stanford thesis on demand

Capstone and thesis submission (undergraduate honors, master's)

There’s a forever home for your capstone, honors thesis, or master’s thesis—archived in the Stanford Digital Repository and accessible online via SearchWorks, the library catalog. It’s free and the process takes just a few minutes.

Start your deposit today  

Who is eligible

• Stanford undergraduate students who have produced a senior capstone project, honors thesis, or similar culminating work are welcome.
• Stanford master’s students outside of the School of Engineering who have written a thesis may deposit their work.
• The Stanford Digital Repository (SDR) is a service available to all Stanford students, faculty, and staff who produce research, scholarly works, or institutional records of long-term value. 

What to expect

• Once you log in, look for the name of the capstone or thesis collection on your dashboard. (Don’t see it on the dashboard? Check with your program contact to request depositor access to the collection.)
• After you submit, your deposit may be queued for review and approval. If so, you will receive a notification when the review is completed. On approval, your deposit will be available online at a persistent URL (PURL) and will be findable in SearchWorks, too.
• Go ahead and share your PURL with your friends and family, and add it to your resume, too!

Watch this brief overview video demonstrating how to deposit your work into the SDR.

More helpful resources

• Dissertation and thesis submission (PhD, JSD, DMA, engineering master's)  
• Guide to student publishing
• Directory of student works collections in the SDR
• SDR services website

Questions? 

Reach out to the SDR team by email .

Steps After Submission

Main navigation.

If you recently submitted a dissertation or thesis in Axess, you still have one more required step to complete. Browse this guide to help you stay on track.

Certificate of Final Reading

After you’ve submitted your dissertation or thesis, one member of your Reading Committee, known as the Final Reader, must certify that they have reviewed the final draft of the dissertation, engineer thesis, or final project submitted to the university. The Final Reader must be a member of the Academic Council.  Final Reader certification or approval is one of the last submission steps that must be completed by the submission deadline date .

The certification process occurs in Axess, where the Final Reader will be able to review a copy of the submission, and then approve or reject the submission.

Upon final submission of the dissertation or thesis online, an email is automatically sent to the Final Reader informing them that they have a dissertation or thesis ready for review in Axess. The Final Reader can locate the Approve Dissertation/Thesis link within their Advisor tab in Axess.

The final reading of the dissertation should include a review of the following:

• Content : All suggested changes have been taken into account and incorporated into the manuscript where appropriate. If the manuscript includes joint group research, the student's contribution is clearly explained in an introduction.
• Published Materials : If previously published materials are included in the dissertation, publication sources are indicated, written permission has been obtained for copyrighted materials, and all of the dissertation format requirements have been met.
• Appearance : The dissertation is ready-for-publication in appearance.
• Release Options : The Final Reader will also have the opportunity to review the selected embargo and other release options.

If the Final Reader is unable to approve electronically via Axess, or if the Final Reader does not have access to a computer, the student may submit a paper Certificate of Final Reading , signed by the Final Reader.

Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED)

Stanford University participates in the Survey of Earned Doctorates, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).  Stanford asks that you complete this survey .

Obtaining Bound Copies for Personal Use

The Office of the University Registrar does not provide bound copies of your dissertation or thesis for personal use.

After you officially submit your dissertation or thesis to Stanford, if you want a bound copy of your work for personal use, the university recommends the HF Group .

The HF Group offers a print-on-demand service for Stanford students wanting personal bound copies (with red covers) of their dissertations, engineer thesis, or DMA Final Project. 

2024 Department Dissertation Awards

With sincere appreciation for all those involved in the nomination and review process, the Department of Statistics proudly announces the winners of the full group of doctoral dissertation awards this year. Each hard-won distinction is accompanied by a prize of $1,000, and recipients will be presented with their certificates during the department's diploma ceremony on June 16th. Congratulations to these outstanding students!

Theodore W. Anderson Theory of Statistics Dissertation Award

Isaac Gibbs – for his groundbreaking work on adaptive conformal inference, maintaining prediction coverage over time despite substantial changes in the data distribution, and his amazing contribution to conformal prediction, quantifying the uncertainty of modern black box algorithms without distributional assumptions.

Jerome H. Friedman Applied Statistics Dissertation Award

Sifan Liu – for her work on high dimensional integration, machine learning optimization strategies and pre-integration in randomized quasi-Monte Carlo, and its novel application in data science.

Ingram Olkin Interdisciplinary Research Dissertation Award

Ying Jin – for pioneering model-free selective inference methods for multi-stage decision pipelines such as job hiring and drug discovery, and for providing new methods for diagnosing replication failure.

Probability Dissertation Award

Kangjie Zhou – for discovering precise high-dimensional asymptotics for projection pursuit with random data, using techniques from spin glasses and empirical process theory.

Thesis Defense: Brandon Derstine, Burns Lab

"Synthetic studies on the discorhabdin v-type alkaloids" 

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Pro-Palestine protesters criticize Stanford banning student

Around 100 students and community members marched from Memorial Church to the Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) Wednesday afternoon to protest Israel’s  bombing  of Rafah. Demonstrators also demanded that the University drop charges against an unidentified student who was allegedly arrested and  banned  from campus last week for policy violations related to pro-Palestine advocacy.

On Tuesday, Israeli airstrikes and shelling  killed  at least 37 people sheltering in Rafah, a Palestinian city in the southern Gaza strip. The city has  grown  in population from 250,000 to 1.4 million since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, as Palestinians have fled from other parts of Gaza.

The International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt the offensive on Rafah last week. But the Israeli government maintains its military operation in Rafah is necessary to  eliminate  Hamas targets and free hostages taken during the Oct. 7 attack.

Reza Yazan, a Palestinian American whose spouse is a Stanford student, called the recent attack on Rafah “gut-wrenching.” Yazan, who brought his daughter to watch the rally, said that especially as a father, seeing children killed and burned was “just devastating.” 

Community members expressed support for students involved with the pro-Palestine encampment. Stanford started to process disciplinary referrals this month against student organizers at the encampment, which violates the University’s time limits on demonstrations in White Plaza.

Pro-Palestine students have circulated a petition this week to ask University President Richard Saller and Provost Jenny Martinez to allow a student banned from campus to return. The petition has garnered over 560 signatures as of May 29. According to an Instagram post from Stanford Against Apartheid in Palestine (SAAP), the student was given no time to collect her belongings from campus, where she lives, studies and works. 

“They are deciding to instead suspend students, ban students from campus and suppress them rather than pushing for divestment, and rather than pushing for disaffiliation as well as disclosure,” a spokesperson for The People’s University, the encampment set up in White Plaza since April 25, told The Daily. The spokesperson requested anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation.

Carlos Enrique Ramirez ’26, who attended the Wednesday demonstration, said the University’s focus on punishing students for protesting “one of the most horrific massacres that we’ve seen” rather than “actually doing anything about it” was “so, so disgusting.” 

Similarly, Yazan criticized the University’s “blind eye” to the humanitarian crisis in Rafah and other human rights violations amid the ongoing Israel-Gaza war.

“The longer it goes, the more disappointing the silence and inaction the University is showing,” Yazan said. “It’s reflective of broader silence within this country, which the government is leading by example.”

Ramirez said that he was approached by an SUDPS officer at the rally, an interaction Ramirez believes was an effort to threaten him.

“They’re trying to use police officers to intimidate us. We’re completely unafraid,” Ramirez said.

The officer was also raised in the petition as someone who made offensive remarks about the arrested student’s physical appearance.

Also at the demonstration were around six members of the Raging Grannies, an international activist coalition of older women whose local chapter often attends regional protests. 

“I’ve been in this struggle for 64, 65 years,” said Iza Predmore, a member of the Raging Grannies, of her pro-Palestine advocacy.

“We were part of the Vietnam War protests when we were in college,” said Lotus Yee Fong, a Stanford parent who is also part of the Raging Grannies. “It’s time to end the colonial period.”

“We are proud of these students standing up for what is morally right,” Fong said. “Because that is the role of the youth.” 

In a speech before Memorial Church, Palestinian student Yousef AbuHashem ’25 pleaded with administrators to think of human rights and to consider the people in Rafah as “colleagues, sons, daughters, mentors, professors, neighbors, kids, nieces and nephews.”

​​”Think about why we’re protesting and what we’re protesting for,” AbuHashem said. “You’re a human and I’m a human too. You’re not just an administrator trying to broker a deal with me. I hope you understand this.”

It is unclear whether SAAP plans to hold protests during Commencement and through the end of the quarter. “This is still a really crucial time for us to push for our goals and push for our demands,” the spokesperson said. “The more that Stanford represses students, the more ideologically emboldened the students are.”

Caroline Chen '26 is a Vol. 265 News Managing Editor. She is from Chapel Hill, N.C. and enjoys vegetable farms and long walks. Contact cqchen 'at' stanforddaily.com. Ananya Udaygiri is the Vol. 265 Video Managing Editor. A sophomore from Houston, TX, she sometimes writes for News -- and on bad days, for Humor. Kaushik Sampath is the sports managing editor. He is a junior from Fayetteville, Arkansas and a history major. You can catch him watching and ranting about his beloved Arkansas Razorbacks or hanging out with friends on campus. Contact him at sports 'at' stanforddaily.com.

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Investigating Complementarities in Subscription Software Usage Using Advertising Experiments

In this study, we examine complementarities in usage across a set of related software products from a multi-product firm. We employ a novel experimental approach to causally estimate complementarities, leveraging rich usage data and advertising experiments that directly affect the usage of only one product at a time to measure complementarities based on consumption rather than purchase. Our approach is particularly useful as digital contexts are characterized by the simultaneous presence of both substitutability and complementarity between products. They also have scant price variation, bundled pricing plans, and infrequent purchase or subscription renewal decisions, often making typical cross-price elasticity measures for complementarities infeasible. We apply our approach to data from a software company with a suite of related products and find evidence for varying degrees of complementarity across both user groups and products. We show that accounting for complementarities significantly affects the measurement of ad effectiveness and may impact ad targeting decisions by the firm. We explore heterogeneity in complementarities, finding that they are larger for users who have used the products heavily in the past, but small or zero for those who have not. Ours is one of the first studies to causally examine complementarity in usage in the context of subscription products, and our identification strategy can be applied to a variety of contexts.

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Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming education, in both worrisome and beneficial ways. On the positive side of the ledger, new research shows how AI can help improve the way instructors engage with their students, by way of a cutting-edge tool that provides feedback on their interactions in class.

The M-Powering Teachers tool provides feedback with examples of dialogue from the class to illustrate supportive conversational patterns. Click on image to enlarge. (Image credit: Courtesy Dora Demszky)

A new Stanford-led study , published May 8 in the peer-reviewed journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, found that an automated feedback tool improved instructors’ use of a practice known as uptake, where teachers acknowledge, reiterate, and build on students’ contributions. The findings also provided evidence that, among students, the tool improved their rate of completing assignments and their overall satisfaction with the course.

For instructors looking to improve their practice, the tool offers a low-cost complement to conventional classroom observation – one that doesn’t require an instructional coach or other expert to watch the teacher in action and compile a set of recommendations.

“We know from past research that timely, specific feedback can improve teaching, but it’s just not scalable or feasible for someone to sit in a teacher’s classroom and give feedback every time,” said Dora Demszky , an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE) and lead author of the study. “We wanted to see whether an automated tool could support teachers’ professional development in a scalable and cost-effective way, and this is the first study to show that it does.”

Promoting effective teaching practices

Recognizing that existing methods for providing personalized feedback require significant resources, Demszky and colleagues set out to create a low-cost alternative. They leveraged recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) – a branch of AI that helps computers read and interpret human language – to develop a tool that could analyze transcripts of a class session to identify conversational patterns and deliver consistent, automated feedback.

For this study, they focused on identifying teachers’ uptake of student contributions. “Uptake is key to making students feel heard, and as a practice it’s been linked to greater student achievement,” said Demszky. “But it’s also widely considered difficult for teachers to improve.”

Dora Demszky is an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education. (Image credit: Courtesy Stanford GSE)

The researchers trained the tool, called M-Powering Teachers (the M stands for machine, as in machine learning), to detect the extent to which a teacher’s response is specific to what a student has said, which would show that the teacher understood and built on the student’s idea. The tool can also provide feedback on teachers’ questioning practices, such as posing questions that elicited a significant response from students, and the ratio of teacher/student talk time.

The research team put the tool to work in the Spring 2021 session of Stanford’s Code in Place , a free online course now in its third year. In the five-week program, based on Stanford’s popular introductory computer science course, hundreds of volunteer instructors teach basic programming to learners worldwide, in small sections with a 1:10 teacher-student ratio.

Code in Place instructors come from all sorts of backgrounds, from undergrads who’ve recently taken the course themselves to professional computer programmers working in the industry. Enthusiastic as they are to introduce beginners to the world of coding, many instructors approach the opportunity with little or no prior teaching experience.

The volunteer instructors received basic training, clear lesson goals, and session outlines to prepare for their role, and many welcomed the chance to receive automated input on their sessions, said study co-author Chris Piech , an assistant professor of computer science education at Stanford and co-founder of Code in Place.

“We make such a big deal in education about the importance of timely feedback for students, but when do teachers get that kind of feedback?” he said. “Maybe the principal will come in and sit in on your class, which seems terrifying. It’s much more comfortable to engage with feedback that’s not coming from your principal, and you can get it not just after years of practice but from your first day on the job.”

Instructors received their feedback from the tool through an app within a few days after each class, so they could reflect on it before the next session. Presented in a colorful, easy-to-read format, the feedback used positive, nonjudgmental language and included specific examples of dialogue from their class to illustrate supportive conversational patterns.

The researchers found that, on average, instructors who reviewed their feedback subsequently increased their use of uptake and questioning, with the most significant changes taking place in the third week of the course. Student learning and satisfaction with the course also increased among those whose instructors received feedback, compared with the control group. Code in Place doesn’t administer an end-of-course exam, so the researchers used the completion rates of optional assignments and course surveys to measure student learning and satisfaction.

Testing in other settings

Subsequent research by Demszky with one of the study’s coauthors, Jing Liu, PhD ’18, studied the use of the tool among instructors who worked one-on-one with high school students in an online mentoring program called Polygence . The researchers, who will present their findings in July at the 2023 Learning at Scale conference, found that on average the tool improved mentors’ uptake of student contributions by 10%, reduced their talk time by 5%, and improved students’ experience with the program as well as their relative optimism about their academic future.

Demszky is currently conducting a study of the tool’s use for in-person, K-12 school classrooms, and she noted the challenge of generating the high-quality transcription she was able to obtain from a virtual setting. “The audio quality from the classroom is not great, and separating voices is not easy,” she said. “Natural language processing can do so much once you have the transcripts – but you need good transcripts.”

She stressed that the tool was not designed for surveillance or evaluation purposes, but to support teachers’ professional development by giving them an opportunity to reflect on their practices. She likened it to a fitness tracker, providing information for its users’ own benefit.

The tool also was not designed to replace human feedback but to complement other professional development resources, she said.

Along with Dora Demszky, Jing Liu, and Chris Piech, the study was co-authored by Dan Jurafsky , a professor of linguistics and of computer science at Stanford, and Heather C. Hill, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Media Contacts

Dora Demszky, Stanford Graduate School of Education: [email protected]

Carrie Spector, Stanford Graduate School of Education: [email protected]