Arun Majumdar's mom cooked over a coal stove, and now he's the leader of Stanford's climate school
in 1970 for his work in genetics and plant breeding that led to the development of "a high-yielding short-strawed, disease-resistant wheat." Borlaug tested his wheat strain in Mexico and then took it to India.
"India went from a food importer to food exporter because of Norman Borlaug," Majumdar said. "And you know, I wouldn't be around if it was not for Norman Borlaug.""Research on issues that are scalable can change billions of lives. And that's the message we want to bring to the school," Majumdar said. "We need to find those Norman Borlaugs who can look at a problem and say, 'I have a solution' and take it all the way to scale."Arun Majumdar with his extended family in front of their home in New Delhi.Majumdar attended Mayo College, an independent boarding school in Ajmer, Rajasthan, India, which was expensive and "tough on my parents" to be able to afford, he told CNBC. But education was a massive priority for Majumdar's family. His parents and their families were displaced when India got its independence from British rule in 1947 and. Majumdar's parents and their families moved from what is now Bangladesh to Kolkata, "and they lost everything," Majumdar said. "I was born in the '60s. We grew up with the stories of what my parents went through." "They valued education because they lost everything when they moved during the partition, so to really get ahead in life, it was education," Majumdar said. After attending boarding school, Majumdar passed a rigorous entrance exam to attend the Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay, which he graduated from in 1985. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, to get his master's and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Arun Majumdar and his late mother at his graduation from the University of California, Berkeley, getting his PhD in mechanical engineering in 1989.Majumdar was drawn to Berkeley in part because his dad had visited for telecommunications training and had loved it, raving to his family about Berkeley being some kind of utopia. Majumdar remembers his father saying, "If the kids ever make it, I want them to come to Berkeley." His father passed away before Majumdar graduated college, "but his dream came true," Majumdar said. After taking several professorial gigs, Majumdar returned to Berkeley, where he ended up on the faculty for 13 years. When he was teaching at Berkeley, he was also doing research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab,Chu tapped Majumdar to lead the DARPA-esque agency for energy, called ARPA-E, an acronym for. "I was nominated in September; by my third week of October, I was there," Majumdar said. He wasn't anticipating the move and ended up staying in Chu's basement for a week until he could find an apartment to stay in, he told CNBC. There were three mission areas of the ARPA-E program: reducing greenhouse gas emissions, energy security and energy efficiency. The idea was to build the new energy industries of the future. In the early days, it was politically challenging. "Anything new in Washington, there are people who support it, there are people who are trying to kill it. So we have to navigate all that. Now, of course, no one questions that it's politically stable, but not at that time," Majumdar said. After leaving Washington, Majumdar took a job with Google for a year and a half to help create a program on providing access to electricity for the one and a half billion people who didn't have electricity. Then he joined Stanford. The lessons he learned at ARPA-E are helping form the foundation for the accelerator arm at the Stanford climate school. "Jokingly, we call it ARPA-S for sustainability, because it's all about impact," Majumdar said. "In ARPA-E, we talked about scale, but not enough. In a climate world, in sustainability, if the solution — whether it's technology or policy — if it doesn't scale, it doesn't matter."So far, the sustainability school at Stanford seems to be popular with students. For example, it opened a new class on sustainability with a limit of 100 students and it was filled up in 12 hours, which is "super fast," Majumdar said. The anticipation, based on early indicators, is that sustainability will become as foundational to the Stanford ethos as computing has been. Majumdar has a lot on his plate every day launching and growing the climate school now, but he hasn't forgotten the days of his childhood. "I grew up commuting by or traveling between cities in trains in India, which are run by coal engines — steam engines with coal. If it's a 24-hour or even 18-hour journey, by the time you reach your destination, you're black" because you are covered in coal smoke. "So I don't think people out here ever face that. So it gives me a perspective on the global aspects of this issue because there's a huge disparity and diversity of backgrounds that people come from, and we can't be monolithic in our solutions." Silicon Valley "could be an echo chamber," Majumdar said, but he keeps a clear connection to his global experience.
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