MIT Climate Nucleus
Committee Meeting
Monday, November 29, 2021
Held Virtually
MINUTES
The meeting began with an update from the co-chairs on the formation of the climate working groups on education, policy, and the campus carbon footprint. The co-chairs put out a call for expressions of interest to the MIT community (faculty, staff, postdocs, and students) on November 24. The co-chairs asked the Nucleus members to help circulate this call as widely as possible. The next step is for the co-chairs to provide preliminary recommendations for the working group memberships to the Climate Steering Committee in December.
Issues raised by members
Before moving to the meeting agenda, the co-chairs asked if members had any issues they wanted to raise. There were two:
- One member pointed out that the Fast Forward plan contains a number of action items in MITIMCo’s purview, and asked if there was a point person at MITIMCo to liaise with the Nucleus and/or serve on the carbon footprint working group.
- One member noted that there were active discussions and proposal across the Institute related to climate education, including new courses, minors, and majors, and asked how the Nucleus ought to engage. There was a discussion about the climate education working group taking on this issue once the group is stood up, and then working with the Nucleus on it.
Innovation
The first agenda item focused on innovation. This part of the meeting began with a brief review of the innovation pillar of the Fast Forward plan, which includes the Climate Grand Challenges; the Climate and Sustainability Consortium; the Future Energy Systems Center; the commitment to devote 20 upcoming faculty appointments to climate- and sustainability-focused talent; faculty mid-career ignition grants; and new fellowships.
The questions put to the Nucleus members were: how the Nucleus itself ought to take on the innovation components of the plan, and whether it would make sense to establish an innovation-focused working group.
Meaning of innovation
One member noted the difference between innovation and invention, and said that to achieve climate goals, it is essential to adopt and scale-up solutions that already exist. The Nucleus member pointed out that solutions that still need to be invented will not be ready in time to reach the scale needed to help cut emissions in half by 2030 and reduce them to net zero by 2050. With this in mind, the member suggested that care should be given to the placement of the 100 new fellows called for in the Fast Forward plan – that there should be a balance between fellows working on basic science and fellows (in schools and DLCs like Sloan and political science) working on scaling-up existing solutions.
Another member noted that the Fast Forward plan commits to deepening MIT’s human capital in both technological and policy advances, and that the Nucleus can help play a role in clarifying the proper balance between them. Another member suggested that inventions in this decade could be deployed at a large scale by 2050.
Faculty hiring
The Nucleus members engaged in an extended discussion about the following action item in the innovation pillar of the Fast Forward plan: “Through coordinated, strategic hiring across all five schools and the college, MIT will devote at least 20 upcoming faculty openings to climate- and sustainability-focused talent over the next five years.” Given that faculty hiring occurs primarily at the school level, there was extended discussion about how the Nucleus could play a role in fostering inter-school coordination and strategic hiring.
One member pointed to a recent faculty search committee (for a search for a faculty member in electric power systems) that had representatives from Sloan, Engineering, and Architecture and Planning, as an example of how this cross-school coordination could happen. Others pointed to shared appointments with the Schwarzman College.
One member pointed out the fact that departments seek to retain their distribution of faculty slots, so that if the 20 hires envisioned in the Fast Forward plan are replacement hires (not new hires), it would be difficult to get departments to give up appointments or share them with other departments.
One member suggested that the Nucleus should also discuss ideas for climate-specific onboarding of new hires to help them succeed.
Faculty promotions and tenure
Nucleus members discussed at some length the idea that, in terms of research, junior faculty members should be evaluated based not just on their academic impact, but on their real-world impact, while maintaining the highest standard of excellence.
One member suggested that we should be thinking about what MIT looked like during the second World War, when the focus was on real-world applications rather than publications. One member said that, given the urgency of the climate problem, there is not enough time to advise new faculty hires to focus their time on solely academic impact, and then pivot to a focus on real-world impact after receiving tenure.
One member noted that excellence is already considered broadly in many disciplines, and that real-world impact is an important factor. In response, another member said more progress could be made in this direction in certain disciplines, and that universities have a societal imperative to do much better than they have done historically.
One member noted that the Nucleus should keep senior faculty members in mind, as well, since they may be interested to start a new chapter in their careers. The mid-career grants were briefly mentioned as one way to support these faculty members.
Other points related to innovation
There was a brief discussion about teaching innovation, including the importance of teaching ethical frameworks for innovation.
There was discussion that the Nucleus should itself act as the working group on innovation, given that the Nucleus already includes members who represent key components of the innovation pillar of the Fast Forward plan. Other members expressed support for this approach.
One Nucleus member pointed out that there is no working group on research, in spite of the fact that research is the majority of the work performed at MIT and expected of all the faculty, and suggested that a working group on research could coordinate different groups and provide advice on new opportunities.
Lincoln Laboratory
The Nucleus then discussed how the Lincoln Laboratory might be engaged in the implementation of the Fast Forward plan. This portion of the meeting included a discussion of whether the Nucleus should make a recommendation to the Climate Steering Committee that it appoint a representative of the Lincoln Laboratory to the Nucleus, as well as Lincoln Lab representation on the climate working groups. Other specific issues raised in this discussion included:
- Whether Lincoln Lab emissions should be accounted for in MIT’s greenhouse gas inventory
- The role of Lincoln Lab in providing a testbed to help new climate solutions move quickly to the demonstration stage and beyond, including energy storage technologies
During the conversation, individual members of the Nucleus expressed the following viewpoints: that Lincoln Lab brings “a lot to the table” in terms of its research capabilities; that the relationship between campus and Lincoln Lab, broadly speaking, could be stronger, and that climate efforts offer one way to strengthen it; and that there are collaborations between researchers at Lincoln Lab and researchers on campus on climate topics, such as CREWSNET. Several members of the Nucleus expressed the opinion that Lincoln Lab should have a representative on the Nucleus.
Finally, one member raised a question about how the MIT-WHOI Joint Program should be represented on the Nucleus and/or working groups. One member suggested inviting a representative from MIT-WHOI to join the education working group.
Next steps
- The co-chairs intend to synthesize members’ ideas and suggestions for faculty searches and research existing plans and practices, and then put the issue back on the agenda for further discussion at a Nucleus meeting in early 2022. The goal is to determine what truly “coordinated and strategic” hiring would look like.
- The co-chairs agreed to make “innovation” a standing agenda item at future Nucleus meetings, reflecting the idea that the Nucleus will serve as the innovation working group.
- The co-chairs again urged the Nucleus members to circulate the call for expressions of interest in the climate working groups.
