Feature Articles
Explore feature articles from previous annual reports.
2023
New Faculty Members Bring New Ideas to the Beckman Center
By Sarah C.P. Williams
Scientists are the lifeblood of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine. Their ideas, ingenuity, and curiosity fuel innovative research that helps to fulfill the mission of the Beckman Center: to promote discovery and innovation in the basic sciences, encourage interdisciplinary collaboration, and accelerate connections between the research bench and clinical medicine.
2020
Beckman Service Centers: Providing the Most Advanced Technologies
By Sarah C.P. Williams
The ability to explore—it’s a sentiment that’s echoed by every faculty member who uses the Beckman Service Centers. The facilities provide not only equipment and software, but training and support that’s hard to put a price tag on.
2022
To Educate, To Learn, To Inspire: Beckman Center Educational Programs Help Scientists Explore New Ideas
By Sarah C.P. Williams
As they probe how the universe works, from the tiniest atoms to the vast reaches of outer space or the complexities of human cognition, scientists are quintessential lifelong learners.
2021
Scientists Work Furiously to Tackle COVID-19
By Ruthann Richter
When the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus spread throughout the world last year, triggering a global pandemic and a university-wide shutdown, scientists across the Stanford University campus had to curtail their lab operations—and think creatively about how to carry on their research.
2019
Three Decades of Technology Innovation
By Ashley P. Taylor
Since the founding of the Beckman Center in 1989, scientists and engineers have developed a wealth of technologies for learning about how life works at the levels of cells, molecules, and genes.
2018
Beckman Researchers Map Intricacies of Lung Cancer in One of Their Own
By Krista Conger
“I believe that the knowledge we will learn from this study will guide the standard of care for all lung adenocarcinoma patients. It’s a remarkable story.”
—Mark Krasnow, M.D., Ph.D
2017
Molecular and Cellular Physiology at the Beckman Center: Deepening our Understanding of Life from Systems to Cells to Molecules
By Krista Conger
It was an unconventional location for a pair of neuroscientists. But Daniel Madison, Ph.D., and Richard Tsien, Ph.D., set up shop in a building attached to the Stanford Museum of Art.
2015
Major Discoveries and Technological Advances in Biochemistry at the Beckman Center
By Krista Conger
It was a seismic shift in the geographic center of gravity for a relatively new scientific field. In June of 1959, six young researchers moved from Washington University in St. Louis to create a new department of biochemistry at Stanford.
2019
Women Scientists of the Beckman Center
By Anna Azvolinksky
Something these women of science had in common was a desire to be part of what each describes as the collegiate, collaborative, and inquisitive culture at the Beckman Center and Stanford University.
2019
Beckman’s Focus on Translational Medicine Yields Benefits for Patients
By Ruth Ann Richter
The goal was to create a new research hub, a rich community of people with backgrounds in science and medicine who could work together toward solutions in a highly collaborative environment.
2016
Developmental Biology at the Beckman Center: Discovering the Events that Control the Formation of Life
By Krista Conger
The new developmental biology department quickly went from relative anomaly to celebrated powerhouse that solved many of the problems that had plagued the field for decades during the early and mid-1900s.
2014
25 Years of Innovation, Discovery, and Collaboration at the Beckman Center
By Krista Conger
“I see the Beckman Center as a place that is willing to push research boundaries and take the risks necessary to support important research ideas.”
—Lucy Shapiro, Ph.D., Beckman Center Director