Stanford University marks a century of scientific discoveries

CBS News

22-05-2025

Stanford University is celebrating 100 years of engineering, commemorating a century of innovation and showcasing the engineering of tomorrow.
Soham Sinha is a Bioengineering Ph.D student at Stanford. He's working on something so science fiction, you would think it was out of a movie.
"Our lab and the entire goal is to 3D print a fully functioning human heart but once we get to that scale, we need a fully functional blood network with it to keep that heart alive," said Sinha. "When you are doing something first of its kind, you're like, 'Oh my God! We're breaking new frontiers where we're at the edge of science where we're no longer pulling ideas from science fiction, you know. Stuff that you only see in the movies and suddenly like, I'm right here where science fiction is reality'."
This research is in Bioengineering Associate Professor Mark Skylar-Scott's lab at Stanford. He shared his inspiration for this revolutionary work.
"Pretty early on, I found a way to make blood vessels in tissue, and it was when I was able to keep thick slabs of tissue, not a thin film of cells at the bottom of a dish but a good chunky slab of human cells, when you can put blood vessels into that and you can keep it fed and alive, that's when I realized, 'Wow like this is something that has been missing in tissue engineering for decades.' This is something that can allow us to think big and focus on really hard problems," said Skylar-Scott.
Connor Hoffman is an electrical engineering student and Stanford University's Solar Car Project President. He showed off the "Azimuth" Stanford Solar Car. He said it's been his dream to study at Stanford.
"I wanted to come to Stanford since I was five years old," said Hoffman. "I saw a video when I was very young of 'Stanley', which was an autonomous vehicle that traversed through the desert and won. It was fully built by Stanford, and I knew I wanted to come here, so the hundredth anniversary is huge. It's very, very exciting for me as a student and for someone who has been excited in this university for a very long time."
Jennifer Widom, Stanford Dean of the School of Engineering, said she's lucky to oversee the program during this important milestone.
"It's incredible," said Widom. "I've been learning a lot about the history of Stanford engineering, and decade by decade, there is just so much science, discovery, innovation, inventions that have been going on for 100 years and at least 100 more coming."
The future is bright for Stanford and students like Sinha.
"I'm a very passionate individual," said Sinha, "I really like working on a project that really speaks to me, so the 3D printing that we're doing is really a passion project. I feel like I'm not just doing the Ph.D to do a Ph.D. It's because I really want to do this."
It's this passion that Sinha and many engineers at Stanford share, a passion to make breakthroughs unlike anything we've seen before to improve our lives in ways we never thought possible through engineering of the future.
The founders of Hewlett-Packard met and became friends as Stanford engineering students in the 1930's. In the 1990's, Stanford University's engineering graduate students went on to create companies like Yahoo, Google and Nvidia.