MIT Climate Nucleus
Committee Meeting
Monday, January 23, 2023
Held Virtually and In-Person
MINUTES
MIT Symposium for Advancing Climate Education – April 2023
The Nucleus heard from the co-chairs of the Climate Education Working Group, David Hsu and David McGee, about the upcoming MIT Symposium for Advancing Climate Education, which will take place on April 6th and 7th. The working group, having discussed issues surrounding the future of climate education since it began meeting, is organizing the symposium to socialize its ideas, learn from others, and build enthusiasm for the topic at MIT. The working group also hopes to learn from the successes and challenges of other institutions of higher education that are working to expand climate education offerings and experiences across their campuses.
Hsu and McGee presented a list of draft session topics for the two-day April event. The session topics ranged from core competencies related to climate education to career services in the sustainability and climate field to responding to climate anxiety among students to, finally, incorporating climate justice discussions into all aspects of the future of climate education. The Nucleus members provided feedback on structure, format, and content of the potential sessions. The Education Working Group co-chairs will take this feedback to the working group members and finalize the agenda for the event.
Faculty Ignition Grants
The Climate Nucleus co-chairs outlined a proposal for a new mid-career faculty ignition grant program to meet the commitment in the Fast Forward plan: “MIT will establish a new mid-career ignition grant for faculty working in fields related to climate change and clean energy, or who wish to transition their research efforts to contribute in this area.”
The proposal is to provide grants for MIT faculty members, one from each of the five schools and one from the College of Computing. The focus of this program is to enable faculty to forge new climate and sustainability connections across the Institute and to help embed climate everywhere. It will encourage faculty to work together on these issues. It also allows faculty to explore any climate-related interests with an open-ended, flexible funding opportunity.
The faculty will join a cohort, aimed at providing climate leadership and development programming for them throughout the year. Additionally, the proposal recommends providing faculty with funding for a climate fellow.
The Nucleus discussed potential budget scenarios for the program, depending on the availability of funds. One aspect of the program also encourages cost-sharing of the grants with the faculty members’ schools/College or and DLCs.
Nucleus members provided feedback on the program, mainly in how faculty value free time versus additional funding opportunities. Others offered insights into how the Nucleus could structure the funding to enable teaching new climate-related subject matter.
The Nucleus will continue to finalize the details of the program and provide an update on funding and structure of the grants.
