SUSTAINABILITY - Key Persons
Brian joined the Office of Sustainability to help develop and demonstrate solutions for how the campus can become resilient and adapted to a changing climate. Brian is also responsible for helping MIT design waste out of our systems by testing and scaling solutions that impact supply chains, campus consumption and waste system behaviors and processes.
Job Titles:
- Adaptation Planning Researcher
Climate Resiliency and Adaptation Planning Researcher Cheng is currently a candidate at MIT pursuing a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism (SMArchS Urbanism). With four years of experience as an architectural project manager, Cheng has a strong design background and has collaborated with various professional groups on several design projects. At MIT, Cheng focuses on design research in urbanism and sustainability through data science and visualization. Currently, Cheng is developing tools and methods to support department-level planning and action on resiliency and adaptation at MITOS.
Dawn joined the office to enhance MIT's culture of reuse, strengthen and amplify MIT's efforts to design waste out of MIT's procurement systems and institutional operations, and facilitate the highest and best use of recyclable materials. Launching from a strong foundation of MIT waste studies and successful design-out-waste practices, she accomplishes her work by partnering across MIT to identify opportunities for improvement, co-creating solutions, and on long-term planning to meet MIT's waste impact climate commitments.
Ellie joined the office to advance school and department level climate action called for by MIT's Fast Forward: Plan for Climate Action for the Decade. In her role, she engages in a collaborative solution design process with students, staff and faculty across MIT Departments, Labs, and Centers.
With a strong emphasis on data, Ellie leads the design and implementation of related data management, strategic planning, and analyses needed to develop the departmental level Sustainability and Climate Action plans.
Prior to MIT, Ellie worked as a geologist and project manager for the global sustainability consultancy ERM, where she focused on characterizing and remediating complex contaminated sites. Ellie currently serves as chair of her local Wetlands Protection Committee. She holds a M.A. in Earth and Environmental Sciences from Columbia University and a B.S. in Interdisciplinary Physics and Earth Systems Science from the University of Michigan.
Job Titles:
- Climate Action Sustainability Researcher
Ippolyti is a graduate student in the MIT Mechanical Engineering department whose research aims at understanding and preventing the uneven flow that occurs when rain infiltrates hydrophobic soils vertically. Such uneven flow impedes water retention, optimal filtering of chemicals and can trigger catastrophic landslides. Outside of the lab, she is involved in environmental initiatives across the MIT campus, through the MIT Water Club, GSC Sustain and the MIT Office of Sustainability. Having joined MITOS in summer 2021, Ippolyti performs energy modeling and cost-benefit analyses to provide recommendations for emissions reduction in lab spaces at MIT.
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- MITOS Faculty Fellow
- Research Scientist in the Department of Civil and Environmental
Jeremy Gregory is a research scientist in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Executive Director of the Concrete Sustainability Hub at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studies the economic and environmental implications of engineering and system design decisions, particularly in the area of materials production and recovery systems.
Gregory's research topics include product and firm environmental footprinting, manufacturing and life cycle cost analysis, and characterization of sustainable material systems. Jeremy has applied these methods, often with industry partners, to a range of different products and industries including pavements, buildings, automobiles, electronics, consumer goods, and waste treatment and recovery. He received his PhD and MS from MIT and BS from Montana State University-Bozeman, all in mechanical engineering.
As a MITOS Faculty Fellow, Gregory is leading an effort to quantify MIT's Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions, which encompasses activities including MIT's purchased goods and services, capital equipment, building construction, business travel, employee commuting, and waste. He is also involved in efforts to quantify the potential for emissions reductions from actions such as improving building energy efficiency through machine learning algorithms, reducing contamination in the recycling stream through behavioral science-informed interventions, and lowering air travel emissions through carbon offsets.
Job Titles:
- Climate Change Data Analyst
Jie is a candidate pursuing the Master of Science in Architecture Studies and Urbanism program at MIT. Her current focus lies in the realm of urban data, where we can push the boundaries of urban development by leveraging data insights to create spaces that resonate with people. Algorithms such as machine learning and artificial intelligence can be adapted to explore urban patterns and envision a future that prioritizes inclusivity and sustainability. Meanwhile, this topic extends beyond technology, encompassing perspectives of anthropology and sociology. She joined MITOS in the summer of 2023, supporting the data analysis of Scope 3.
Julie joined MIT as the Institute's first Director of Sustainability to found the Office of Sustainability and build a platform both unique to MIT yet with the intention of advancing the field at large. With this in mind, Julie launched MIT's sustainability platform grounded in a methodology to leverage the role of the campus to solve for sustainability and a changing climate across multiple scales - at the levels of the individual, the campus, the city, the state, the country and the globe.
Julie is a pioneer in the field of campus sustainability and has worked for twenty-five years at a combination of public and private, and rural and urban campuses alike. In her work she has demonstrated that the actions and infrastructure of our campuses are integral to advancing and fulfilling the educational mission of Higher Education. She brings a systems thinking perspective to all of her work and seeks to build bridges between operational and academic partners alike to inform both her understanding of the challenges at hand and to develop solutions. Her prior research which she now applies, focused on the intersection between decision-making processes and organizational behavior in institutionalizing sustainability into higher education.
Prior to MIT, Julie was the founding Director of the Office of Sustainability for Yale University where she also held a lecturer appointment with the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Julie came to Yale from the University of New Hampshire, Office of Sustainability Programs (OSP) where she assisted with the development of the program since its inception. As the field of campus sustainability took route, Julie was determined to bring the northeast pioneers together with the understanding that as colleagues we do our best work when we challenge each other's thinking. With this in mind, Julie co-founded the Northeast Campus Sustainability Consortium, to advance education and action for sustainable development on university campuses in the northeast and maritime region.
Julie is also a Lecturer in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at MIT. She lectures and consults for universities both nationally and internationally, participates on a variety of boards and advisory committees and has contributed to a series of edited books and peer reviewed journals. Julie holds a BS in Natural Resource Policy and Management from the University of Michigan; an MS in Environmental Policy and Biology from Tufts University; and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources and Environmental Studies from the University of New Hampshire.
Newman, J.; Rauch, J. (2009). Defining sustainability metric targets in an institutional setting. International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education. v. 10. n.2., 107 - 116.
Job Titles:
- Climate Action Researcher
Katya is a PhD student at the "Concrete Sustainability Hub" at the department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Her passion lies in structural resiliency of the city scape to flood related natural disasters. Joining MIT office of sustainability in September of 2020 as a climate resiliency modeler and simulator, she is working on developing an improved method to assess, predict and mitigate storm and flood induced hazards. Her research project matches her work at MITOS, combining the projects she is using MIT campus as a test bed in her research work, trying to assess and mitigate natural disaster hazards as well as impacts of climate change on the severity of damages.
Kenneth Strzepek has spent 30 years as a researcher and practitioner at the nexus of engineering, environmental and economics systems, primarily related to water resource planning and management, river basin planning, and modeling of agricultural, environmental, and water resources systems. His work includes applications of operations research, engineering economics, micro-economics and environmental economics to a broad range applications: from project scale to national and global investment policy studies.
Strzepek has worked for a range of national governments as well as the United Nations, the World Bank, the USAID. He is Professor Emeritus of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and recently a Visiting Professor of Economics and Affiliated Professor in College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute as well as an International Fellow at the Center for Environmental Economics and Policy for Africa and Examiner in the Department of Agricultural Economics at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has been an contributing author to the Second IPCC assessement, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the World Water Vision, and the UN World Water Development Report. He is currently the USAID Scientific Liaison Office on Water and Climate Change to the CGIAR. Prof. Strzepek has a PhD in Water Resources Systems Analysis from MIT, an MA in Economics from the University of Colorado and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of Hamburg, Germany.
Leela is a post-doctoral researcher working jointly with MITOS and MIT's Climate and Sustainability Consortium. Her research focuses on characterizing decarbonization pathways and net-zero targets and identifying common bottlenecks to achieving net-zero across both higher education and industry.
Leela's work includes reviewing literature, conducting interviews with stakeholders, analyzing relevant sources of data and keeping up to date with various GHG accounting standards including Science Based Targets.
Prior to MIT, Leela graduated from UC Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Education in Maths, Science and technology, where she worked with Prof. Michael Ranney on a variety of projects that involved changing acceptance, beliefs, and emotions regarding climate change. During her Ph.D. she was also a UCOP Carbon Neutrality Graduate Student Fellow and worked at UC Berkeley's Office of Sustainability on a variety of initiatives including managing the 2018-2021 campus greenhouse gas emissions inventory and helping to design and launch a business air travel mitigation pilot program for the campus. She has a combined Bachelors and Masters degree in chemistry from the University of Oxford (UK).
Job Titles:
- Environmental Justice Researcher
Manasa is working as an Environmental Justice Researcher at MIT's Office of Sustainability this summer. She recently graduated with a Master's in Urban Planning from Harvard University, with a concentration in Sustainable Transportation and Infrastructure. She has previously worked with governments, donors, non-profit organizations, social enterprises, and grassroots actors on issues across sustainable development, digital service delivery, education, and urban planning. Manasa is passionate about leveraging her multidisciplinary background in systems thinking, human-centred design, and governance transformation to address issues of sustainable infrastructure development and social equity.
Miho Mazereeuw is an architect and landscape, associate professor of architecture and urbanism, and director of the Urban Risk Lab. Much of her work and research focuses on disaster resilience.
Job Titles:
- Design Out Waste Researcher
Nathan Kim is a current MIT undergraduate sophomore interested in studying mechanical engineering, business/entrepreneurship, and design. He is working at the Design out Waste Researcher this summer. At MIT, he is involved in the UA Sustainability Committee, Waste Watchers Dorm Lead, and Ring Committee. Outside of school, he enjoys finding new restaurants with friends, taking pictures, and going on nature adventures (hiking, boat rides, beach trips, etc).
Nicole joined the office with a goal of engaging the campus community in sustainability efforts across MIT. In her role, she works closely with MITOS project managers and staff across the Institute to communicate programs, initiatives, and news in support of MIT's work in responding to the challenges of a changing planet.
Job Titles:
- Senior Administrative Assistant
- Co - Chair for the MIT Working Green Committee
Rebecca is responsible for providing administrative support to the Director and all project managers in the Office of Sustainability. She is the office manager, human resources administrator, accountant, and event planner. She works closely with the Director on managing priorities and team wellbeing.
Rebecca is a co-chair for the MIT Working Green Committee, a group that promotes sustainability among staff members on campus, and manages and runs Choose to Reuse. Rebecca has a M.Sc. In Environmental Social Science from the University of Kent and a B.A. In Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Job Titles:
- Project Manager
- Environmental Planner
Steve helped establish the Office of Sustainability in 2013. Prior to this, Steve was leading campus sustainability efforts as Deputy Director within the MIT Environmental Programs Office.
With a focus on climate and energy work, Steve works to develop, promote, and coordinate programs to advance the Institute's commitment to sustainable practices, while integrating campus-focused research and learning opportunities with MIT's faculty, students, and the broader community. Steve serves on several advisory and working committees serving the Institute, the Cities of Cambridge and Boston, and his hometown of Winchester.
Before joining MIT, Steve worked in a variety of environmental research and planning capacities in management consulting, technical consulting, and non-profit policy research, including the World Resources Institute, United Nations Development Programme, World Bank, and Arthur Andersen.
Steve is an environmental planner by training with over 20 years experience in environmental policy development and program implementation. He holds a Bachelors degree in international economic development from Brown University, and a Masters degree in environmental policy and planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Recent projects: Implementing MIT's net-zero emissions by 2026 climate action plans, developing MIT's greenhouse gas inventory, enhancing our DataPool visualizations
Job Titles:
- Senior Sustainability Project Manager
Susy joined the team to help implement the strategic framework for the Office during its launch in 2013, convening staff, students, and faculty from across the Institute around topics ranging from low-carbon commuting to organizational change. She is currently working to advance sustainable and accessible food systems and environmental justice on campus.