The price of the pledge

On first glance, it could be a tall order for Turkey to fulfill its Paris Agreement pledge, which targets a reduction in the nation’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 21 percent below business-as-usual levels by 2030. Fossil fuels comprise nearly all of Turkey’s energy mix, and low-carbon options have not yet gained traction. Wind and solar accounts for about 5 percent of energy generation and nuclear power plants are only in the planning stages.

That means meeting Turkey’s Paris commitment will require a dramatic shift to low-carbon energy sources, but how much of a toll might such a transition take on the nation’s economy?

To address this question systematically, a team of researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change developed a computational general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Turkish economy, TR-EDGE. Unlike similar CGE models, TR-EDGE includes a detailed representation of the energy-intensive electricity sector. The team’s analysis appears in the journal Energy Policy.

“When the role of the power sector in decarbonizing an economy is taken into account, the TR-EDGE model enables researchers to more precisely estimate the economic impact of different climate policies in Turkey by capturing important characteristics of separate generation technologies and the intermittent nature of renewable power,” says Bora Kat, lead author of the study and a former Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Joint Program who now serves on the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey.

Using the model, Kat and his collaborators — Joint Program Deputy Director Sergey Paltsev and Research Scientist Mei Yuan analyzed four different scenarios: business-as-usual (BAU), which incorporates the government’s current plans for a nuclear program and tariff-funded renewables initiative; no-nuclear (NoN), which assumes no nuclear program; and the combination of each of those two scenarios with a national emissions trading policy.

The results show that a national emissions trading market would at once incent GHG emissions reductions and mitigate negative impacts on economic growth. Absent an emissions trading policy, fossil fuels — oil, natural gas, and coal — continue to comprise nearly all of Turkey’s primary energy mix in 2030. Implementing an emissions trading policy eliminates carbon-intensive coal-fired power generation by 2030 in both BAU and NoN scenarios. Keeping a nuclear program reduces GHG emissions by about 3 percent more than scrapping it (NoN), while lowering the price of carbon from $70 per metric ton of carbon dioxide to $50.

Based on these results, fulfilling Turkey’s Paris pledge would cost the economy about 0.8 (with nuclear) to 1.1 percent of its GDP by 2030.

“The results show that the targets that Turkey envisioned for the Paris Agreement are reachable at a modest economic cost,” says Kat. “However, our estimates do not account for economic co-benefits of GHG emission reductions or the risks associated with nuclear power plants. Further research may include incorporating such factors in a more detailed analysis.”

The study’s approach of modeling the electric power sector in detail could be applied in assessing the likely national economic impact of other countries’ Paris climate commitments.

“At the Joint Program we have developed a global energy-economic modeling expertise that is extremely informative for understanding long-term energy and emission trends,” says co-author Sergey Paltsev. “Our new focus on using the lessons learned from our global modeling to create detailed country-specific models is equally important for helping decision-makers to design efficient policies for emissions mitigation.”

“We are especially happy when we can help to train local experts, as in the case of Turkey, who return to their home institutions and increase their country’s capabilities to perform their own world-class economic analysis,” Paltsev says.

The research was made possible by funding from the Turkish Fulbright Commission (Visiting Scholar Program) and the Joint Program’s consortium of sponsors.

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Senior Vice President and Corporation Secretary Greg Morgan to retire

After 12 years of service at MIT, Senior Vice President and Secretary of the MIT Corporation R. Gregory Morgan will step down at the end of this year, President L. Rafael Reif announced today in a letter to members of the MIT community. He will be succeeded by Suzanne Glassburn, who has been an attorney in MIT’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC) since 2008.

“Since I took office and long before, Greg has been among my closest and most trusted advisors,” Reif said in his letter. He pointed out that Morgan’s duties have covered a wide swath: “His vital work includes serving as chief of staff — coordinating the efforts of MIT’s senior leadership, the MIT Corporation, its Executive Committee and the overall administration, raising our sights and making us all more effective.”

Morgan came to MIT in January 2007 at the request of then-president Susan Hockfield, to be MIT’s first general counsel and create for the first time a unified in-house legal team for the Institute. Together with then-Deputy General Counsel Mark DiVincenzo, he quickly established the OGC by bringing together MIT’s internal legal talent and then steadily built the team by attracting other highly qualified attorneys to MIT from top law firms.

“Because the general counsel role was new for MIT, there was some skepticism at first, but Greg’s effectiveness quickly dispelled those doubts,” says MIT President Emerita Susan Hockfield. “His ability to listen astutely, his breadth of curiosity, and his tenacity at solving hard problems made him an invaluable thought partner, to me and to individuals across the Institute. We were incredibly fortunate to have Greg navigate the transition to the ‘Office of the General Counsel’ model, which continues to serve MIT so well.”

Before coming to MIT, Morgan was co-managing partner of the prominent law firm of Munger, Tolles and Olson, where he had practiced law since 1981, with clients including Berkshire Hathaway and its chair Warren Buffett. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, he had clerked for Judge J. Edward Lumbard of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, as well as for Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court.

At MIT, Morgan has played an important role in shaping the framework for several major new Institute initiatives, first as vice president and general counsel, and since 2015 in his present role. This work included setting the terms of MIT’s involvement in the creation of new universities in other countries, including the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Russia. He also played a key role in the launch of the online education platforms MITx and edX and in the transition of the Broad Institute into a free-standing, self-governed entity that remains tightly coupled to MIT.

President Reif, in his letter to members of the MIT community, praised Morgan’s abilities, saying “he has served the MIT community with extraordinary dedication, working at the highest levels, often behind the scenes, and around the clock. From helping to respond to terrible crises like the Boston Marathon bombing and the tragic impact on our campus, to the essential work of MIT’s governance, over and over I have counted on his rare scope and sensitivity to get things right.”

Recognizing that MIT students often need independent legal advice, Morgan was instrumental in creating a series of law clinics for students, to help them deal with matters such as the legal questions involved in creating new startup companies based on their research, or other legal issues relating to intellectual property or cybersecurity. He forged an agreement with the Boston University Law School, which agreed to provide law students to staff the clinics. The clinics are now offered weekly during the academic year and have seen steadily rising demand from students for their services. “It’s an educational experience for both the MIT students as clients and the BU students as lawyers,” Morgan says.

Morgan will continue his role at MIT until the end of 2018, and starting in September he will overlap with Glassburn in order to ensure a smooth transition. “I don’t know what I’m going to do next,” he adds, but he says he wants to “rediscover and reinvent,” and find out where his curiosity takes him.

Glassburn, one of Morgan’s early hires for the office, will conclude her work as an attorney for MIT as she assumes her new position. She joined MIT’s OGC in April 2008 after 17 years at the Boston-based law firm Nutter, McClennen and Fish, where she had been a partner since 1999.

“Through her deep understanding of MIT’s academic and research transactional needs, her ability to identify the core needs of each party and bring them to agreement, and her wise counsel to her OGC colleagues, Suzanne has been a tremendous asset to our office, and to the Institute,” says Vice President and General Counsel Mark DiVincenzo. “Though I will miss her representing MIT as a lawyer in the OGC, I have every confidence that the skills and qualities she has mastered in her legal role at the Institute will serve Suzanne very well in her new role.”

A graduate of Vanderbilt University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, she handled a wide variety of subjects in her law practice, including mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property, and was co-chair of the firm’s Emerging Companies Group. But, after her years at the law firm, she came to a conclusion: “Where I’d really like to work is at a university.” Though she enjoyed her work, “I wanted something that excited me more,” she recalls, and MIT seemed the perfect fit.

In her years at the Institute, Glassburn says, she has had the good fortune to work on a number of projects that support President Reif’s agenda, including the establishment of MITx and edX; the launch of the Quest for Intelligence, an initiative focused on human and machine intelligence; and the creation of The Engine, a venture to support “tough-tech” companies at work on transformative ideas. 

She has also worked closely on several of the Institute’s significant initiatives, including the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab; the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) public-private partnership, established with support from the U.S. Department of Defense; and a number of international collaborations that led to new universities — Skoltech in Russia, the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and the Masdar Institute (now Khalifa University) in Abu Dhabi.

“The most exciting and interesting part of my career has been the time I’ve spent at MIT,” Glassburn says. Among other things, it has given her the chance to work with many amazing people on interesting and challenging projects, she says, and “in this new role, I’ll have an even greater opportunity” to collaborate with such talented people.

In taking on her new position, Glassburn says, “I’m looking forward to expanding the range of issues I get to work on,” including work on major issues such as “the future of education, the future of work, and the future of the environment. … I’m excited to have a more direct impact on what the Institute is trying to achieve.”

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Featured video: Reshaping the Arab world through science and technology

The mission of the MIT Arab Students’ Organization lies in building cultural, academic, and industrial bridges between MIT and the Arab world. The student-led group aims to create a platform for Arab scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to express their ideas, and a place for the MIT community to engage with the Arab world through various events and initiatives.

This spring, the ASO held its first Arab Science and Technology conference, where leaders and innovators from across the globe gathered to discuss issues relating to education, technology, and entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa.

“I think it’s very useful to be able to listen to [different] perspectives and learn from their experiences,” says Safa Jabri, rising senior in mechanical engineering.

Submitted by: Arab Students' Organization | Video by: ASO | 1 min, 41 sec

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Department of Mechanical Engineering announces new leadership team

Evelyn Wang, the Gail E. Kendall Professor, who began her role as head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) on July 1, has announced that Pierre Lermusiaux, professor of mechanical engineering and ocean science and engineering, and Rohit Karnik, associate professor of mechanical engineering, will join her on the department’s leadership team. Lermusiaux will serve as associate department head for operations and Karnik will be the associate department head for education.

“I am delighted to welcome Pierre and Rohit to the department’s leadership team,” says Wang. “They have both made substantial contributions to the department and are well-suited to ensure that it continues to thrive.”

Pierre Lermusiaux, associate department head for operations

Pierre Lermusiaux has been instrumental in developing MechE’s strategic plan over the past several years. In 2015, with Evelyn Wang, he was co-chair of the mechanical engineering strategic planning committee. They were responsible for interviewing individuals across the MechE community, determining priority “grand challenge” research areas, investigating new educational models, and developing mechanisms to enhance community and departmental operations. The resulting strategic plan will inform the future of MechE for years to come. 

“Pierre is an asset to our department,” adds Wang. “I look forward to working with him to lead our department toward new research frontiers and cutting-edge discoveries.”

Lermusiaux joined MIT as associate professor in 2007 after serving as a research associate at Harvard University, where he also received his PhD. He is an internationally recognized thought leader at the intersection of ocean modeling and observing. He has developed new uncertainty quantification and data assimilation methods. His research has improved real-time data-driven ocean modeling and has had important implications for marine industries, fisheries, energy, security, and our understanding of human impact on the ocean’s health.

Lermusiaux’s talent as an educator has been recognized with the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Teaching Excellence. He has been the chair of the graduate admissions committee since 2014. He has served on many MechE and institute committees and is also active in MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program committees.

“Working for the department, from our graduate admission to the strategic planning with Evelyn, has been a pleasure,” says Lermusiaux. “I am thrilled to be continuing such contributions as associate department head for research and operations. I look forward to developing and implementing strategies and initiatives that help our department grow and thrive.”

Lermusiaux succeeds Evelyn Wang, who previously served as associate department head for operations under the former department head Gang Chen.

Rohit Karnik, associate department head for education

Over the past two years, Rohit Karnik has taken an active role in shaping the educational experience at MechE. As the undergraduate officer, he has overseen the operations of the department’s undergraduate office and chaired the undergraduate programs committee. This position has afforded Karnik the opportunity to evaluate and refine the department’s course offerings each year and work closely with undergraduate students to provide the best education.

“Rohit is a model citizen and has provided dedicated service to our department,” says Wang. “I look forward to working with him to create new education initiatives and continue to provide a world-class education for our students.”

Prior to joining MIT as a postdoc in 2006, Karnik received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2006, he joined the faculty as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. He is recognized as a leader in the field of micro-and-nanofluidics and has made a number of seminal contributions in the fundamental understanding of nanoscale fluid transport. He has been recognized by an National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Department of Energy Early Career Award.

Karnik’s dedication to his students have been recognized by the Keenan Award for Innovation in Education and the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Teaching Excellence. He has also served on the graduate admissions committee and various faculty search committees.

“It is a tremendous honor and responsibility to take this position in the top mechanical engineering department in the world,” says Karnik. “I will strive to ensure that we maintain excellence in mechanical engineering education and adapt to the changing times to offer strong and comprehensive degree programs and the best possible experience for our students.”

Karnik succeeds Professor John Brisson who previously served as associate department head for education.

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Seth Mnookin brings bestselling author’s touch to teaching science journalism

As an undergraduate, Seth Mnookin went through five or six different majors before finally settling on history and science — an apt combination for someone who would end up heading MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, as he does now. But there was a long road in between these endpoints.

“I didn’t think I had the skills to be a bench scientist,” Mnookin recalls, “but science was something that fascinated me.” At the same time, he says, “I knew since high school that I wanted to be a journalist.”

At Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, he worked on the school paper, where he says he learned more from the paper’s advisor, Helen Smith, than he has “from any other person.” Smith imparted to her students the importance of attention to detail, Mnookin recalls, by “treating our paper as if it was The New York Times. … She really laid the foundations [and showed] that being a reporter gave you a way to go anywhere, talk to anyone.”

Mnookin pursued a dual history and science major as an undergraduate at Harvard University, which, he says, “allowed me to focus on science through a humanities lens.” That combination worked well for him, leading to a career as a writer for prestigious publications and eventually to penning award-winning books including “The Panic Virus,” about the erroneous belief that vaccines contributed to a rise in autism cases.

It wasn’t all science along the way, though. “I didn’t do anything with my degree for about 15 years,” Mnookin says. Instead, he covered very different topics, including the amazing rise of the Red Sox to win their first World Series in nearly a century, in his book “Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top.” Earlier, he wrote about journalism, in his 2004 book “Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media,” which was named by The Washington Post as a best book of the year.

Mnookin started his journalism career as a freelance rock and jazz critic before joining The Palm Beach Post in Florida as a crime and metro reporter in 1997. In 1999 he moved to New York City, where he covered City Hall for The Forward, a Jewish weekly newspaper. The following year, he was hired by Brill’s Content to cover the 2000 presidential campaign.

He describes that campaign as a great introduction to political coverage, which found him riding on press planes with people who had been covering politics since John F. Kennedy’s campaign and later the Watergate scandal. “It was an incredible experience,” he recalls. Among other things, “I got to interview [Bill] Clinton in the Oval Office.”

After Brill’s Content closed shortly after Sept. 11, Mnookin was hired as a senior writer at Newsweek, where he covered the media.

Soon, a series of scandals rocked the journalism world, involving plagiarism and falsified interviews with people who turned out not to exist. Jayson Blair at The New York Times, for example, was found to have invented sources for numerous stories. “I had been skeptical” about the leadership at the Times in those days, he says, and that led to his first book, “Hard News,” which was an account of those events.

After that project, as he was wondering about what to write as a second book project, “a fortuitous confluence of events” led Mnookin to follow the progress of a new young general manager: local boy Theo Epstein, who had taken over at the Red Sox, vowing that “this is the year they’re going to win” after having failed to win a World Series since 1918.

“I spent a year living with the team,” Mnookin says, a period that included the amazing come-from-behind win of the 2004 series. The book came out in the summer of 2006 and made the Times best-seller list in its first week. The fact that the book did so well, Mnookin says, had “less to do with me, and more about the fact that people like to read about winning sports teams.” The success of that book, he says, “gave me more freedom to choose what’s next.”

He had previously interviewed for science writing positions, including at The Wall Street Journal, and “I knew that was something I wanted to get back into.” He started looking into what was then heating up as an intense controversy: the now thoroughly debunked notion that vaccines were contributing to a rise in autism rates. That became the subject of his next book, “The Panic Virus,” which he says took him longer to write and required more discipline than anything he had done before.

He says the reason he finds writing about science so attractive, compared to, say, music, which he also loves to write about, is that “science was a difficult type of challenge. It pushes me to constantly go out of my comfort zone. You’re always learning about new things, and I think that’s the coolest part about being a journalist.”

Mnookin joined MIT in 2011, first as a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Science Writing. The following year, he was hired as an assistant professor and became the program's co-director. In 2016 he became the director of that program and and the following year was promoted to professor of science writing in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. “What we do here is a little bit different” than at many other journalism schools, he says, stressing the importance of providing students with real-world journalistic experiences and giving them the hands-on knowledge that he says is indispensable in today’s journalism world.

These days, with newspapers declining and fewer entry-level jobs in the business, he says, “it’s much more difficult to just pop in and learn on the job — to understand what the null principle is, or to get a study and immediately focus on what the shortcomings are, [or to ask,] ‘is the sample size sufficient for the conclusions the authors claim?’ That kind of stuff can be pretty difficult to learn on the job.”

Since he’s been the director, the science writing program has added some new modules to its curriculum every year, he says, including one on podcasting and another on data journalism. “We want to constantly update ourselves,” including finding more ways to help fund students’ learning and find them employment opportunities.

Mnookin has also been collaborating with Deborah Blum, director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program, to find ways for the two programs to work together. Each year, four students from the graduate program work as editorial interns for Undark, a magazine Blum runs out of the Knight program. The students also write profiles of all Knight fellows each year as a way for the two groups to get to know each other.

In addition to his academic work, Mnookin has met with MIT students struggling with drug-use issues, and has served as a resource for Student Support Services. He's motivated by personal experiences with drug-use disorders, which stretched from high school through his mid-twenties. “I almost died as a result of heroin dependency,” he says.

Outside of MIT, Mnookin spends his free time with his wife Sara and their two children, Max and Eliza. They love music and go to a lot of concerts together, says Mnookin, who also enjoys playing the mandolin.

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How to improve critical hurricane-related supply chains

Researchers from the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab have released a new report on critical supply chains during hurricanes and how they might be better managed in future U.S. disasters. 

The report summarizes the lab’s December 2017 roundtable, “Supply Chain Resilience: Restoring Business Operations Following a Hurricane,” which convened 40 supply chain leaders from both the public and private sectors to discuss the challenges brought on by the record-breaking 2017 hurricane season. The discussion addressed how better information sharing and resource coordination could accelerate the restoration of business operations serving disaster-affected populations.

The discussions revealed potential opportunities for improvement, especially in the realm of business-government coordination. For example, pre-crisis supply chain mapping and post-crisis visibility may enable better management of resources. In cases where detailed real-time data is impractical, aggregate indicators and sentinel data sources could provide timely, actionable insights. Better relationships among businesses and the many government agencies in all levels of jurisdictions could improve coordination in a crisis. Although the future of disasters may be dynamic and unbounded, research, development, and rehearsal of resilience strategies can help mitigate the black swans to come.

MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab Director Jarrod Goentzel released the report to coincide with the start of the new FEMA-sponsored Post-hurricane Supply Chain Adaptability Study. The study, led by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine looks at issues related to the resilience of supply chains during disasters to better understand how supply and demand networks react to severe disruptions, including the role of logistics management in preparing for and responding to extreme events.

Goentzel will lead a team to analyze private sector supply chain capabilities for critical commodities.

“This is a great opportunity to continue the learning from recent events and further develop ideas that surfaced at this roundtable,” he says.

Those ideas focus on the transport of food, fuel, water, pharmaceutical supplies, and medical equipment to affected communities, and how data gathering, analysis, communication, and prioritization can be improved. 

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CSAIL launches new initiative for financial technology

Recent advances in automating and digitizing financial services has largely changed how we use technology to make fiscal decisions. As infrastructure and operations are changing rapidly — recent reports show $31 billion was invested in the sector in 2017 — reinventing global financial technology poses many challenges and potential rewards.

To address these issues, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) recently launched a research-industry collaboration focused on creating financial technologies that will be able to open up new business models, gain new data insights, and improve security.

The initiative will span topics that include artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, blockchain foundation and applications, machine learning, multi-party computation for superior security and privacy, data management and analytics, natural language processing, and cyber-risk management, among others.

MIT professors Andrew Lo, Silvio Micali, and Shafi Goldwasser are leading the new initiative, which is called FinTech@CSAIL. A select group of companies, including ANT Financial, Citi, London Stock Exchange Group, Nasdaq, Ripple, Ryan LLC, and State Street, will work with CSAIL researchers to inform new lines of impactful research and develop innovative real-world applications.

“A financial company’s success in this sector is built on trust, security, value, and efficiency,” says FinTech Executive Director Lori Glover. “FinTech holds promise not only for verified transaction systems such as blockchain, but also for technologies involving AI, security, data analytics, trust verification, risk management and privacy advances as well.”

CSAIL researchers will focus on several key areas across the lab, including cybersecurity and secure computation, natural language processing, robotics, and replacement technologies and legacy systems.

Lo, Micali, and Goldwasser are guiding the effort with a unique combined expertise focused on economics, computer science and cybersecurity.

Lo’s research centers on using computational tools to make better financial decisions, including financial engineering and risk management, trading technology and market microstructure, as well as creating computational models for individual risk preferences, financial markets, and intelligence.

During his remarks at the Wednesday launch event, Lo talked about the interplay of finance and technology and how they have impacted the way that AI systems are used.

Specifically, he discussed early efforts in AI that focused on very specific problems and tasks, like playing chess, and how they aimed to covered as many different scenarios for each problem as possible. He said that this approach was a timely and expensive endeavour that was ineffective for financial models.

“We’ve largely moved away from AI as expert systems to simple algorithms and more complex data, which is much closer to real human intelligence,” Lo said. “We need theories and algorithms on how people actually behave, and larger datasets where we can find meaningful trends and patterns. Unless we truly understand human behavior, we won’t we be able to make financial technologies that work.”

Micali and Goldwasser, who are both focused on security, have pioneered research at the foundation of current and emerging fintech innovations. Both are winners of the A.C.M. Turing Award, often described as “the Nobel of computing.”

Micali and Goldwasser’s research efforts focus on enhancing information security and the privacy and correctness of computation and data. They have been instrumental in developing systems like zero-knowledge proofs (methods for authentication that don’t require passwords), and secure multi-party computation, which are both used in many cybersecurity systems and financial applications.

“We believe in transferring technology to society, which is a value of not only fintech but CSAIL as well,” said Micali. “As this sector rapidly matures, we need to make technologies that can keep up with that pace.”

FinTech@CSAIL builds on the lab's other initiatives, which include Cybersecurity@CSAIL and SystemsThatLearn@CSAIL.

“With a legacy that dates back to the originators of artificial intelligence and many computational techniques in use today, CSAIL is at the leading edge of research and new technologies that can benefit the entire financial ecosystem,” said Lo.

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