Stanford’s Climate Week promotes interdisciplinary climate action with Explore Energy Expo

Energy-related clubs and programs organized tables in the Engineering Quad on Oct. 22 as part of Climate Week’s Explore Energy Expo, an event aimed at promoting the variety of opportunities available to students in the climate space. 

In past years, Stanford has held the Explore Energy Expo as an independent event in the fall, set up as a club fair. This year the event’s organizer, Edward Chen ’28, decided to incorporate the Expo into Climate Week in hopes that the partnership would expand the Expo’s impact. 

“We created this partnership with Climate Week, where, because we’re in Climate Week, we can consolidate a bigger audience,” said Chen. 

Mary Lee ’26 co-founded Climate Week last April with Marco Sie ’25 and Avni Vats ’26 as a way to bring together different communities that play a role in the climate sphere — including policy, tech, finance and healthcare — through a selection of events and workshops. Last year, Stanford’s inaugural Climate Week focused on “bridging sustainability across the climate ecosystem,” Lee said.

This year, Lee hopes Climate Week will attract students in fields not traditionally associated with climate and show them that they have a role in the climate space.  

“Every problem is a climate problem,” Lee said.

The Explore Energy Expo is particularly well-suited to this goal. As Chen organized the Expo and decided which clubs and programs to feature, he asked himself how he could create partnerships across different clubs and sectors to showcase the knowledge diversity of professionals in the climate sector. With this objective in mind, Chen chose to include any clubs “remotely related” to climate in addition to those whose main focus lay in energy and sustainability. 

Emily Zhao ’29 attended the Expo to discover how Stanford supports sustainability across various fields. There, she hoped to find opportunities to integrate sustainability with technical sciences, finance and entrepreneurship. The Explore Energy Expo illuminated the interdisciplinary potential of climate for Zhao. 

“If you want to go into finance, there are ways to incorporate sustainability. If you want to do engineering, there are ways to do that. Or if you’re into entrepreneurship, there’s opportunities for that too,” Zhao said. 

Zhao encourages other students to get involved in similar Climate Week activities. “No matter your background or what you’re trying to do, you can really get something out of these events,” said Zhao. 

Climate week events such as the Explore Energy Expo serve as an accessible, low-commitment way to get involved in the climate space at Stanford, where students play a unique role in environmental initiatives. 

“As students, we don’t have full-time jobs. We’re not tied down, and we have all this energy, which allows us to move a lot faster to make things happen than institutions or seasoned people with full-time jobs,” said Sie. 

According to Chen, the Explore Energy Expo and Climate Week as a whole aim to promote collaboration in the climate space. “We want to create more partnerships, more collaborations,” Chen said. “Because that’s really what’s going to get the ball moving forward at the end of the day, right?”

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