IAJS-sponsored fellows focus on solutions in healthcare, archival storytelling

Two 2025-26 Stanford Impact Labs design fellows sponsored by Stanford’s Institute for Advancing Just Societies illustrate the breadth of the solutions-focused research the institute supports and illustrate the global focus of its programming.

Alyce Adams, the inaugural Stanford Medicine Innovation Professor and Professor of Health Policy, Epidemiology and Population Health, will study diabetes care in high-risk communities. Grant Parker, Associate Professor of Classics and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, will explore ways of bringing archival material from South Africa to the public.

The Stanford Impact Labs Design Fellowship is a 10-month fellowship for faculty members from any of Stanford’s seven schools. Each fellow works on a project that uses their research skills and scholarship to tackle a pressing social problem. All fellows participate in monthly workshops and receive one-on-one mentoring. They also receive a $50,000 grant to cover expenses such as staff, travel, equipment, or workshops.

One of the goals of working with community partners on these projects is to produce long-term change.

“Stanford Impact Labs has a wonderful framework for how to develop meaningful partnerships that have an impact in the community. SIL provides best practices, resources, guidance, and advice around how to do that well and have it be sustainable over time,” Adams said.

Alyce Adams

Adams is establishing a partnership with The Queen’s Health System, the largest health system in Hawaii, to develop and test an early detection and monitoring approach to reduce the downstream consequences of nerve damage related to diabetes, up to and including lower extremity amputation.

“I am strongly motivated by disparities in chronic disease treatment outcomes, particularly diabetes and cancer,” Adams said.

Adams’ work is “the embodiment of the kind of research we are trying to support,” said Tomás R. Jiménez, Founding Faculty Co-Director, Institute for Advancing Just Societies, Professor of Sociology, School of Humanities and Sciences, Joan B. Ford Professor, and Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education.

Grant Parker

Parker will use his fellowship to explore ways to bridge the gaps between heritage, education, and tourism in South Africa and beyond. He is considering ways of making museum archival materials more available to the public — via digitization, school lesson plans, targeted pop-up exhibits, writing in the popular press, or short videos — as well as the policy and practical implications of connecting the heritage sector with public audiences.

“If I can bring people together to make educational resources with museum materials, that would be a powerful way to connect people, especially young people, with intergenerational stories,” Parker said.

Parker “is a broad thinker,” Jiménez said. “When we think of solutions-focused research, there are a lot of ways that can look. It includes the kind of engagement that Grant displays with people who are trying to preserve their history.”