Laur
Hesse Fisher

Laur Hesse Fisher works at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative to expand MIT's public engagement on climate change. The MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) is MIT’s institute-wide and primary effort to enlist and mobilize the substantial scientific, engineering, policy, and design capacity of the MIT community to contribute to addressing climate change and other environmental challenges. Read more at https://esi.mit.edu Throughout her career, Laur has focused on building robust and self-sustaining projects and initiatives related to climate change and community engagement. She has worked for public, private and non-government organizations in the US, Sweden, New Zealand, and Canada; and has experience in a wide range of fields, including carbon reporting, green building, waste management, issue literacy, communications, and collective intelligence. Before joining the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, Laur spent five years at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence leading Climate CoLab, an online community and contest platform where over 100,000 people work with experts and each other to develop proposals on how to address climate change. She also founded and leads Civic Series (www.civicseries.org), an international non-partisan, volunteer-run organization that helps people in their 20s and 30s understand, think for themselves, and have meaningful conversations about the most important issues of our time. Laur holds a self-designed Bachelor’s degree from Tufts University titled, “Engaging Sustainability as an Innovative Process.” When she’s not working on ESI and Civic Series, you’ll find Laur hiking a mountain somewhere, restoring a circa 1903 home in Philadelphia with her husband Shawn, and fulfilling a lifelong dream of learning piano.