Stanford University School of Earth Sciences

The Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, which changed its name from the School of Earth Sciences in February 2015, is one of three schools at Stanford awarding both graduate and undergraduate degrees. Stanford's first faculty member was a professor of geology; as such it is considered the oldest academic foundation of Stanford University. It is composed of four departments and two interdisciplinary programs. Research and teaching span a wide range of disciplines.

Earth Sciences at Stanford can trace its roots to the university's beginnings, when Stanford's first president, David Starr Jordan, hired John Casper Branner, a geologist, as the university's first professor. The search for and extraction of natural resources was the focus of Branner's geology department during that period of Western development. Departments were originally not organized into schools but this changed when the department of geology became part of the School of Physical Sciences in 1926. This changed in 1946 when the School of Mineral Sciences was established and geology eventually split into several departments.

There are four academic departments within the school; Earth System Science, Geological Sciences, Geophysics, and Energy Resources Engineering There are two interdisciplinary programs housed within the school: the undergraduate and coterminal master's program Earth Systems, and the graduate Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources. In addition, the school organizes a master's degree in Computational Geoscience in collaboration with the Stanford Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. As of February 2015 it had 63 regular faculty members.

The interdisciplinary programs, in conjunction with the four departments, reach out to all other schools on the Stanford campus, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and both state and federal policy makers.

The school's library, Branner Earth Sciences Library, contains over 125,000 volumes, a large map collection and Stanford's GIS lab for ongoing GIS reference and research consultation.

The school as a whole was ranked as the third best Earth Sciences program by the U.S. News & World Report as of 2014^[update]. (Caltech is ranked no. 1, MIT no. 2, and Berkeley is tied for no. 3).

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