In July 2024, MIT President Sally Kornbluth announced the appointment of seven faculty members to lead the six focal areas, or missions, of the Climate Project. Read about the announcement on MIT News. In September 2024, the Mission Directors convened the campus community for a launch event to begin the work.
The mission directors, representing diverse areas of expertise, collaborate with faculty, researchers, students, and staff across MIT, as well as each other, to accelerate solutions that address climate change.
Andrew Babbin
Restoring the atmosphere, protecting the land and oceans (co-director)
Christopher Knittel
Inventing New Policy Approaches
Jesse Kroll
Restoring the atmosphere, protecting the land and oceans (co-director)
Benedetto Marelli
Wild Cards
Miho Mazereeuw
Empowering Frontline Communities
Elsa Olivetti
Decarbonizing Energy and Industry
Christoph Reinhart
Building and Adapting Healthy, Resilient Cities
The role of the Mission Directors
A key role of mission leadership will be to promote engagement with companies, impact investors, and social and technological entrepreneurs, as well as governments, nonprofits, and philanthropists.
The mission leaders will form road-mapping teams to assess global progress. The teams will articulate near- and long-term goals and milestones and will identify critical gaps and bottlenecks that are constraining progress. Proposals from the MIT community and beyond will be solicited to address these gaps or otherwise accelerate progress toward the mission. The leaders and their advisors will identify the most consequential actions that MIT can take in support of the mission.
New projects will be launched if funds are available and if the mission community and its partners are well-positioned to achieve impactful results. These will range in size from single-investigator projects to larger-scale projects with multiple principal investigators. A key responsibility of mission leadership will be to preserve space for out-of-the-box, potentially transformative approaches.
Mission leaders will allocate key resources for these projects, including student fellowships and Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program projects (UROPs), and where possible, existing labs, centers, programs, and initiatives will host the projects. The main educational contribution of the missions will be to provide opportunities for MIT students to participate in creative problem-solving at the knowledge frontier.