Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center reporting directly to the Dean of Research and outside of any school, or semi-independent of the University itself.

Independent laboratories, institutes and centers

These report directly to the Vice-Provost and Dean of Research and are outside of any school though any faculty involved in them must belong to a department in one of the schools. These include Bio-X and Spectrum in the area of Biological and Life Sciences; Precourt Institute for Energy and Woods Institute for the Environment in the Environmental Sciences area; the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) (see below), Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) (see below), Human-Sciences and Technologies Advance Research Institute (H-STAR), Stanford Center on Longevity (SCL), Stanford Humanities Center (see below), and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) in the area of Humanities and Social Sciences; and, for Physical Sciences, the Edward L. Ginzton Laboratory, the Geballe Laboratory for Advanced Materials, the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Photon Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering (PULSE), Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES), and W. W. Hansen Experimental Physics Laboratory (HEPL).