Yost

Yost House is situated in a serene, open space of West Campus near Lake Lagunita. We’re lucky to be close to exciting campus facilities like the Arrillaga Outdoor Education and Recreation Center (AOERC), the O’Donohue Family Farm, and the Windhover Contemplative Center. In Yost itself, we are lucky to have an open kitchen and in-house meal plan, as well as many balconies and decks for outdoor recreation. As a community, we strive for a caring, open, comfortable and inclusive environment.

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Meet the Yost Resident Fellow (2025-26)

Resident Fellows, or RFs, are Stanford faculty and senior administrative staff who live in apartments or cottages adjacent to student residences and serve as leaders for their communities. Jovana Lazić is a historian and serves as associate director of the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and a lecturer at Stanford Global Studies.

Jovana's fascination with all things global started in childhood when she had to navigate her new home in New Jersey as a newly arrived immigrant from Yugoslavia (a country that no longer exists). As an undergraduate she studied International Relations at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and spent her junior year in Paris. She then earned her PhD in History from Yale, where her fascination with the First World War began. When not geeking out about history and global affairs, Jovana can be found baking traditional recipes from her grandmother’s cookbook, grabbing coffee with her daughter Mia, and chasing down their Chocolate Labrador, Charlie, and unruly kittens, Sam and Stella.

Meet the Yost Resident Fellow (2026-27)

Mykel Kochenderfer is a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and (by courtesy) Department of Computer Science. He is the director of the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL) and co-director of the Stanford Center for AI Safety. In addition, he is a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI).

Growing up in Tracy, California, his first taste of Stanford was at the Stanford University Mathematics Camp, where he fell in love with the beautiful campus and ultimate frisbee. He originally started as a math major, but later switched to computer science, intrigued by the possibilities of artificial intelligence, even though it didn't work so well back then. After doing a couple industrial internships, he decided to try research for a summer with Nils Nilsson, one of the foundational pioneers of artificial intelligence. The experience excited him enough to pursue a Ph.D. program at the University of Edinburgh, where he did a thesis on reinforcement learning. He later worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he was able to combine his personal passion for aviation as a third-generation pilot with his intellectual passion for artificial intelligence. His research eventually grew into what became a series of international standards for aircraft collision avoidance. In 2013, he returned to Stanford as a faculty member and started a course on decision making under uncertainty, which was the most enrolled course at Stanford in Fall 2025 (outside of COLLEGE101). Along the way, he has graduated 44 doctoral students and wrote four textbooks. Some of his favorite experiences are traveling with Stanford undergraduates as part of the Stanford Bing Overseas Program to places like Scotland, Morocco, Argentina, and India, and also serving as Faculty in Residence at the Stanford House in Oxford. His primary sources of joy are his children, with diverse interests spanning aviation, architecture, violin, and ballet.