Stanford students, faculty, alumni and staff gathered at the Science and Engineering Quad and Lawn (SEQ) Thursday afternoon and evening to celebrate 100 years since the School of Engineering’s inception at the Stanford Engineering Centennial Celebration and Showcase.

“We set out to create an event that would exhibit some of the extraordinary, collaborative work happening in the School of Engineering today,” said Erin Phillips, senior associate director of development at the School and co-lead of the planning committee.

Phillips said that in the past year leading up to the event, members of the planning committee researched the school’s history. They developed a centennial website including a historical timeline of the school’s milestones, ten decades of stories released every few weeks through the end of July and multimedia from the archives.

Jennifer Widom, dean of the school, said in her speech and a letter to the Stanford community that the centennial showcase testifies to how the school’s “spirit of collaboration and innovation” is a “direct legacy” of the pioneering ethos that has guided it for the past century.

On May 15, 1925, the Board of Trustees approved and established the school after a few visionary faculty members endeavored to bring individual academic engineering departments together into a school. Before this day, the University had housed individual academic departments in engineering, ranging from electrical engineering to mining and metallurgy (now disbanded), Widom said in her speech.

Five of the University’s first 15 faculty members were engineering professors, and 141 of the original 559 students were enrolled as engineering majors.

Since its inception, the school has produced over 80,000 alumni around the world. Faculty, students and alumni alike have pioneered breakthroughs that Widom says have been “fast and furious.”

Such breakthroughs include electrical engineering and mechanical engineering professors William Durand and Everett Lesley ’34 building the first wind tunnels, Dean Frederick Emmons Terman pioneering the Stanford Research Park and the government-industry model as the “father of Silicon Valley,” Mae Jemison ’77 becoming the United States’ first African American female astronaut and the development of the World Wide Web through major tech companies such as Yahoo and Google.

The showcase opened at 3:30 p.m. with a display of 52 exhibits across robotics, design making, water, smart sensing for cities, virtual reality, biotic futures, wearables and implantables, Quintillion Quest, the future of work and campus clubs.

According to Julie Greicius, associate dean of communications and alumni affairs at the school, these themes were selected based on faculty-submitted proposals. Faculty and student teams developed exhibits within each theme in collaboration with the planning committee on logistics and based on work currently undertaken at the School.

Marlo Kohn ’05 M.S. ’07, senior lecturer of mechanical engineering and associate director of the Product Realization Lab, presented tokens with the centennial showcase logo made of recycled plastics. The tokens were produced by taking printer scraps from labs across campus, reprocessing them through local vendor PrintCycle and then recycling them through injection molding.

Kohn said that the biggest challenge she and her team faced in assembling their exhibit was fitting the students’ work under the proposed themes and determining how to best compile and present them.

Ekashmi Rathore and Kindle Williams, first-year and third-year postdoctoral scholars in chemical engineering respectively, presented technology that recovers resources from wastewater and was first developed by their principal investigator and assistant professor of chemical engineering William Tarpeh ’12. Rathore, Williams, and their team are working to build the economic case for applying their technology to centralized treatment contexts.

“We have a team of chemists, material scientists, chemical engineers, biologists and mechanical engineers in the lab working to execute this technology,” Williams said, alluding to how their showcase is emblematic of the School’s emphasis on interdisciplinary research to tackle societal challenges.

Weng Ian Ieong M.S. ’25, who attended the showcase, said that she was impressed with a wastewater recycling project that aimed to promote the safety of recycled water because it aligned with her coursework and academic interests as an environmental engineering student.

Although most attendees were current students like Ieong, alumni reminisced about their years at the School as they walked through SEQ.

Christopher Kitching ’92 M.S. ’92 said that his experience as an undergraduate and graduate student was academically rigorous but also intellectually and professionally rewarding. He said that although the research opportunities weren’t as expansive during his time as a student as they are today, he found the professors approachable, which he considers to be a highlight of his time at the school.

As attendees explored exhibits from faculty and student presenters like Kohn, Rathore and Williams, they also played rounds of bean bag toss at a d.school booth and enjoyed foods and beverages ranging from small street tacos to engineering-themed mocktails like the “innovators’ elixir” and “prototype punch.”

Six campus clubs, including the Stanford Space Initiative and Stanford Student Robotics, also presented projects they had been developing throughout the year.

Luca Higgins ’28 and Iris Xu ’28 from Stanford Student Robotics showcased the autonomous drone delivery service project developed by their team. Xu also presented a 3D printer that draws and automates Chinese calligraphy characters, a project inspired by a fellow club member who took a Chinese calligraphy class.

Widom also praised the School’s spirit of collaboration and interdisciplinary learning that it has fostered over the century.

“I’m proudest of our engineers when they take advantage of the fact that we’re in a full-service university,” Widom said. “We have the liberal arts. We have the professional schools right at our doorstep. Those are the collaborations that enable remarkable discoveries and advancements.”

University president Jonathan Levin ’94 echoed Widom’s sentiments in his speech. He underscored how the school prepares its students to become not just engineers but also great citizens, humanists, social scientists, and natural scientists who learn how to “put the disciplines together” and collaborate.

Levin announced the renaming of the SEQ in honor of Robert Rosenkranz, a philanthropist and the former CEO of the Delphi Financial Group, for his “significant philanthropic gift to the University,” which supports aging research and endows professorships in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.

Levin’s speech was followed by the cutting of a commemorative cake served to attendees and a performance by the Stanford Band and the Stanford Tree. Stanford Football general manager Andrew Luck ’12 M.A. ’13 also delivered remarks, with attendees exploring the exhibits afterward.

Zuzanna Krawcyzk, a graduate visiting researcher student in materials science and engineering, said that seeing Stanford’s wide-ranging research at the showcase has challenged her to expand her horizons.

“We [as researchers] usually focus on our small field of research,” Krawcyzk said, “so it’s nice that the centennial showcase has brought the community together and gotten them inspired.”