Sustainable Mobility Center aims to transform how the world moves

The Precourt Institute for Energy at the Doerr School of Sustainability has launched a cross-campus initiative to fundamentally rethink how people and goods move across land, sea, and air.

Stanford University

LinkedInWeChat
WhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

The new Center for Sustainability Research will seek to make transportation of people and goods over land, air, and sea more sustainable, as well as to make interconnected mobility systems more efficient and less expensive.

view more 

Credit: Courtesy Center for Automotive Research at Stanford

When you drive a conventional car, only 1% of the gasoline burned gets you from point A to point B. Almost all the fuel’s energy just generates wasted heat and propels your two-ton vehicle down the road. That $5 a gallon gasoline delivered less than a nickel’s worth of value.

Surely, we can do better.

The Precourt Institute for Energy at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability has launched the Sustainable Mobility Center to fundamentally rethink how people and goods move across land, sea, and air – systems that mostly operate as they did decades ago. This new center aims to make mobility systems more sustainable in the broad sense of the word: environmentally responsible, affordable, reliable, safe, and fair, with solutions that can scale worldwide.

“Transportation is the backbone of the global economy, but also one of its most difficult sectors to transform,” said Marco Pavone, faculty co-director of the Sustainable Mobility Center with Ram Rajagopal. “The center is designed to combine Stanford’s strengths – from energy systems to AI and autonomy – with industry and government collaboration to accelerate real-world solutions at scale.”

Systems-level approach

The global transportation system incorporates vehicles, infrastructure, energy networks, operations, public policies, and human behavior. Making this system broadly sustainable demands a coordinated redesign, according to the new program’s leaders.

An example of overlapping challenges: While electric vehicles do not produce local pollution, most are charged by electric grids that rely on fossil fuel power plants that pollute neighboring communities and drive climate change. Relatedly, how will growing adoption of EVs affect the stability of electricity grids? More broadly, how will public and private transportation of people, as well as the movement of goods over land, air, and sea, work together to improve efficiency, speed, cost, and other goals?

“We are not simply transitioning from one energy source to another,” said Rajagopal, associate professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering, a joint department of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the School of Engineering. “We are rethinking how mobility systems are designed, optimized, and experienced by leveraging new transportation technologies and advances in AI, autonomy, digital infrastructure, smart grids, and data-driven decision-making.”

Bridging research and impact

The Sustainable Mobility Center’s leadership team understands how foundational research, technology development, the digital economy, and real-world deployment work together, and how more sustainable transportation can help make communities and cities cleaner and healthier for generations to come.

William Chueh, who is the faculty director of Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy, is a leader in energy science and technology and an entrepreneur. Rajagopal is an expert in power systems and the integration of renewables, smart distribution systems, and demand-side data analytics. He also directs Stanford’s smart grid initiative, Bits & Watts, which has funded extensive research on preparing electric grids for high penetration of electric vehicles. Rajagopal is co-founder and chief technology officer of a software startup for managing higher electricity demand on electricity grids.

Pavone is an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford’s School of Engineering and leads autonomous vehicle research at NVIDIA. His research centers on physical AI, with applications including self-driving cars, autonomous aerospace vehicles, and general-purpose robotic systems. Pavone directed the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford, a long-standing program that shaped the evolution of autonomous vehicle technology and was the forerunner to the Sustainable Mobility Center.

“AI and autonomy are not separate from sustainability. They are central to it,” said Pavone. “They allow us to operate mobility systems with a level of efficiency, safety, and coordination that simply wasn’t possible before.”

Twenty Stanford faculty members across five schools have affiliated themselves with the center.

The Sustainable Mobility Center’s activities will be funded by corporations through two mechanisms: member fees paid to an industrial affiliates program and research sponsored by individual companies. Membership fees are pooled to fund the new center’s research, educational, and other efforts.

While affiliate members can advise center leadership on research initiatives, the faculty directors decide the topics for proposal requests and select Stanford research projects to fund through a competitive process. The center and the Precourt Institute will help members sponsor research by connecting them with Stanford faculty who share their academic interests. Stanford’s Office of Research Administration oversees sponsored research projects.

“As throughout the campus, industry engagement is essential to ensure that our research is grounded in real-world challenges and constraints,” said Ryan Chin, the center’s managing director.

“We will work with our academic and business affiliates to develop solutions that are technically rigorous and practically deployable,” added Chin, who is co-founder and former CEO of an autonomous vehicle company spun out of MIT, where he earned his doctorate.

The six founding industry supporters are International Motors, LLC, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Prologis, Rivian, Shell, and Yazaki North America.

Research focus and structure

To accelerate progress, the Sustainable Mobility Center will convene stakeholders around a set of global, persistent, and complex challenges. “These ‘Grand Challenges’ include zero-emission freight, sustainable aviation fuels, intelligent logistics systems, multi-modal transportation networks, and resilient infrastructure,” said associate director Eylül Bilgin, PhD ’23 in aeronautics and astronautics.

To enable solutions for Grand Challenges, the Sustainable Mobility Center’s work has been organized around five pillars. Each pillar enables in-depth technical development while also serving as a building block for integrated solutions that align with Grand Challenge opportunities. For example, to develop zero-emission freight at global scale, new vehicle technology, intelligent infrastructure, safety systems, and sensible policies and economics must all work together to unlock grand challenge opportunities.

The center’s five core pillars are:

• Energy systems: Advancing electrification, sustainable fuels (in partnership with the Precourt Institute’s Center for Fuels of the Future), and deep integration with energy infrastructure – including grid resilience, smart charging, and vehicle-to-grid systems.
• Infrastructure: Designing next-generation physical and digital infrastructure, from charging and fueling networks to connected, data-enabled transportation systems.
• Economics and policy: Aligning incentives, markets, and regulatory frameworks to enable adoption, scale, and access to sustainable mobility solutions for everyone.
• Safety: Ensuring secure, reliable, and trustworthy mobility systems, particularly as autonomy and AI-driven decision-making become more prevalent.
• Interdisciplinary design: Reimagining mobility through human-centered and systems-level approaches that integrate engineering, urban design, and behavioral science.

Invited leaders from academia, industry, and government will participate in the center’s inaugural meeting at Stanford on May 21. Participants will primarily work to define the scope and priorities of the program’s initial Grand Challenges, as well as opportunities for additional companies to engage in the work.

“The world needs new models for mobility, ones that are sustainable, affordable, secure, and deeply integrated with the technologies shaping our future,” said Chueh. “Stanford’s Sustainable Mobility Center is positioned to substantially define that future.”