Dear CEE Community and Friends,

For Earth Month, we are excited to announce a new undergraduate major - the Course 1–12 Climate System Science and Engineering SB degree jointly offered with our colleagues in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). You can learn more about why we initiated this new degree program in our MIT News article below. In other exciting news, MIT President Sally Kornbluth sits down with Prof. Desirée Plata as her first guest in a new podcast series, Curiosity Unbounded. This year’s TREX class incorporates new fieldwork focused on researching effects of climate change in Hawaii. Congratulations to Assistant Prof. Cathy Wu for receiving the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, and PhD student Jie Yun for receiving the J-WAFS Fellowship award.

Also in this issue, a team of researchers including Professors Admir Masic and Franz-Josef Ulm developed a new process for manufacturing concrete that can absorb up to 15% of the Carbon made in the process. Prof. Otto Cordero and colleagues have created an algorithm that can help predict ecosystem function in soils, oceans, and gut microbiomes, and a new study from Prof. Tami Lieberman reveals how a microbe that invades patches of skin affected by eczema can rapidly evolve.

Our profiles this month highlight Assistant Prof. Haruko Wainwright, who aims to help citizens make informed decisions about the environment, and undergraduate, Runako Gentiles, who seeks to lead projects that increase harmony between society and the environment. Lastly, we share a recording of the C.C. Mei Distinguished Speaker Series with Prof. Paulo Monteiro.

Sincerely,

Ali Jadbabaie

JR East Professor

Department Head, MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering

Core Faculty, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Department Heads Ali Jadbabaie of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Robert van der Hilst of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences discuss how the new joint Course 1-12 degree program is designed to train the next generation of climate leaders, providing a foundational understanding of both the Earth system and engineering principles — as well as an understanding of human and institutional behavior as it relates to the climate challenge.

Fieldwork class examines signs of climate change in Hawaii

MIT students researched effects of climate change on forests and sulfur dioxide emissions as a model for planet-wide events as part of Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences (TREX) 2023.

Podcast: Curiosity Unbounded, Episode 1 — How a free-range kid from Maine is helping green-up industrial practices

President Sally Kornbluth talks with Associate Professor Desirée Plata about her research — and what she wishes students knew about their professors.

Cathy Wu receives Faculty Early Career Development Award

Prof. Cathy Wu has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant will support her project "Learning for Generalization in Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems.” These systems can unlock transformative societal benefits across broad economic sectors and promise to contribute to the most pressing challenge of the century—climate change.

PhD student honored for her work to solve critical issues in water and food

PhD student Jie Yun received a J-WAFS Fellowship for Water and Food Solutions, which is funded by the J-WAFS Research Affiliate Program. Yun’s research includes studying plant response to drought stress in the hopes of improving agricultural sustainability and yield under climate change.

Concrete production accounts for 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. New research from Professors Admir Masic and Franz-Josef Ulm, postdoc Damian Stefaniuk, PhD student Marcin Hajduczek, and James Weaver from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute reveals new carbonation pathways for creating more environmentally friendly concrete.

Scientists track evolution of microbes on the skin’s surface

New findings from Prof. Tami Lieberman and colleagues reveal how Staphylococcus aureus, a microbe that invades patches of skin affected by eczema, can rapidly evolve within a single person’s microbiome.

Identifying microbial guilds on the basis of ecological patterns

From the Cordero lab, postdoc Rachel Gregor presents a new machine learning algorithm that coarse-grains the complex structure of microbial ecosystems by extracting groups of functionally coherent species from ecological patterns. In this work, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, Prof. Cordero and colleagues showed that their algorithm can help predict ecosystem function in soils, oceans, and gut microbiomes.

Helping the cause of environmental resilience

As part of her research, Assistant Professor of Nuclear Science and Civil and Environmental Engineering, Haruko Wainwright, is working on a machine learning framework for improving environmental monitoring strategies to help citizens make informed decisions about their energy and environment.

Engineering for social impact

Influenced by his desire to make meaningful contributions to society, CEE junior Runako Gentles seeks to lead environmental engineering projects with a profound social impact. “While growing up, I was encouraged to live a life that could potentially bring about major positive changes in my family and many other people’s lives,” he says.

C.C. Mei Distinguished Speaker Series: Prof. Paulo Monteiro

Speaker Paulo Monteiro, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, gave a talk on “Synchrotron X-ray probes to study the multiscale structure of concrete.”

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Civil 

and Environmental Engineering

77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 1-290 Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 

(617) 253-7101

CEE.MIT.EDU