Real Problems. Real Partners. Real Impact.

HPH Action Labs are project-based courses where Stanford students partner with nonprofits, government agencies, and mission-driven organizations to generate solutions they can use immediately - informing policy, guiding investments, and improving health and environmental outcomes.

Each lab focuses on a specific challenge - sustainable aquaculture, fossil fuel phaseout, climate-smart agriculture - and pairs students with a partner organization. Together they produce research-backed analysis, policy recommendations, and strategies partners can put into practice.

Why Action Labs?

For Students 

• Take on challenges with real stakes and real partners.
• Collaborate across disciplines in a fast-moving team environment.
• Leave with a portfolio piece that already informed a real decision.

For Faculty

• Amplify your research with support from HPH and multidisciplinary student teams.
• Translate findings into action through partner adoption.
• Help develop future leaders ready to tackle complex climate and health challenges.

For External Partners

• Receive high-quality, evidence-based analysis and recommendations.
• Advance your goals while shaping the next generation of leaders.
• Explore innovative solutions with Stanford’s backing. 

Ready to get started?

Whether you have a challenge to bring, research to amplify, or just want to learn more, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to Katie Vogelheim to explore how you can be part of the next Action Lab.

From Inquiry to Impact

Delicious by Design (SUSTAIN 123)

Spring 2026 - Instructors: Christopher Gardner, Tamiko Katsumoto, Sara Damore, Katie Vogelheim

Hospitals are among the largest institutional food providers in the country - yet their menus often include foods that drive both chronic disease and climate change. What if that changed?

This Action Lab explores how hospitals can become catalysts for food system transformation. Students will work with hospitals, NGOs, food service professionals, chefs, clinicians, and policy experts to develop the tools, strategies, and evidence needed to shift menus toward plant-forward, culturally diverse, genuinely delicious food - and to make the case that healthy, climate-friendly, and cost-effective can all be the same meal.

Current student teams are working directly with Greener by Default alongside hospital advisors at Stanford and Kaiser Permanente to recommend strategies to scale plant forward menu solutions.

Regenerative Coffee: Biochar, Climate, and Health

Winter 2026 - Instructors: Kate Maher, Katie Vogelheim, Emily Callaghan
Partner: Conservation International

Every year the global coffee industry generates more than 34 million tons of organic waste - pulp, husks, spent grounds - most of it discarded. This Action Lab asked: what if that waste could become a climate solution?

Student teams explored how coffee waste-derived biochar can advance both human and planetary health, from improving soil health and water retention to capturing carbon and supporting farmer livelihoods. Working with Conservation International and the Stanford Biochar Project three teams approached the challenge from different angles - mapping the biochar value chain, designing a finance vehicle for landscape-scale adoption, and building a circular waste strategy rooted in the realities of Colombian coffee farmers.

• Developed a Biochar Decision Playbook for Conservation International - a structured framework to help project developers navigate biomass sourcing, pyrolysis technology, farmer incentives, and carbon verification.
• Designed a blended finance vehicle (the Landscape Biochar Acceleration Facility) to aggregate smallholder farmers, align coffee buyers and traders, and pool capital to drive landscape-scale biochar adoption in Colombia.
• Proposed a circular waste management strategy connecting clean cooking initiatives to biochar production, freeing pruning biomass from harmful burning while eliminating indoor air pollution and improving farmer economics.
   

Blue Foods for Indonesia

Winter/Spring 2024 - Instructors: Jim Leape, Janet Martinez, Eric Hartge, Katie Vogelheim
Partner: Indonesia Ministry of Development and Planning

Indonesia is one of the world’s largest producers of aquatic foods - yet the policy frameworks to fully harness that potential for nutrition and livelihoods have lagged behind. This Action Lab asked: how can blue foods strengthen sustainable diets and equitable economic opportunity across the archipelago?

Led by faculty from the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions and Law School, student teams developed policy strategies grounded in geospatial analysis and nutritional evidence, working directly with Indonesia’s Ministry of Development and Planning.

Read More: Learning Policy through Blue Food Research 

Renewable Energy in Rural America 

Fall 2024 - Instructors: Lisa Patel, Debbie Sivas, Luci Herman, Katie Vogelheim
Partner: Renew Missouri

Rural energy cooperatives power millions of American households - but while the national grid draws roughly 19% of its electricity from fossil fuels, co-ops still rely on them for an average of 61%. Students set out to quantify what that gap actually costs the communities living near those plants.

Working with public health organizations and clean energy advocates, student teams applied a Health Impact Assessment framework to rural fossil fuel dependence - a methodology rarely used in this context. What they found made the stakes impossible to ignore:

• Fossil fuel plants in Missouri alone generate an estimated $1.6 billion in annual health-related costs.
• Nearby communities face significantly elevated rates of asthma, lung disease, and high blood pressure.
• Delivered a policy roadmap that rural cooperatives across the country can adapt to build cleaner, healthier energy futures.

Read more: Putting a Health Lens on Rural Energy Choices