Sustainability Leadership Steering Committee

Advancing sustainability at MIT

In 2015, Provost Martin Schmidt and Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz convened the Campus Sustainability Task Force. In 2018, the Task Force drafted the Pathway to Sustainability Leadership by MIT, a vision and comprehensive framework for MIT’s commitment to campus sustainability.

The Task Force sponsored a community forum in June 2018 to generate input into how to implement this vision successfully. After taking this input into consideration, MIT announced the next phase of this process, endorsing the following conditions of success and establishing a new Steering Committee.

Conditions for Success

1. Oversight: Position the MIT Office of Sustainability to provide institutional guidance and strategy to ensure the implementation of the Pathways to Sustainability Leadership commitments.

2. Governance: Launched a Sustainability Leadership Steering Committee of faculty and staff to begin their work in early 2019. That group will be led by Campus Sustainability Task Force co-chairs Andrea Campbell and Julie Newman to support implementation by making recommendations, reviewing progress, and determining priorities as sustainability benchmarks are set and achieved.

3. Availability of and Access to Data: The Office of Sustainability will continue to work with the MIT community to expand the Sustainability Data Pool, which hosts MIT-specific data and is accessible to all members of the MIT community, to catalyze sustainability decision making and research.

4. Visibility: Design and launch an MIT Sustainability communication and visibility campaign to enable all members of the community, as well as campus visitors and MIT alumni, to gain a deeper understanding of our goals and successes.

Sustainability Leadership Steering Committee

Tolga Durak | Managing Director, Environment, Health and Safety Programs

John Fernández | Director, Environmental Solutions Initiative; Professor of Building Technology, Department of Architecture

Sarah Gallop | Co-Director, Office of Government and Community Relations

Timothy Gutowski | Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Mark Hayes | Director of Campus Dining

Joe Higgins | Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship, Office of the Executive Vice President and Treasurer

Valerie Karplus | Assistant Professor of Global Economics and Management, Sloan School of Management

Janelle Knox-Hayes | Associate Professor of Economic Geography and Planning, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

John Lienhard | Director, Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab; Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water Mechanical and Engineering

Maureen McCaffrey | Director, Real Estate, MIT Investment Management Company

David McGee | Director, Terrascope; Associate Professor of Paleoclimate, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (Co-Chair)

Julie Newman | Director, Office of Sustainability; Lecturer, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (Co-Chair)

Kate Trimble | Senior Associate Dean and Director, Office of Experiential Learning

Pathway to Sustainability Leadership by MIT: Incubation, Transformation, and Mobilization

Read Report Here