New fund makes MIT a living sustainability lab
The MIT Office of Sustainability (MITOS) has announced the recipients of the first-ever Campus Sustainability Incubator Fund, with $200,000 awarded between four multi-departmental projects, all of which use the MIT campus as a test bed for research in sustainable operations, management, and design. The four project teams are lead by Kripa Varanasi of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Randy Kirchain and Jeremy Gregory of the Concrete Sustainability Hub, Lisa Anderson of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Danielle Dahan of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. “The seed funds will enable researchers to explore the physical facility and social context in which they are working, living and learning,” says Julie Newman, MITOS director and convener of the fund’s Advisory Committee. Newman calls the MIT campus a “rich environment for creating and testing sustainability solutions” at both the individual and building level to ensure they work at a city and global scale. The...