Castaño

Castaño is part of the vibrant Gerhard Casper Quad, which is home to the acclaimed Gerhard Casper Dining Commons. Residents enjoy a wonderful range of house amenities, as well as close access to Manzanita Field.

Resident Fellows

Jamie Jones is a Professor in the Department of Environmental Social Sciences in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. His research interests include human adaptability, human ecology and population biology, and social networks. He did his undergraduate work at New College (RIP) in Sarasota, Florida and his Ph.D. in anthropology at Harvard. He then did a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Washington in Seattle in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, and the Center for AIDS and STD. Jamie is a founding member of the Department of Environmental Social Sciences in SDSS and is very active in advocating for understanding the human dimensions of global change and sustainability. In addition to his scientific work, he is mildly obsessed with climate fiction, or CliFi, as a tool for imagining more sustainable and just futures and even taught a class on the subject in 2023 and 2024. Jamie was born in Boston and grew up living in the curator’s quarters of a historical museum in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

Jamie is always happy to talk about science fiction, environmental justice, weird facts about nature and evolution (especially parasites and other infectious agents), and Effective Altruism, Longtermism, and Rationalism more generally (just prepare for an earful). You can also get him going on weightlifting and fitness and obscure sports (for Americans) like rugby union and water polo. He used to know a lot more about basketball.

Libra Hilde is Professor and Chair of History at San José State University. Her research focuses on race and gender in the 19th century United States, with a particular emphasis on slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, women’s history, and Native American history. She has a B.A. in history and Native American studies from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard. In another life, Libra played D1 basketball at Cal back in the days of the PAC-10. Libra grew up off the grid in the Coast Range of Oregon and probably has better survival skills than anyone you know. She spends much of her spare time gardening in the Castaño RF yard. 

Libra and Jamie have two adult children who are frequently around. Their son Calder is a graduate student in psychology at Berkeley and their daughter Milan works on trachoma elimination for the Proctor Foundation at UCSF.  They also share their space with Jazz the cat. Jazz is a transfer from Northwestern and still sports  his purple collar (Go Cats!), even as he roams Casper Quad at Stanford  in search of adventures and/or mischief.