Faculty

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares149 Views

      in Environment

      3 Questions: Can disused croplands help mitigate climate change?

      by

      As the world struggles to meet internationally agreed targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, methods of removing carbon dioxide such as reforestation of cleared areas have become an increasingly important strategy. But little attention has been paid to the potential for abandoned or marginal croplands to be restored to natural vegetation as an additional carbon sink, say MIT assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering César Terrer, recent visiting MIT doctoral student Stephen M. Bell, and six others, in a recent open-access paper in the journal Nature Communications. Here, Terrer and Bell explain the potential use of these “post-agricultural” lands to help in the fight against damaging climate change.

      Q: How significant is the potential of unused agricultural lands as a carbon sink to help mitigate climate change?

      Bell: We know of these huge instances of land abandonment and post-agricultural succession throughout history, like following the collapse of major cities from ancient Mesopotamia to the Mayans. And when the Europeans arrived in the Americas in the 15th century, so many people died and so much forest grew back on abandoned farmland that it helped cool the entire planet and was potentially a driver of the coldest part of the so-called “Little Ice Age” period.

      Today, we have abandoned farmland all over the Mediterranean region, where I did my PhD field work. As young people left rural areas for the cities throughout the 20th century, farmers couldn’t pass on their land to anyone, and the land succeeded back into shrub lands and forests. The biggest recent example of abandonment is for sure the collapse of the Soviet Union, where an estimated 60 million hectares of forest regrew when support for collective farming stopped, resulting in one of the largest carbon sinks ever attributed to a single event.

      So, when we look back at the past, we know there’s potential. Of course, these are huge events, and no one is proposing to replicate anything like that. We need to use land for multiple purposes, but looking back at these big examples, we know there is potential for abandoned or restored agricultural land to be carbon sinks. And so that tells us to dig deeper into this question and get a better idea of realistic scenarios, a better understanding of the climate change mitigation potential of agricultural cessation in the most strategic places.

      Terrer: More than 115 billion tons of carbon have been lost from soils due to agricultural practices that disturb soil integrity — such as tilling, monoculture farming, removing crop residue, excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides, and over-grazing. To put this into perspective, the amount of carbon lost is equivalent to the total CO2 emissions ever produced in the United States.

      Our current research synthesizes field data from thousands of experiments, aiming to understand the factors that influence soil carbon accrual in abandoned croplands transitioning back to forests or natural grasslands. We’re working to quantify the potential for carbon sequestration in these soils over 30-, 50-, and 100-year time frames and mapping the areas with the greatest potential for carbon storage. This includes both increases in soil carbon and in vegetation biomass.

      Q: What are some of the key uncertainties in evaluating this potential for unused cropland to serve as a carbon sink, and how could those uncertainties be addressed?

      Bell: We use this word uncertainties in two ways. Specifically, the longevity of potential recarbonization, and the intensity of the potential recarbonization. Those are two factors, two aspects that we need to quantify to reduce our uncertainty.

      So, how long will the land recarbonize, regardless of the intensity? If the carbon level is going up, that’s good. If there’s more carbon increasing in the soil, we know that it came from somewhere, it came from the atmosphere. But how long does that happen? We know soil can get saturated. It can reach its carbon capacity limit, it won’t continue to increase the carbon stock, and the recarbonization curve will flatten out. When does that happen? Is it after a hundred years? Is it after 20 years?

      But the world’s soils are very diverse and complex, so what might be true in one place is not true in another place. It may take a longer time to reach saturation for more fertile soils in the Midwest U.S. than less fertile soils in the Southwest, for example. Alternatively, sometimes soils in drier areas like in the Southwest may never reach true saturation if they are degraded and have stalled recovery following abandonment.

      The second uncertainty is intensity: How high on the y-axis on the chart of recarbonization does saturation occur? With the analogy comparing U.S. soils, you might have a relatively huge carbon increase on an abandoned farm in the Southwest, but because the soil is not very carbon-rich it’s not a large increase in absolute terms. In the Midwest, there might only be a small relative increase, but that increase could be much more in total than in the Southwest. These are just nuances to keep in mind as we look at this at the global scale.

      These nuances are essentially uncertainties. Soil carbon responses to agricultural land abandonment is complicated, and unfortunately it hasn’t been studied in much detail so far. We need to reduce those uncertainties to get a better understanding of the recarbonization potential. This is easier said than done because not only do we have these temporal data uncertainties, but we also have spatial uncertainties. We don’t have very good maps of past and present post-agricultural landscapes.

      Q: Can this potential use of post-agricultural lands be implemented without putting global food supplies at risk? How can these needs be balanced?

      Terrer: As to whether utilizing post-agricultural lands for carbon sequestration can be implemented without jeopardizing global food supplies, and how to balance these needs, our recent research provides valuable insights.

      The challenge, of course, lies in balancing cropland restoration for climate mitigation with food security for a growing global population. Abandoned croplands represent an opportunity for carbon sequestration without impacting active agricultural lands. However, the available area of abandoned croplands is insufficient to make a substantial impact on climate mitigation on its own.

      Thus, our proposal also emphasizes the importance of closing yield gaps, which involves increasing crop production per hectare to its theoretical limits. This would enable us to maintain or even increase global crop yields using only a fraction of the currently cultivated area, allowing the remaining land to be dedicated to climate mitigation efforts. By pursuing this strategy, we estimate that over half of the amount of soil carbon lost so far due to agriculture could be recovered, while ensuring food security for the world’s population. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Energy

      Paula Hammond wins faculty’s Killian Award for 2023-24

      by

      Paula Hammond, a leading innovator in nanotechnology and head of MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, has been named the recipient of the 2023-2024 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award.

      Hammond, an MIT Institute Professor, was honored for her work designing novel polymers and nanomaterials, which have extensive applications in fields including medicine and energy.

      “Professor Hammond is a pioneer in nanotechnology research, with a program that spans from basic science to translational research in medicine and energy. She has introduced new approaches for the design and development of complex drug delivery systems for cancer treatment and non-invasive imaging,” according to the award citation, which was read at the May 17 faculty meeting by Laura Kiessling, the chair of the Killian Award Selection Committee and the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at MIT.

      Established in 1971 to honor MIT’s 10th president, James Killian, the Killian Award recognizes extraordinary professional achievements by an MIT faculty member.

      “I’ve been to past Killian Award lectures, and I’ve always thought these were the ultimate achievers at MIT in terms of their work and their science,” Hammond says. “I am incredibly honored and overwhelmed to be considered even close to a part of that group.”

      Hammond, who earned her bachelor’s degree from MIT in 1984, worked as an engineer before returning to the Institute four years later to earn a PhD, which she received in 1993. After two years as a postdoc at Harvard University, she returned to MIT again as a faculty member in 1995.

      “In a world where it isn’t always cool to be heavy into your science and your work, MIT was a place where I felt like I could just be completely myself, and that was an amazing thing,” she says.

      Since joining the faculty, Hammond has pioneered techniques for creating thin polymer films and other materials using layer-by-layer assembly. This approach can be used to build polymers with highly controlled architectures by alternately exposing a surface to positively and negatively charged particles.

      Hammond’s lab uses this technique to design materials for many different applications, including drug delivery, regenerative medicine, noninvasive imaging, and battery technology.

      Her accomplishments include designing nanoparticles that can zoom in on tumors and release their cargo when they associate with cancer cells. She has also developed nanoparticles and thin polymer films that can carry multiple drugs to a specific site and release the drugs in a controlled or staggered fashion. In recent years, much of that work has focused on potential treatments and diagnostics for ovarian cancer.

      “We’ve really had a focus on ovarian cancer over the past several years. My hope is that our work will move us in the direction of understanding how we can treat ovarian cancer, and, in collaboration with my colleagues, how we can detect it more effectively,” says Hammond, who is a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

      The award committee also cited Hammond’s record of service, both to MIT and the national scientific community. She currently serves on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and she is a former member of the U.S. Secretary of Energy Scientific Advisory Board. At MIT, Hammond chaired the Initiative on Faculty Race and Diversity, and co-chaired the Academic and Professional Relationships Working Group and the Implementation Team of the MIT response to the National Academies’ report entitled “Sexual Harassment of Women.”

      Among her many honors, Hammond is one of only 25 scientists who have been elected to the National Academies of Engineering, Sciences, and Medicine.

      Hammond has also been recognized for her dedication to teaching and mentoring. As a reflection of her excellence in those areas, Hammond was awarded the Irwin Sizer Award for Significant Improvements to MIT Education, the Henry Hill Lecturer Award in 2002, and the Junior Bose Faculty Award in 2000. She also co-chaired the recent Ad Hoc Committee on Faculty Advising and Mentoring, and has been selected as a “Committed to Caring” honoree for her work mentoring students and postdocs in her research group.

      “The Selection Committee is delighted to have this opportunity to honor Professor Paula Hammond, not only for her tremendous professional achievements and contributions, but also for her genuine warmth and humanity, her thoughtfulness and effective leadership, and her empathy and ethics. She is someone worth emulating. Indeed, simply put, she is the best of us,” the award committee wrote in its citation. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Environment

      J-WAFS announces 2023 seed grant recipients

      by

      Today, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) announced its ninth round of seed grants to support innovative research projects at MIT. The grants are designed to fund research efforts that tackle challenges related to water and food for human use, with the ultimate goal of creating meaningful impact as the world population continues to grow and the planet undergoes significant climate and environmental changes.Ten new projects led by 15 researchers from seven different departments will be supported this year. The projects address a range of challenges by employing advanced materials, technology innovations, and new approaches to resource management. The new projects aim to remove harmful chemicals from water sources, develop monitoring and other systems to help manage various aquaculture industries, optimize water purification materials, and more.“The seed grant program is J-WAFS’ flagship grant initiative,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “The funding is intended to spur groundbreaking MIT research addressing complex issues that are challenging our water and food systems. The 10 projects selected this year show great promise, and we look forward to the progress and accomplishments these talented researchers will make,” she adds.The 2023 J-WAFS seed grant researchers and their projects are:Sara Beery, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), is building the first completely automated system to estimate the size of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest (PNW).Salmon are a keystone species in the PNW, feeding human populations for the last 7,500 years at least. However, overfishing, habitat loss, and climate change threaten extinction of salmon populations across the region. Accurate salmon counts during their seasonal migration to their natal river to spawn are essential for fisheries’ regulation and management but are limited by human capacity. Fish population monitoring is a widespread challenge in the United States and worldwide. Beery and her team are working to build a system that will provide a detailed picture of the state of salmon populations in unprecedented, spatial, and temporal resolution by combining sonar sensors and computer vision and machine learning (CVML) techniques. The sonar will capture individual fish as they swim upstream and CVML will train accurate algorithms to interpret the sonar video for detecting, tracking, and counting fish automatically while adapting to changing river conditions and fish densities.Another aquaculture project is being led by Michael Triantafyllou, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Professor in Ocean Science and Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Robert Vincent, the assistant director at MIT’s Sea Grant Program. They are working with Otto Cordero, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, to control harmful bacteria blooms in aquaculture algae feed production.

      Aquaculture in the United States represents a $1.5 billion industry annually and helps support 1.7 million jobs, yet many American hatcheries are not able to keep up with demand. One barrier to aquaculture production is the high degree of variability in survival rates, most likely caused by a poorly controlled microbiome that leads to bacterial infections and sub-optimal feed efficiency. Triantafyllou, Vincent, and Cordero plan to monitor the microbiome composition of a shellfish hatchery in order to identify possible causing agents of mortality, as well as beneficial microbes. They hope to pair microbe data with detail phenotypic information about the animal population to generate rapid diagnostic tests and explore the potential for microbiome therapies to protect larvae and prevent future outbreaks. The researchers plan to transfer their findings and technology to the local and regional aquaculture community to ensure healthy aquaculture production that will support the expansion of the U.S. aquaculture industry.

      David Des Marais is the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. His 2023 J-WAFS project seeks to understand plant growth responses to elevated carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, in the hopes of identifying breeding strategies that maximize crop yield under future CO2 scenarios.Today’s crop plants experience higher atmospheric CO2 than 20 or 30 years ago. Crops such as wheat, oat, barley, and rice typically increase their growth rate and biomass when grown at experimentally elevated atmospheric CO2. This is known as the so-called “CO2 fertilization effect.” However, not all plant species respond to rising atmospheric CO2 with increased growth, and for the ones that do, increased growth doesn’t necessarily correspond to increased crop yield. Using specially built plant growth chambers that can control the concentration of CO2, Des Marais will explore how CO2 availability impacts the development of tillers (branches) in the grass species Brachypodium. He will study how gene expression controls tiller development, and whether this is affected by the growing environment. The tillering response refers to how many branches a plant produces, which sets a limit on how much grain it can yield. Therefore, optimizing the tillering response to elevated CO2 could greatly increase yield. Des Marais will also look at the complete genome sequence of Brachypodium, wheat, oat, and barley to help identify genes relevant for branch growth.Darcy McRose, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is researching whether a combination of plant metabolites and soil bacteria can be used to make mineral-associated phosphorus more bioavailable.The nutrient phosphorus is essential for agricultural plant growth, but when added as a fertilizer, phosphorus sticks to the surface of soil minerals, decreasing bioavailability, limiting plant growth, and accumulating residual phosphorus. Heavily fertilized agricultural soils often harbor large reservoirs of this type of mineral-associated “legacy” phosphorus. Redox transformations are one chemical process that can liberate mineral-associated phosphorus. However, this needs to be carefully controlled, as overly mobile phosphorus can lead to runoff and pollution of natural waters. Ideally, phosphorus would be made bioavailable when plants need it and immobile when they don’t. Many plants make small metabolites called coumarins that might be able to solubilize mineral-adsorbed phosphorus and be activated and inactivated under different conditions. McRose will use laboratory experiments to determine whether a combination of plant metabolites and soil bacteria can be used as a highly efficient and tunable system for phosphorus solubilization. She also aims to develop an imaging platform to investigate exchanges of phosphorus between plants and soil microbes.Many of the 2023 seed grants will support innovative technologies to monitor, quantify, and remediate various kinds of pollutants found in water. Two of the new projects address the problem of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), human-made chemicals that have recently emerged as a global health threat. Known as “forever chemicals,” PFAS are used in many manufacturing processes. These chemicals are known to cause significant health issues including cancer, and they have become pervasive in soil, dust, air, groundwater, and drinking water. Unfortunately, the physical and chemical properties of PFAS render them difficult to detect and remove.Aristide Gumyusenge, the Merton C. Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, is using metal-organic frameworks for low-cost sensing and capture of PFAS. Most metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are synthesized as particles, which complicates their high accuracy sensing performance due to defects such as intergranular boundaries. Thin, film-based electronic devices could enable the use of MOFs for many applications, especially chemical sensing. Gumyusenge’s project aims to design test kits based on two-dimensional conductive MOF films for detecting PFAS in drinking water. In early demonstrations, Gumyusenge and his team showed that these MOF films can sense PFAS at low concentrations. They will continue to iterate using a computation-guided approach to tune sensitivity and selectivity of the kits with the goal of deploying them in real-world scenarios.Carlos Portela, the Brit (1961) and Alex (1949) d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Ariel Furst, the Cook Career Development Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, are building novel architected materials to act as filters for the removal of PFAS from water. Portela and Furst will design and fabricate nanoscale materials that use activated carbon and porous polymers to create a physical adsorption system. They will engineer the materials to have tunable porosities and morphologies that can maximize interactions between contaminated water and functionalized surfaces, while providing a mechanically robust system.Rohit Karnik is a Tata Professor and interim co-department head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is working on another technology, his based on microbead sensors, to rapidly measure and monitor trace contaminants in water.Water pollution from both biological and chemical contaminants contributes to an estimated 1.36 million deaths annually. Chemical contaminants include pesticides and herbicides, heavy metals like lead, and compounds used in manufacturing. These emerging contaminants can be found throughout the environment, including in water supplies. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States sets recommended water quality standards, but states are responsible for developing their own monitoring criteria and systems, which must be approved by the EPA every three years. However, the availability of data on regulated chemicals and on candidate pollutants is limited by current testing methods that are either insensitive or expensive and laboratory-based, requiring trained scientists and technicians. Karnik’s project proposes a simple, self-contained, portable system for monitoring trace and emerging pollutants in water, making it suitable for field studies. The concept is based on multiplexed microbead-based sensors that use thermal or gravitational actuation to generate a signal. His proposed sandwich assay, a testing format that is appealing for environmental sensing, will enable both single-use and continuous monitoring. The hope is that the bead-based assays will increase the ease and reach of detecting and quantifying trace contaminants in water for both personal and industrial scale applications.Alexander Radosevich, a professor in the Department of Chemistry, and Timothy Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry, are teaming up to create rapid, cost-effective, and reliable techniques for on-site arsenic detection in water.Arsenic contamination of groundwater is a problem that affects as many as 500 million people worldwide. Arsenic poisoning can lead to a range of severe health problems from cancer to cardiovascular and neurological impacts. Both the EPA and the World Health Organization have established that 10 parts per billion is a practical threshold for arsenic in drinking water, but measuring arsenic in water at such low levels is challenging, especially in resource-limited environments where access to sensitive laboratory equipment may not be readily accessible. Radosevich and Swager plan to develop reaction-based chemical sensors that bind and extract electrons from aqueous arsenic. In this way, they will exploit the inherent reactivity of aqueous arsenic to selectively detect and quantify it. This work will establish the chemical basis for a new method of detecting trace arsenic in drinking water.Rajeev Ram is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His J-WAFS research will advance a robust technology for monitoring nitrogen-containing pollutants, which threaten over 15,000 bodies of water in the United States alone.Nitrogen in the form of nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, and urea can run off from agricultural fertilizer and lead to harmful algal blooms that jeopardize human health. Unfortunately, monitoring these contaminants in the environment is challenging, as sensors are difficult to maintain and expensive to deploy. Ram and his students will work to establish limits of detection for nitrate, nitrite, ammonia, and urea in environmental, industrial, and agricultural samples using swept-source Raman spectroscopy. Swept-source Raman spectroscopy is a method of detecting the presence of a chemical by using a tunable, single mode laser that illuminates a sample. This method does not require costly, high-power lasers or a spectrometer. Ram will then develop and demonstrate a portable system that is capable of achieving chemical specificity in complex, natural environments. Data generated by such a system should help regulate polluters and guide remediation.Kripa Varanasi, a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Angela Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor and head of the Department of Biological Engineering, will join forces to develop an affordable water disinfection technology that selectively identifies, adsorbs, and kills “superbugs” in domestic and industrial wastewater.Recent research predicts that antibiotic-resistance bacteria (superbugs) will result in $100 trillion in health care expenses and 10 million deaths annually by 2050. The prevalence of superbugs in our water systems has increased due to corroded pipes, contamination, and climate change. Current drinking water disinfection technologies are designed to kill all types of bacteria before human consumption. However, for certain domestic and industrial applications there is a need to protect the good bacteria required for ecological processes that contribute to soil and plant health. Varanasi and Belcher will combine material, biological, process, and system engineering principles to design a sponge-based water disinfection technology that can identify and destroy harmful bacteria while leaving the good bacteria unharmed. By modifying the sponge surface with specialized nanomaterials, their approach will be able to kill superbugs faster and more efficiently. The sponge filters can be deployed under very low pressure, making them an affordable technology, especially in resource-constrained communities.In addition to the 10 seed grant projects, J-WAFS will also fund a research initiative led by Greg Sixt. Sixt is the research manager for climate and food systems at J-WAFS, and the director of the J-WAFS-led Food and Climate Systems Transformation (FACT) Alliance. His project focuses on the Lake Victoria Basin (LVB) of East Africa. The second-largest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Victoria straddles three countries (Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya) and has a catchment area that encompasses two more (Rwanda and Burundi). Sixt will collaborate with Michael Hauser of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, and Paul Kariuki, of the Lake Victoria Basin Commission.The group will study how to adapt food systems to climate change in the Lake Victoria Basin. The basin is facing a range of climate threats that could significantly impact livelihoods and food systems in the expansive region. For example, extreme weather events like droughts and floods are negatively affecting agricultural production and freshwater resources. Across the LVB, current approaches to land and water management are unsustainable and threaten future food and water security. The Lake Victoria Basin Commission (LVBC), a specialized institution of the East African Community, wants to play a more vital role in coordinating transboundary land and water management to support transitions toward more resilient, sustainable, and equitable food systems. The primary goal of this research will be to support the LVBC’s transboundary land and water management efforts, specifically as they relate to sustainability and climate change adaptation in food systems. The research team will work with key stakeholders in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania to identify specific capacity needs to facilitate land and water management transitions. The two-year project will produce actionable recommendations to the LVBC. More

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in Energy

      Solve at MIT 2023: Collaboration and climate efforts are at the forefront of social impact

      by

      “The scale, complexity, the global nature of the problems we’re dealing with are so big that no single institution, industry, or country can deal with them alone,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth stated in her first remarks to the Solve community.

      Over 300 social impact leaders from around the world convened on MIT’s campus for Solve at MIT 2023 to celebrate the 2022 Solver class and to discuss some of the world’s greatest challenges and how we can tackle them with innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology.

      These challenges can be complicated and may even feel insurmountable, but Solve at MIT leaves us with the hope, tools, and connections needed to find solutions together.

      Hala Hanna, executive director of MIT Solve, shared what keeps her inspired and at the front line of social impact: “Optimism isn’t about looking away from the issues but looking right at them, believing we can create the solutions and putting in the work. So, anytime I need a dose of optimism, I look to the innovators we work with,” Hanna shared during the opening plenary, Unlocking our Collective Potential.

      Over the course of three days, more than 300 individuals from around the world convened to celebrate the 2022 Solver class, create partnerships that lead to progress, and address solutions to pressing world issues in real-time.

      Every technologist, philanthropist, investor, and innovator present at Solve at MIT left with their own takeaway, but three main themes seemed to underscore the overall discussions.

      Technology and innovation are as neutral as the makers

      Having bias is a natural part of what makes us human. However, being aware of our predispositions is necessary to transform our lived experiences into actionable solutions for others to benefit from. 

      We’ve largely learned that bias can be both unavoidable and applied almost instantly. Sangbae Kim, director of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory and professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, proved this through robotics demonstrations where attendees almost unanimously were more impressed with a back-flipping MIT robot compared to one walking in circles. As it turns out, it took one individual three days to program a robot to do a flip and over two weeks for a full team to program one to walk. “We judge through the knowledge and bias we have based on our lived experiences,” Kim pointed out.

      Bias and lived experiences don’t have to be bad things. The solutions we create based on our own lives are what matter. 

      2022 Solver Atif Javed, co-founder and executive director of Tarjimly, began translating for his grandmother as a child and learned about the struggles that come with being a refugee. This led him to develop a humanitarian language-translation application, which connects volunteer translators with immigrants, refugees, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and more, on demand. 

      Vanessa Castañeda Gill, 2022 Solver and co-founder and CEO of Social Cipher, transformed her personal experience with ADHD and autism to develop Ava, a video game empowering neuro-divergent youth and facilitating social-emotional learning.

      For Kelsey Wirth, co-founder and chair of Mothers Out Front, the experience of motherhood and the shared concerns for the well-being of children are what unite her with other moms. 

      Whitney Wolf Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble, shared that as a leader in technology and a person who witnessed toxic online spaces, she sees it as her responsibility to spearhead change. 

      During the plenary, “Bringing us Together or Tearing us Apart?” Wolf Herd asked, “What if we could use technology to be a force for positivity?” She shared her vision for equality and respect to be part of the next digital wave. She also called for technology leaders to join her to ensure “guardrails and ground rules” are in place to make sure this goal becomes a reality.

      Social innovation must be intersectional and intergenerational

      During Solve at MIT, industry leaders across sectors, cultures, ages, and expertise banded together to address pressing issues and to form relationships with innovators looking for support in real time.

      Adam Bly, founder and CEO of System Inc., discussed the interconnected nature of all things and why his organization is on a mission to show the links, “We’re seeing rising complexity in the systems that make up life on earth, and it impacts us individually and globally. The way we organize the information and data we need to make decisions about those systems [is highly] siloed and highly fragmented, and it impairs our ability to make decisions in the most systemic, holistic, rational way.”

      President and CEO of the National Resources Defense Council Manish Bapna shared his advocacy for cross-sector work: “Part of what I’ve seen really proliferate and expand in a good way over the past 10 to 15 years are collaborations involving startups in the private sector, governments, and NGOs. No single stakeholder or organization can solve the problem, but by coming together, they bring different perspectives and skills in ways that can create the innovation we need to see.”

      For a long time, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) were seen as the subjects that would resolve our complex issues, but as it turns out, art also holds a tremendous amount of power to transcend identity, borders, status, and concerns, to connect us all and aid us in global unity. Artists Beatie Wolfe, Norhan Bayomi, Aida Murad, and Nneka Jones showed us how to bring healing and awareness to topics like social and environmental injustice through their music, embroidery, and painting.

      The 2023 Solv[ED] Innovators, all age 24 or under, have solutions that are improving communication for individuals with hearing loss, transforming plastic waste into sustainable furniture, and protecting the Black birthing community, among other incredible feats.

      Kami Dar, co-founder and CEO of Uniti Networks, summarizes the value of interconnected problem-solving: “My favorite SDG [sustainable development goal] is SDG number 17— the power of partnership. Look for the adjacent problem-solvers and make sure we are not reinventing the wheel.”

      Relationships and the environment connect us all

      Solve is working to address global challenges on an ongoing basis connected to climate, economic prosperity, health, and learning. Many of these focus areas bleed into one another, but social justice and climate action served as a backdrop for many global issues addressed during Solve at MIT.

      “When we started addressing climate change, we saw it primarily as technical issues to bring down emissions … There’s inequality, there’s poverty, there are social tensions that are rising … We are not going to address climate change without addressing the social tensions that are embedded,” said Lewis Akenji, managing director of the Hot or Cool Institute. Akenji sees food, mobility, and housing as the most impactful areas to focus solutions on first.

      During the “Ensuring a Just Transition to Net Zero” plenary, Heather Clancy, vice president and editorial director at Greenbiz, asked panelists what lessons they have learned from their work. Janelle Knox Hayes, ​​professor of economic geography and planning at MIT, shared that listening to communities, especially front-line and Indigenous communities, is needed before deploying solutions to the energy crisis. “Climate work has this sense of urgency, like it rapidly has to be done … to do really engaged environmental justice work, we have to slow down and realize even before we begin, we need a long period of time to plan. But before we even do that, we have to rebuild relationships and trust and reciprocity … [This] will lead to better and longer-lasting solutions.”

      Hina Baloch, executive director and global head of climate change and sustainability strategy and communication at General Motors, asked Chéri Smith, founder of Indigenous Energy Initiative, to share her perspective on energy sovereignty as it relates to Indigenous communities. Smith shared, “Tribes can’t be sovereign if they’re relying on outside sources for their energy. We were founded to support the self-determination of tribes to revamp their energy systems and rebuild, construct, and maintain them themselves.”

      Smith shared an example of human and tribal-centered innovation in the making. Through the Biden administration’s national electronic vehicle (EV) initiative, Indigenous Energy Initiative and Native Sun Community Power Development will collaborate and create an inter-tribal EV charging network. “The last time we built out an electric grid, it deliberately skipped over tribal country. This time, we want to make sure that we not only have a seat at the table, but that we build out the tables and invite everyone to them,” said Smith.

      Solve at MIT led to meaningful discussions about climate change, intersectional and accessible innovation, and the power that human connection has to unite everyone. Entrepreneurship and social change are the paths forward. And although the challenges ahead of us can be daunting, with community, collaboration, and a healthy dose of bravery, global challenges will continue to be solved by agile impact entrepreneurs all around the world. 

      As Adrianne Haslet, a professional ballroom dancer and Boston Marathon bombing survivor, reminded attendees, “What will get you to the finish line is nothing compared to what got you to the start line.” More

    • 50 Shares109 Views

      in Environment

      Governing for our descendants

      by

      Social scientists worry that too often we think only of ourselves. 

      “There’s been an increasing recognition that over the last few decades the economy and society have become incredibly focused on the individual, to the detriment of our social fabric,” says Lily L. Tsai, the Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT.

      Tsai, who is also the director and founder of the MIT Governance LAB (MIT GOV/LAB) and is the current chair of the MIT faculty, is interested in distributive justice — allocating resources fairly across different groups of people. Typically, that might mean splitting resources between different socioeconomic groups, or between different nations. 

      But in an essay in the journal Dædalus, Tsai discusses policies and institutions that consider the needs of people in the future when determining who deserves what resources. That is, they broaden our concept of a collective society to include people who haven’t been born yet and will bear the brunt of climate change in the future.

      Some groups of people do actually consider the needs of future people when making decisions. For example, Wales has a Future Generations Commissioner who monitors whether the government’s actions compromise the needs of future generations. Norway’s Petroleum Fund invests parts of its oil profits for future generations. And MIT’s endowment “is explicitly charged” with ensuring that future students are just as well-off as current students, Tsai says.

      But in other ways, societies place a lower value on the needs of their descendants. For example, to determine the total return on an investment, governments use something called a discount rate that places more value in the present return on the investment than the future return on the investment. And humans are currently using up the planet’s resources at an unsustainable rate, which in turn is raising global temperatures and making earth less habitable for our children and our children’s children.

      The purpose of Tsai’s essay is not to suggest how, say, governments might set discount rates that more fairly consider future people. “I’m interested in the things that make people care about setting the discount rate lower and therefore valuing the future more,” she says. “What are the moral commitments and the kinds of cultural practices or social institutions that make people care more?”

      Tsai thinks the volatility of the modern world and anxiety about the future — say, the future habitability of the planet — make it harder for people to consider the needs of their descendants. In Tsai’s 2021 book “When People Want Punishment,” she argues that this volatility and anxiety make people seek out more stability and order. “The more uncertain the future is, the less you can be sure that saving for the future is going to be valuable to anybody,” she says. So, part of the solution could be making people feel less unsettled and more stable, which Tsai says can be done with institutions we already have, like social welfare systems.

      She also thinks the rate at which things change in the modern world has hurt our ability to consider the long view. “We no longer think in terms of decades and centuries the way in which we used to,” she says.

      MIT GOV/LAB is working with partners to figure out how to experiment in a lab setting with developing democratic practices or institutions that might better distribute resources between current people and future people. That would allow researchers to assess if structuring interactions or decision-making in a particular way encourages people to save more for future people. 

      Tsai thinks getting people to care about their descendants is a problem researchers can work on, and that humans have a natural inclination to consider the future. People have a desire to be entrusted with things of importance, to leave a legacy, and for conservation. “I think many humans actually naturally conserve things that are valuable and scarce, and there’s a strange way in which society has eroded that human instinct in favor of a culture of consumption,” she says. We need to “re-imagine the kinds of practices that encourage conservation rather than consumption,” she adds. More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Environment

      Envisioning education in a climate-changed world

      by

      What must colleges and universities do differently to help students develop the skills, capacities, and perspectives they’ll need to live, lead, and thrive in a world being remade by the accelerating climate crisis?

      That question was at the heart of a recent convening on MIT’s campus that brought together faculty and staff from more than 30 institutions of higher education. Over two days, attendees delved into the need for higher education to align structurally and philosophically with the changing demands of the coming decades.

      “We all know that there is more to do to educate and to empower today’s students, the young people who rightly feel the threat of climate change most acutely,” said MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles. “They are our future leaders, the generation that will inherit the full weight of the problem and the responsibility for trying to solve it.”

      The MIT Symposium for Advancing Climate Education, held on April 6 and 7, was hosted by MIT’s Climate Education Working Group, one of three working groups established under the Institute’s ambitious Fast Forward climate action plan. The Climate Education Working Group is tasked with finding ways to strengthen climate- and sustainability-related education at the Institute, from curricular offerings to experiential learning opportunities and beyond.

      “We began working as a group about a year ago, and we quickly realized it would be important to expand the conversation across MIT and to colleagues at other institutions who … are thinking broadly,” says Professor David McGee, co-chair of the Climate Education Working Group.

      Co-chair Professor David Hsu encouraged attendees to build lasting relationships, adding, “There is a true wealth of knowledge spread throughout the room. Every university has pieces of the puzzle, but I don’t think we can point to a single one that right now exemplifies all of what we want to achieve.”

      The symposium featured keynotes by Nobles; Kim Cobb, director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society; and Reverend Mariama White-Hammond, founder of the New Roots AME Church in Dorchester, who is also chief of environment, energy, and open space for the City of Boston.

      On the first morning of the event, participants engaged in roundtable discussions, exchanging ideas, successes, and pain points. They also identified and read out close to a dozen unsolved challenges, among them: “How do we meet the fear and anger that students are feeling, and the desire to ‘do’ that students are expressing?” “How do we support people who challenge the status quo?” “As we create these new educational experiences, how do we ensure that a diversity of students can participate in them?” “How do we align tenure and power structures to center communities in the development of this work?” and “How radical a change is MIT willing to make?”

      Kate Trimble, senior associate dean and director of the Office of Experiential Learning, remarked on the thorniness of those questions in closing, wryly adding, “We’ll answer every last one of them before we leave here tomorrow.”

      But in sharing best practices and lessons learned, the tone was overwhelmingly hopeful. Trimble, for example, led a series of discussions highlighting 10 climate education programs already developed at MIT, the University of California at Davis, the University of Michigan, Swarthmore College, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and McGill University, among others. Each offered new models by which to weave climate justice, community partnerships, and cross-disciplinary teaching into classroom-based and experiential learning.

      Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research, opened the symposium on the second day. Invoking the words of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres upon publication of the IPCC’s sixth synthesis report last month, she said, “the global response needs to be ‘everything, everywhere, all at once.’”

      She pointed to a number of MIT research initiatives that are structured to address complex problems, among them the Climate Grand Challenges projects — the proposals for which came from researchers across 90 percent of MIT departments — as well as the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium and the MIT Energy Initiative’s Future Energy Systems Center.

      “These initiatives recognize that no sector, let alone any single institution, can be effective on its own — and so they seek to engage from the outset with other research institutions and with government, industry, and civil society,” Zuber said.

      Cobb, of Brown University, also spoke about the value of sustained action partnerships built on transdisciplinary research and collaborations with community leaders. She highlighted Brown’s participation in the Breathe Providence project and Georgia Tech’s involvement in the Smart Sea Level Sensors project in Savannah.

      Several speakers noted the importance of hands-on learning opportunities for students as a training ground for tackling complex challenges at scale. Students should learn how to build a respectfully collaborative team and how to connect with communities to understand the true nature and constraints of the problem, they said.

      Engineering professor Anne White, who is co-chair of the MIT Climate Nucleus, the faculty committee charged with implementing the Fast Forward plan, and MIT’s associate provost and associate vice president for research administration, moderated a career panel spanning nonprofit and corporate roles.

      The panelists’ experiences emphasized that in a world where no sector will be untouched by the impacts of climate change, every graduate in every field must be informed and ready to engage.

      “Education is training; it’s skills. We want the students to be smart. But what I’m hearing is that it’s not just that,” White reflected. “It’s these other qualities, right? It’s can they be brave … and can they be kind?”

      “Every job is a climate job in this era,” declared MIT graduate student Dyanna Jaye, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement.

      John Fernández, director of the Environmental Solutions Initiative at MIT, moderated a panel on structural change in higher education, speaking with Jim Stock, vice provost for climate and sustainability at Harvard University; Toddi Steelman, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University; and Stephen Porder, assistant provost for sustainability at Brown.

      Steelman (who is also a qualified wildland firefighter — a useful skill for a dean, she noted) described a popular course at Duke called “Let’s Talk About Climate Change” that is jointly taught by a biogeochemist and a theologian. The course enrolled around 150 students in the fall who met for contemplative breakout discussions. “Unless we talk about our hearts and our minds,” she said, “we’re not going to make progress.”

      White-Hammond highlighted one trait she believes today’s students already have in abundance.

      “They’re willing to say that the status quo is unacceptable, and that is an important part of being courageous in the face of this climate crisis,” she said. She urged institutions to take that cue.

      “If we have to remake the world, rebuild it on something radically different. Why would we bake in racial injustice again? Why would we say, let’s have an equally unequal economic system that just doesn’t burn as many fossil fuels? I think we have an opportunity to go big.”

      “That,” she added, “is the work I believe higher education should be taking on, and not from an ivory tower, but rooted in real communities.”

      The MIT Symposium for Advancing Climate Education was part of Earth Month at MIT, a series of climate and sustainability events on campus in April. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Energy

      Asegun Henry wins National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award

      by

      The National Science Foundation (NSF) today named Asegun Henry, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, as a 2023 recipient of its Alan T. Waterman Award. This award is the NSF’s highest honor for early-career researchers and provides funding for research in any science or engineering field. 

      This is the second year NSF has chosen to honor three researchers with the award. Henry is the sixth faculty member from MIT to receive this honor in its 47-year history, and is only the second mechanical engineer to ever win the award. In addition to a medal, Henry and his fellow awardees, Natalie S. King of Georgia State University and William Anderegg from the University of Utah, will each receive $1 million over five years for research in their chosen field of science.

      “I am thrilled to congratulate this year’s Waterman awardees, three outstanding scientists who are courageously tackling some of the most challenging societal problems through their ingenuity and innovative mindset,” says NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “Their pioneering accomplishments are precisely what the Waterman Award was created to recognize, and I look forward to their tremendous contributions in the future.”

      NSF recognizes Henry as an international thermal science and engineering leader. Henry has made breakthrough advances in nanoscale heat transfer and high-temperature energy systems. He directs the Atomistic Simulation and Energy (ASE) Research Group at MIT, focusing on heat transfer at the atomic level. He also works on developing technologies that can help mitigate climate change, addressing many problems from the atomic to the gigawatt scale.

      Henry and colleagues have led the development of several technological breakthroughs, setting a world record for the highest-temperature pump, using an all-ceramic mechanical pump to move liquid metal above 1,400 degrees Celsius, as well as the world record for thermophotovoltaic efficiency.

      “It has been challenging to push the field towards acceptance of new ideas, and it has been a path fraught with resistance and questioning of the validity of our results,” says Henry. “Receiving this award is vindicating and will impact my career greatly as it helps validate that the advances we’ve pioneered really do register as major contributions, and I pride myself on the impact of my work.”

      The Waterman Award will be presented to Henry at a ceremony held in Washington on May 9 during the National Science Board meeting.  More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Energy

      Robert Armstrong: A lifetime at the forefront of chemical engineering research and education

      by

      Robert C. Armstrong, the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering who has been the director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) since 2013 and part of MITEI’s leadership team since its inception in 2007, has announced that he will retire effective June 30. At that time he will have completed 50 years on the MIT faculty.  

      Armstrong plans to continue to work at 10 percent capacity, focusing on research projects on which he serves as principal investigator and also advising a number of graduate students.

      “Working at MIT has been a great honor and privilege for me,” says Armstrong. “Nowhere else can I imagine having had the opportunity to work with such exceptional students and colleagues and to have a ‘job’ that makes me want to get up every day to see what I can do to help humanity with its great challenges.”

      Armstrong joined the founding MITEI leadership team with Ernest Moniz, now the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems emeritus and special advisor to the MIT president. When Moniz left MIT in 2013 to become U.S. secretary of energy, Armstrong was named MITEI director.

      “MITEI has enabled us to leverage MIT’s great talent base to make significant advances in energy research, education, and outreach,” says Armstrong. “This is an incredibly important and exciting time in energy, and there is much to be done in envisioning and implementing an energy transition that mitigates the worst impacts of climate change, provides energy justly and equitably to those around the world without access or with inadequate access, and improves security of energy supply. I have been honored to do this work with amazing colleagues at MITEI and throughout MIT, and I will be cheering that team on, as it races to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.”

      MIT Vice President for Research Maria Zuber will form a search committee to select the new MITEI director. Zuber has worked closely with Armstrong since she became vice president for research in 2012.

      “Anyone who knows Bob knows that he is soft-spoken, but a person of deep conviction,” says Zuber. “He is a master of complexity, an admired educator, a respected leader, and a terrific colleague. During his decade as director, Bob has focused the MIT Energy Initiative on the urgent, daunting challenge of transforming the global energy system to respond to the climate crisis. In the last couple of years, Bob led the creation of MITEI’s Future Energy Systems Center, reflecting his keen understanding that an effective climate response requires integrated analysis and a systems approach — there is no one-fix-all solution. I congratulate Bob on a remarkable career, and I thank him for his half-century of dedicated service to MIT.”

      Armstrong joined the MIT faculty in 1973 after earning his doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A native of Louisiana, he earned his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from Georgia Tech. He served as chair of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering from 1996 until joining MITEI in 2007. 

      “In his 50 years at MIT, Bob has been a truly dedicated educator, researcher, and leader in our department, the Institute, and the field of chemical engineering,” says Paula T. Hammond, Institute professor and the head of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering — a successor to Armstrong in that role. “During his time as head, he expertly expanded the breadth and depth of the department’s research and academics while maintaining its high level of excellence. He has served as a thoughtful and proactive mentor to so many of our faculty members, as well as a dedicated teacher and advocate for modernizing chemical engineering curriculum. We are extremely fortunate to have profited from his scholarship and leadership over the past several decades and will continue to benefit thanks to his vision and work toward the future of chemical engineering and energy.”

      In 2008, Armstrong was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering, based on his research into non-Newtonian fluid mechanics, his leadership in chemical engineering education, and his co-authoring of influential chemical engineering textbooks. He became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

      He received the 2006 Bingham Medal from The Society of Rheology, which is devoted to the study of the science of deformation and flow of matter, as well as the Founders Award (2020), the Warren K. Lewis Award (2006), and the Professional Progress Award (1992), all from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. More