includes tenure-line faculty, senior fellows and center fellows at specified policy centers and institutes, and Medical Center-line faculty.
Total Faculty 1,829*  
Members of Academic Council 1,428  
Percentages are rounded
Graduate School of Business 93 (5%)
School of Earth Sciences 46 (3%)
School of Education 46 (3%)
School of Engineering 239 (13%)
School of Humanities and Sciences 522 (29%)
School of Law 47 (3%)
School of Medicine 781 (43%)
Other:(SLAC, FSI, Independent Labs) 55 (3%)
Tenure Status/Appointment Line
Tenure Line, Tenured 1,001 (55%)
Tenure Line, Not Tenured 294 (16%)
Not Tenure Line 133 (7%)
Medical Center Line 401 (22%)
Tenure-Line Faculty
Professors 816 (63%)
Associate Professors 217 (17%)
Assistant Professors 262 (20%)
Faculty Appointed to Endowed Professorships 403  
Faculty Holding Highest Degree in Their Field 1,810 (99%)
Sex
Women 449 (25%)
Men 1,380 (75%)
Race/Ethnicity
African American/Black 48 (3%)
Asian 252 (14%)
Hispanic 52 (3%)
Native American 3 (<1%)
Non-Minority 1,471 (80%)
Unidentified 3 (<1%)