Diana Gragg

Biography

Diana Gragg is the Managing Director of the Explore Energy program at the Precourt Institute for Energy.  Explore Energy is a student-engagement program that helps students navigate the variety of energy opportunities, courses, majors, internships/fellowships, and job opportunities related to energy across all of Stanford's seven schools.  Explore Energy also offers energy-related programs and courses for students, including Energy@Stanford&SLAC, Shultz Energy Fellowships, Summer Undergraduate Program on Energy Research (SUPER), and Energy Seminar.

Diana is also a Core Lecturer in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department at Stanford University. Since 2015, she has been teaching a popular energy fundamentals course called CEE 107A/207A-ENERGY 107A/207A-EarthSys 103 Understand Energy in the fall and spring and a related course called Understand Energy: Essentials during the summer as part of Summer Session. She delivers the course along with Jane Woodward and Kirsten Stasio. Over 250 students/year take these courses.  She is also the lead energy and content expert for the free online resource based on the course material, the Understand Energy Learning Hub, and the monthly Energy Spotlight.  She also contributed to the Integrative Design for Radical Energy Efficiency Learning Hub based on work by Amory Lovins.

Diana has a B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley in Chemical Engineering (2000), and M.S. and PhD degrees in the Atmosphere/Energy program in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford (2012). Her dissertation focused on atmospheric gas-phase and aqueous-phase chemistry and investigated the impact of ethanol (E85) use on urban air pollution. She was a Schneider Fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. working on transportation advocacy in the summer of 2005.

She worked for the Dow Chemical Company as a production engineer at a chlorine facility and as a project lead on energy efficiency projects from 2000 to 2004, and as a post-doctoral scholar investigating different areas of sustainable transportation at the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford from 2012 to 2015. She grew up in Houston, Texas. She is an environmentalist and animal lover who enjoys hiking, running, skiing, playing water polo, hanging out with friends and family, connecting with students, and anything that involves spending time with her four kids, her husband Mike, and her dog Gus.