Environmental justice provides an opportunity to engage in a wide array of research questions regarding the causes of and community responses to social and environmental inequity.

Epidemiology, Data Science & Environmental Change:
EJ asks hard questions about risk and vulnerability analysis. How can we quantitatively measure environmental injustice? How do we understand the cumulative effects of racial and socioeconomic disparities with environmental hazard and health exposures? How do we understand human dimensions of environmental change, in relation to problems of social equity?

Public Health & Participatory Research Methods
Community-based participatory research methods are a fundamental component of much of the public health-oriented EJ research. How do we pursue equitable collaboration between academic and communities and/or community-based researchers?

Ethics & Legal Theory
What are the ethical foundations of EJ, and its implications for theories of justice. What are some of the jurisdictional challenges of global environmental problems, e.g. internationalization of risks that arise from international and domestic law (legislation and treaties) regulating the waste trade.

Sociology, Social Movements, and Education
Studying environmental protest movements is an important part of EJ research. When do environmental justice movements arise and under what conditions do they succeed or fail? How do we effectively teach EJ histories in the classroom?

Humanities & Critical Theory
EJ research uses perspectives from critical race theory and ethnic studies to understand contemporary environmental movements. As environmental justice and human rights movements join forces, how do we understand the globalization of the environmental justice movement (e.g. international dimensions of inequity and the flow of resources between states that a climate treaty might require)?

EJ Champions

There are a few, isolated examples of current efforts and research at Stanford that contain elements of environmental justice. Postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and selected faculty are exploring human-centered fields of inquiry in tandem with natural and physical sciences to understand and further scholarship in justice and equity within environment and resources.

Michelle Wilde Anderson, a law professor, has been working with cities in distress across the United States, including most recently in Puerto Rico. She is researching how places like Stockton, Detroit, and Flint can change course from their declining population and struggling economies into more equitable, vibrant, and healthy communities.




Deland Chan, lecturer and director of community-engaged learning in Urban Studies teaches project-based courses. She takes a community-based approach to urban planning and researching sustainability transitions. For example, her work in San Francisco has included developing a Chinatown pedestrian master plan with local residents and community-based urban planning youth training program.




Josh Dimon, a postdoctoral scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American West, is leading an international collaboration to study the disproportionate effects of air pollution on fenceline communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the possibilities for reversing this trend through California's climate policies.





Sibyl Diver, a research scientist in Earth System Science (ESS), is conducting environmental governance research in partnership with Indigenous communities to understand how these communities are self-organizing their own water science programs, thereby shifting multi-jurisdictional water governance negotiations on the Klamath River in California.

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José Fragoso, a lecturer in the Center for Latin American Studies and researcher at the California Academy of Sciences, along with Biology professor Rodolfo Dirzo, has conducted research in collaboration with the indigenous Makushi, Wapishana and Waiwai nations to understand the relationship between animal diversity and carbon sequestration in the Amazon, research that relates to the threats of deforestation to Indigenous cultures, territories, and subsistence strategies.



Gabriel Garcia, a professor of medicine and health policy research directs a year-long undergraduate patient advocacy service-learning course at Stanford University and has developed a international service learning program entitled Community Health in Oaxaca to address immigrant health issues. This project has recently included community-led research initiatives that are linked to the surrounding environment. He has supervised an alternative spring break that examines the lives of California farm workers.



Derek Ouyang, a lecturer in Stanford’s Sustainable Urban Systems Initiative has co-founded the City Systems initiative. To address the affordable housing crisis in the Bay Area, he has worked with Rebuilding Together Peninsula and the City of East Palo Alto to streamline the garage conversion process, with the goal of increasing the number of safe and affordable second units in the community. He is also working with diverse communities and local government in South Stockton to re-envision vibrant economic development in the area.


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Lisa Goldman Rosas, an assistant professor of medicine and health policy research works on the multi-level determinants of obesity and chronic disease with the purpose of informing policies that will address health equity. She also does community-engaged and policy-relevant behavioral intervention research to identify strategies to promote healthy lifestyles and reduce disparities. Recent work includes a family-based approach to promoting healthy lifestyles among Latino adolescents and their parents.
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​Debbie Sivas, a law professor, runs the Environmental Law Clinic that has worked on multiple environmental justice cases. These cases range from protecting ancestral Pit River Indian Tribal land from geothermal mining, to fighting to enforce water quality standards in the central valley of California where a disproportionate percentage of those impacted are low-income and people of color.

Stanford Interdisciplinary Centers and Institutes that align with EJ

• Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity
• WSD Handa Center for Human Rights and International Justice
• Earth Systems Program
• Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources
• Haas Center for Public Service
• McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
• Stanford Law and Policy Lab
• Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health
• ​Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment
• Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
• Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford 
• Precourt Institute for Energy
• ​O'Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm