In their work to make the MIT campus a replicable model for environmental sustainability, the MIT Office of Sustainability bridges the operational and academic sides of the Institute with programs like the donor-supported Campus Sustainability Incubator Fund.
The MIT Office of Sustainability (MITOS) was formed in 2013 with a mission to transform MIT into a replicable model for responding to the unprecedented challenges of a changing planet. Director Julie Newman, PhD, who founded a similar office at Yale University before coming to MIT to launch MITOS, and her team pursue opportunities to make MIT a role model for the world on how an organization prepares and responds to a changing climate.
In that role, she always has questions running through her head: What is the role of geothermal energy in decarbonizing the campus? How do we evolve old infrastructure with minimal disruption? What are the investments that lead to greater efficiency and cost reductions?
More often than not, an email arrives from a professor: “We think we’ve solved recycling sorting—how can we test this on campus?” As a bridge from the administrative side of MIT to the academic and a catalyzer of climate and sustainability work on campus, MITOS frequently receives requests like this from faculty and students alike. The MITOS team, in partnership with members of MIT’s Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship team, researches and advises on new campus measures like adding solar panels, optimizing new construction projects for climate resilience, and maintaining the Sustainability DataPool, a signature tool that makes building and sustainability data accessible for the MIT community to use in their research. At the same time, MITOS is connecting students, professors, and researchers to opportunities that use MIT as a test bed for accelerating new technologies and approaches to sustainability.
“Even if we think a question has been answered about topics like decarbonization or waste reduction, those questions can still be fresh to a student,” Newman says. “MITOS presents a well of opportunity for students, from engineers to entrepreneurs, to take a look at real-time issues with real data in an educational environment.”
That approach has resonated with the MIT community and far beyond. When Cyndi Peterson, a retired educator living in Mountain Home, Arkansas, learned about MITOS through an internet search, she established a charitable remainder unitrust (CRUT) through the MIT Office of Gift Planning to support their work. “I appreciate the ways in which MITOS allows students and researchers who have a strong affinity for environmental issues to build their strengths at the Institute,” she says. “I’m a big believer in the butterfly effect, and I hope to help build their wings.”
A living laboratory
Peterson’s gift will help support the Campus Sustainability Incubator Fund, which has provided seed funds to enable teams of students, faculty, and researchers to use the MIT campus as a test bed for research in sustainable operations, management, and design. The fund was established in 2017 by a gift from Malcom M. Strandberg, made from a trust left by his late father, MIT physics professor Malcom W.P. “Woody” Strandberg PhD ’48.
The number of applicants for the funding, Newman says, has demonstrated the excitement around using MIT’s campus as a test bed. “It also became clear that faculty need funding so that they can help pay not only for students but also for necessary materials and any other project-related expenses.” The fund has awarded seed funding to several campus-based research projects that have wider implications for replicability in academic and other contexts, including installing batteries on campus buildings that store and redistribute electricity provided by photovoltaic panels and identifying sustainable sourcing strategies for personal protective equipment at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
One of the first projects it supported was by MIT spinout Infinite Cooling, which had won the grand prize at the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition in 2018 and needed to de-risk its technology at scale. With MITOS funding, the company set up a test installation on one of the cooling towers of MIT’s Central Utility Plant. Battelle Energy Alliance LLC Professor in Nuclear Engineering Jacopo Buongiorno PhD ’01 in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering soon spotted an opportunity for collaboration and offered MIT’s Nuclear Reactor Laboratory research facility for further testing.
The laboratory ended up being a perfect partner to implement the Infinite Cooling technology: an efficient water-recovery system that captures water droplets produced by power plant cooling towers. The technique produces clean water, eliminates vision-obstructing plumes, and has the capability to save millions of dollars each year for facilities that require cooling capabilities.
Research lead Kripa Varanasi SM ’02, PhD ’04, professor of mechanical engineering, said in 2021 that working with the Nuclear Reactor Laboratory was an important step. The process, he said, “shows the importance of using the campus as a living laboratory. It allows us to do these kinds of experiments at scale, and it shows the ability to sustainably reduce the water footprint of the campus.”
Propagating a sustainable future
Teaching English as a second language, says Peterson, is what sparked her initial interest in environmental sustainability. “Getting to know so many people from all over the world deeply impacted my interest in finding ways to help people live happy, prosperous, sustainable lives while working with the planet,” she says.
This interest manifests in many ways, from propagating plants to share with others—“Giving people an opportunity to connect with nature more, even in small ways, brings me joy,” she says—to her philanthropic support of the Campus Sustainability Incubator Fund. She named her fund in honor of her parents, who shared her interest in sustainability, and appreciated the option of creating an income-generating CRUT. “Investments are made alongside MIT’s endowment, so the funds can grow while also generating income throughout my lifetime. In addition, the staff in the Office of Gift Planning have made the process seamless,” Peterson says. “There’s nothing better than empowering more people who care.”
Positioned for impact
When Newman first came to MIT in 2013, she interviewed more than 100 MIT community members—administrators, operational staff, faculty, students—about what sustainability looks like to them. “I’ve spent my career in education, but MIT is its own unique being,” she says. “What I learned is that MIT community members are driven by educating the next generation of entrepreneurs and policymakers and leaders and academics, and no matter their role, they are here for the students.”
MIT’s location, she learned, is key to that enthusiasm. “There is a unique sense of excitement that MIT is embedded in a state that wants to be number one in clean energy, in a city [Cambridge] with climate and sustainability commitments and policies,” she says. “The exciting thing is, researchers across fields are confronting all of these challenges at MIT. At MITOS, we are looking at these challenges collaboratively in an interdisciplinary scope, elevating a variety of voices on campus and around the world, and demonstrating how to implement solutions.”
Make a gift to the Campus Incubator Sustainability Fund
Contact the Office of Gift Planning for more information about income-generating gifts and other types of planned gifts.
