Sustainability Courses

Fall 2023  |  Introduces the carbon cycle and "climate solutions" + provides specialized knowledge to manage and offset carbon emissions for government entities and large corporations through nature-based solutions and technology.

• Faculty: C Terrer
• MW1-2.30 + Lab: F2-4 

Spring 2025 | Introduces the carbon cycle and "climate solutions." Provides specialized knowledge to manage and offset carbon emissions for government entities and large corporations through nature-based solutions and technology. Students prepare a mini-project simulating the assessment of practices and technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the air for a specific organization, which prepares them to become professionals with the skills to help evaluate and manage carbon emissions. 

• Faculty: C. Terrer
• MW 1:00 - 2:30 PM; Rec F 2:00 - 4:00 PM

Fall 2024 | Develops environmental accounting tools including energy, carbon, materials, land use, and possibly others, from small scales (e.g., products and processes) to larger scales, (e.g., companies, nations and global) to reveal how reoccurring human behavior patterns have dominated environmental outcomes. Involves visiting experts and readings in areas such as ethics, economics, governance, and development to frame core issues in human relationship to the environment and future societies. Explores how local actions, including engineering interventions and behavior change, play out at larger scales associated with the concept of sustainability, and how local actions may be modified to realize sustainability. Class is participatory and includes an exploratory project. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Limited to 25.

• Faculty: T. Gutowski
• MW 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Spring 2025 | Introduces the essential knowledge for understanding nuclear waste management. Includes material flow sheets for nuclear fuel cycle, waste characteristics, sources of radioactive wastes, compositions, radioactivity and heat generation, chemical processing technologies, geochemistry, waste disposal technologies, environmental regulations and the safety assessment of waste disposal. Covers different types of wastes: uranium mining waste, low-level radioactive waste, high-level radioactive waste and fusion waste. Provides the quantitative methods to compare the environmental impact of different nuclear and other energy-associated waste. (Also offered in the Fall)

• Faculty: H. Wainwright
• MW 1:00 - 2:30 PM

Fall 2024 | Provides a detailed overview of the chemical transformations that control the abundances of key trace species in the Earth's atmosphere. Emphasizes the effects of human activity on air quality and climate. Topics include photochemistry, kinetics, and thermodynamics important to the chemistry of the atmosphere; stratospheric ozone depletion; oxidation chemistry of the troposphere; photochemical smog; aerosol chemistry; and sources and sinks of greenhouse gases and other climate forcers.

• Faculty: J. Kroll
• T Th 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Spring 2025 | Investigates social conflict and distributional disputes in the public sector. While theoretical aspects of conflict and consensus building are considered, focus is on the practice of negotiation and dispute resolution. Comparisons between unassisted and assisted negotiation are reviewed along with the techniques of facilitation and mediation.

• Faculty: L. Susskind
• T;Th 3:30-5:30 PM

Spring 2025 | Examines the challenges facing communities of color around home-buying opportunities and access to quality rental housing. Introduces the central institutions in the field of housing finance, provides a review of past housing finance policy, and explores how future policy could advance social equity and climate resilience. Guest speakers include leaders in the field from government, nonprofits, and industry.

• Faculty: J. Steil, E. Golding
• T;Th 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Spring 2025 | Examines how Indigenous peoples' relationships to their homelands and local environments has been adversely affected by Western planning. Explores how these relationships have changed over time as American Indians, Alaska Natives, and other groups indigenous to North America and Hawai'i have adapted to new conditions, including exclusion from markets of exchange, overhunting/overfishing, dispossession, petrochemical development, conservation, mainstream environmentalism, and climate change. Seeks to understand current environmental challenges and their roots and discover potential solutions to address these challenges. 

• Faculty: L. Susskind, J. Knox-Hayes, J. Pierite
• W 9:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Spring 2025 | Offers insight into tension and synergy between sustainability and the real estate industry. Considers why sustainability matters for real estate, how real estate can contribute to sustainability and remain profitable, and what investment and market opportunities exist for sustainable real estate products and how they vary across asset classes. Lectures combine economic and business insights and tools to understand the challenges and opportunities of sustainable real estate. Provides a framework to understand issues in sustainability in real estate and examine economic mechanisms, technological advances, business models, and investment and financing strategies available to promote sustainability. Discusses buildings as basic physical assets; cities as the context where buildings interact with the built environment, policies, and urban systems; and portfolios as sustainable real estate investment vehicles in capital markets. 

• Faculty: S. Zheng
• T;Th 9:30 - 11:00 AM / Rec W 6:30 - 8:00 PM

Fall 2023 | Introduces frameworks for analyzing and addressing inequalities in the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, particularly by race and by class.

• Faculty: Steil 

• Th 2-5

Spring 2025 |  Examines the history and dynamics of international environmental treaty-making, or what is called environmental diplomacy. Emphasizes climate change and other atmospheric, marine resource, global waste management and sustainability-related treaties and the problems of implementing them. Reviews the legal, economic, and political dynamics of managing shared resources, involving civil society on a global basis, and enforcing transboundary agreements. Focuses especially on principles from international relations, international law, environmental management, and negotiation theory as they relate to common-pool resource management.

• Faculty: L. Susskind

Spring 2024 | Focuses on disseminating Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) innovations in low-income countries and underserved communities worldwide. Structured around project-based learning, lectures, discussions, and student-led tutorials. Emphasizes core WASH principles, appropriate and sustainable technologies at household and community scales, urban challenges worldwide, culture-specific solutions, lessons from start-ups, collaborative partnerships, and social marketing. Mentored term project entails finding and implementing a viable solution focused on education/training; a technology, policy or plan; a marketing approach; and/or behavior change. Guest lecturers present case studies, emphasizing those developed and disseminated by MIT faculty, practitioners, students, and alumni. Field trips scheduled during class time, with optional field trips on weekends.  Limited to 20. 

• Faculty: S. E. Murcott, S. L. Hsu
• T 12:00PM - 3:00PM

Fall 2024 | Examines key issues in the current and future development of urban energy systems, such as technology, use, behavior, regulation, climate change, and lack of access or energy poverty.

• Faculty: M. Harkavy
• M 5:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Fall 2024 | Examines the tensions and potential synergies among traditional transportation policy values of individual mobility, system efficiency and “sustainability”

• Faculty: J. Aloisi

• F 2:00 - 5:00 PM

Spring 2025 | Presents methods for resolving facility siting disputes, particularly those involving renewable energy. After completing four modules and a competency exam for MITx certification, students work in teams to help client communities in various cities around the United States. Through direct interactions with the proponents and opponents of facilities subject to local opposition, students complete a stakeholder assessment and offer joint fact-finding and collaborative problem-solving assistance. The political, legal, financial, and regulatory aspects of facility siting, particularly for renewable energy, are reviewed along with key infrastructure planning principles. 

• Faculty: L. Susskind, J. Chun
• F 3:00 - 5:00 PM

Fall 2024 | Studies interactions between planners and institutions at different scales, from local to global/transnational. Emphasizes historical and institutional approaches to development planning.

• B. Rajagopal
• T, Th 2:30 - 4:00 pm

Fall 2024 | Urban analytics draws upon statistics, visualization, and computation to better understand and ultimately shape cities. This course emphasizes telling stories about cities and neighborhoods covering a set of fundamental concepts of descriptive approaches, quantitative and spatial analysis in R, and principles of reproducible data analysis. Students learn to communicate the results of visualization and analysis for use in decision-making and policy development and to critique those processes.

• Faculty: Cong
• MW 10:00 - 11:30 AM

Fall 2023 | Will teach you how to evaluate a development project and practice socially responsible real estate yourself by applying SIA, EIA, and consultation methods.

• Faculty: Susskind
• T Th - 12:30

Spring 2024 | Studies the basic principles of techniques for reconstructing the history of ocean climate from marine sediment cores, corals, ice cores, and other paleoclimate archives. Examines this data in the light of proposed climate change mechanisms. Micropaleontological, isotopic, geochemical, and mineralogical changes are used to infer changes in seawater composition, atmospheric chemistry, and climate. Observations are interpreted as consequences of changes in ocean temperature, circulation, and chemistry, and are used to evaluate theories proposed to account for glacial/interglacial cycles. Focuses on the past two million years, but major processes and events from the past 100 million years are also included.

• Faculty: E. Boyle
• MWF 2:00PM

Spring 2025 | Addresses changes in the ocean, terrestrial biosphere and rocks modulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide on timescales from months to millions of years. Includes feedbacks between carbon cycle and climate. Combines hands-on data analysis with the formulation of simple models rooted in basic physical, chemical and biological principles. Students create individual "toy" global carbon cycle models. Students taking graduate version complete different assignments.

• Faculty: M. Follows

Spring 2024 | Explores climate variability and change, focusing on the atmosphere and ocean, while building experience applying diagnostic analyses to a range of modern observations and models. Provides practical insight, from regional to global scale, with applications to past and future climates. Emphasizes salient features of the mean climate system and modes of natural variability, as well as observed and projected manifestations of anthropogenic climate change. Students gain experience accessing, analyzing, and visualizing a wide range of gridded observational-based datasets, as well as output from global climate model simulations. Develops the tools necessary to apply climate diagnostic analysis to one's own research, as well as the interdisciplinary edge to critically assess and interpret the observational and model results underpinning the Fifth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

• Faculty: M. Bittrich
• Time TBA

Fall 2024 | Students master and apply economic theory, causal inference, and contemporary evidence to analyze policy challenges. These include the effect of minimum wages on employment, the value of healthcare, the power and limitations of free markets, the benefits and costs of international trade, the causes and remedies of externalities, the consequences of adverse selection in insurance markets, the impacts of labor market discrimination, and the application of machine learning to supplement to decision-making. Class attendance and participation are mandatory. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

• Faculty D. Autor

• MW 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Spring 2025 | 15.012 (fall) 15.014 (spring) establishes understanding of the development processes of societies and economies. Studies several dimensions of sustainability (environmental, social, political, institutional, economy, organizational, relational, and personal) and the balance among them. Explores the basics of governmental intervention, focusing on areas such as the judicial system, environment, social security, and health. Builds skills to determine what type of policy is most appropriate. Considers implications of new technologies on the financial sector: internationalization of currencies, mobile payment systems, and cryptocurrencies. Discusses the institutional framework to ensure choices are sustainable across all dimensions and applications.

• Faculty: R. Rigobon, A. Makarin
• MW 8:30 - 10:00 AM

Spring 2025 | Concentrates on debates about current policy challenges. Students debate and vote on policy actions on current issues in developed and developing nations. Subjects include industrial policy, macroeconomics, poverty, social safety net, labor practices, immigration and labor markets, international economics, human rights, civil rights, democracy, environmental policy, regulation, and crypto assets. Topics change from year to year.

• Faculty: R. Rigobon
• W 4:00 - 7:00PM

Spring 2025 | Explores how energy markets function, what changes as the world decarbonizes, and the role of new technologies in this change. Examines how market outcomes are influenced by policies, with a focus on environmental policies. Uses economic tools to analyze efficiency and public policy challenges in interconnected energy and environmental markets. Topics include how electricity markets are shaped by large-scale renewable penetration, how decarbonization policies affect different regions and socio-economic groups, measuring the social costs of climate change, and the role of critical minerals in a decarbonizing world. Students gain experience in linking theory to real-world policy problems, particularly through a team-based electricity market simulation that mirrors decision-making by market participants. 

• Faculty: C. Knittel
• T;Th 2:30 - 4:00 PM; REC F 11:00 - 12:00 PM

Spring 2025 | Explores decision making and leadership. Analyzes the dilemmas and decisions characters face in a selection of plays, stories, and films. Provokes reflection on what constitutes effective and moral reasoning in critical moments of both life and leadership. Restricted to Sloan Fellow MBAs.

• Faculty: C. Turco
• F 10:00 - 12:00 PM

Spring 2024 | Opportunity to address both individual skills and organizational strategies for advancing equity and inclusion.

• Faculty: Blackburn, Kelly
• T 4:00PM-7:00PM

Fall 2024  | Project-based approach to innovation and venture creation in the energy sector and sectors that can mitigate climate change. Explores how innovation and entrepreneurial concepts apply (or do not apply) to the significant opportunities in these industries. Working in teams, students create new ventures specifically for the energy sector or to address climate change. Lectures guide teams through key elements of their projects. 15.390 is recommended as a prerequisite.

• Faculty: Hynes, O'Sullivan, Wayman, Pless
• Th 5:30-8:00pm

Fall 2024 | Explores technological, behavioral, policy, and systems-wide frameworks for innovation in transportation systems, complemented with case studies across the mobility spectrum, from autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility to last-mile sidewalk robots. Students interact with a series of guest lecturers from CEOs and other business and government executives who are actively reshaping the future of mobility. Interdisciplinary teams of students collaborate to deliver business plans for proposed mobility-focused startups with an emphasis on primary market research. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

• Faculty: J. Zhao, J. Moavenzadeh
• M W 11:30 am - 1:00 pm

Fall 2024 | Experiential study of the climate for innovation and determinants of entrepreneurial success. Students work in teams of four with the top management of a company to address real-world business challenges. Students gain insight as to how companies build, run, and scale a new enterprise. Focuses primarily on scale-ups operating in emerging markets. Restricted to MBA students; all other graduate students by permission of instructor only. *Project must be related to sustainability to be counted as an elective for the certificate.

• Faculty: Johnson
• TR 2:30-4:00PM

Fall 2024 | Explores a range of ethical issues and challenges that arise in organizations and financial practice. Provides fundamental theories typically used to evaluate ethical dilemmas and references both real situations and hypothetical examples. Highlights the importance of ethical values and their impact on financial regulation for professional practice. Discusses the various factors that influence ethical behavior, such as family, religious values, personal standards and needs, senior leadership behavior, norms among colleagues, organizational expressed and implicit standards, and broader community values. Restricted to students in the Master of Finance Program.

• Faculty: J. Cohen, E. Golding
• Th 6:30 - 8:00 PM

Fall 2024 | Examines the relationship between law and the development of science and technology, the ways in which law, economics, and technological change shape public policy, and compares law and economics as alternative paradigms for encouraging sustainability, growth, and employment.

• Faculty: Ashford, Caldart
• T/Th 3:30 - 5:00 PM

Spring 2025 | Analyzes federal and state regulation of air and water pollution, hazardous waste, greenhouse gas emissions, and production/use of toxic chemicals. Analyzes pollution/climate change as economic problems and failure of markets. Explores the role of science and economics in legal decisions. Emphasizes use of legal mechanisms and alternative approaches (i.e., economic incentives, voluntary approaches) to control pollution and encourage chemical accident and pollution prevention. Focuses on major federal legislation, underlying administrative system, and common law in analyzing environmental policy, economic consequences, and role of the courts. Discusses classical pollutants and toxic industrial chemicals, greenhouse gas emissions, community right-to-know, and environmental justice. Develops basic legal skills: how to read/understand cases, regulations, and statutes. 

• Faculty: N. Ashford, C. Caldart
• T;Th 3:30 - 5:00 PM

Spring 2024 | Discusses the broader trends in the labor market, how urban labor markets function, public and private training policy, other labor market programs, the link between labor market policy and economic development, and the organization of work within firms.

• Faculty: Anna Stansbury
• Th 1:00PM-4:00PM

Spring 2025 | Investigates the different perspectives a general manager must take, how to integrate those perspectives, and the role of leadership in setting and realizing goals. Students work intensively in teams and with multiple faculty, using a deep dive into the challenges faced by a major global firm operating in complex global markets. Restricted to Executive MBA students.

• Faculty: D. Ancona, E. Kelly, G. Perakis, N. Repenning, H. Samel, J. Sterman, A. Verdelhan

Spring 2025 | Topics draw on current macroeconomic issues and events, such as modern monetary and fiscal policy; financial crisis, contagion, and currency crisis; real exchange rates, purchasing power parity, and long run sustainability; sustainable development; targeting and the new monetary policy regime; and Europe and the Euro: optimal currency areas. Restricted to Executive MBA students.

• Faculty: R. Rigobon
• Th 7:30 - 9:30 PM

IAP 2025 |  Workshops focus on two models: the dynamics of service quality within a firm; and industry dynamics (particularly investment cycles and bubbles), including the energy and housing markets. Emphasis on formulation, analysis, use, and decision-making. Develops modeling skills.

• Faculty: R. Nachtrieb, J. Sterman

Fall 2024 | Explores the use of operations tools and perspectives in the service sector, including both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Builds on conceptual frameworks and cases from a wide range of service operations, selected from health care, hospitality, internet services, supply chain, transportation, retailing, food service, entertainment, financial services, humanitarian services, government services, and others

• Faculty: Z. Ton
• MW 1:00 - 2:30 PM or MW 2:30 - 4:00 PM

Spring 2025 | Covers modern tools and methods for product design and development. Includes a cornerstone project in which teams conceive, design and prototype a physical product and/or service. Covers human-centered design, agile development, product planning, identifying customer needs, concept generation, product architecture, industrial design, concept design, green design methods, and product management.

• Faculty: K. Grasso, M. Sosa
• T;Th 1:00 - 4:00 PM

Spring 2025 | Introduction to systems thinking and system dynamics modeling applied to strategy, organizational change, and policy design. Students use simulation models, management flight simulators, and case studies to develop conceptual and modeling skills for the design and management of high-performance organizations in a dynamic world. Case studies of successful applications of system dynamics in growth strategy, management of technology, operations, public policy, product development, and others. Principles for effective use of modeling in the real world. (Also offered in Fall).

• Sustainability Certificate Requirement 
• Faculty: V. Yang, H. Rahmandad
• Multiple. MW 10:00 - 11:30 AM OR 1:00 - 2:30 PM; Rec F 1:00 - 2:30 PM

Fall 2024 | Introduces governance and science aspects of complex environmental problems and approaches to solutions. Introduces quantitative analyses and methodological tools to analyze environmental issues that have human and natural components. Demonstrates concepts through a series of in-depth case studies of environmental governance and science problems.

• Faculty: A. Siddiqi
• F 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Fall 2024 | Establishes a foundation for formulating, analyzing, and executing strategies to develop and commercialize new products and services in technology-intensive industries. Develops and applies rigorous frameworks to examine the interaction between patterns of technological change, market dynamics, and the development of internal firm capabilities. Topics include profiting from innovation, the role of intellectual property, platform strategy, government regulation, and innovation policy. Applies concepts in various industry and case settings with an emphasis on addressing issues most relevant for today's changing economic landscape and fostering innovation for social progress, such as clean energy, environmental management, healthcare, and digitalization.

• Faculty: J. Pless
• MW 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Spring 2025 |  Explores Consumer-centric Energy and Climate Innovations; such as technologies and services that strategically enhance building efficiency and electrification; incorporate site solar, battery storage, and electric vehicles; and are enabled to integrate with today's increasingly renewable electric grids. Such innovations provide a foundation for a New Era for Energy Management.With enabling support from the instructors, materials, and assignments, class members examine emerging New Era of Energy Management technology, analytic, business, and policy innovations.

• Faculty: H. Michaels
• T;Th 1:00 - 2:30 PM

Fall 2024 | The course will first introduce the big picture of energy system transition, then go into details of the key decision-making problems in electric power systems, and study the couplings between power and other infrastructure systems, and finally assess energy system transition in an integrated fashion. This course aims to lead PhD or advanced master students to the forefront of energy system research.  

• Faculty: A. Sun
• MW 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm

IAP 2025 |  Group study of current topics related to management not otherwise included in curriculum.

• Faculty: H. Samel

IAP 2025 |  Group study of current topics related to management not otherwise included in curriculum.

• Faculty: F. Berg, R. Verdi

IAP 2025 |  Group study of current topics related to management not otherwise included in curriculum.

• Faculty: B. Thomas

Fall 2023 | Combines rigorous engineering theory and user-centered product design to create technologies for developing and emerging markets. 

• Faculty: Winter

• MW 1-2.30

Fall 2023 |  Provides an introduction to the concept of sustainability from various perspectives using the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the MIT campus and research.

• Faculty: Gutowski, Newman
• MW 1:00-2:30PM

Fall 2024 | Introduces the essential knowledge for understanding nuclear waste management. Includes material flow sheets for nuclear fuel cycle, waste characteristics, sources of radioactive wastes, compositions, radioactivity and heat generation, chemical processing technologies, geochemistry, waste disposal technologies, environmental regulations and the safety assessment of waste disposal. Covers different types of wastes: uranium mining waste, low-level radioactive waste, high-level radioactive waste and fusion waste. Provides the quantitative methods to compare the environmental impact of different nuclear and other energy-associated waste. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

• Faculty: C. Forsberg

• MW 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM

Spring 2024 | This course focuses on the social and historical context of materials science design decisions with an emphasis on both regrettable and beneficial materials substitutions, learning from the past to foster more equitable and sustainable materials futures. This course will explore the scientific and sociotechnical context of applied and industrial case studies of critical materials replacements such as bisphenol A (BPA), poly(vinyl chloride (PVC), asbestos, lead-free brass, and per- and polyfluorinated Substances (PFAS). Course assignments will be customized to students' areas  of interest and have potential for development into  dissertation/thesis chapters and peer-reviewed publications.

• Faculty: C. Ortiz and E.F. Spero
• MW 12pm-1:30pm (RM 16-275)

Spring 2025 | Develops the materials principles, limitations and challenges in clean energy technologies, including solar, energy storage, thermoelectrics, fuel cells, and novel fuels. Draws correlations between the limitations and challenges related to key figures of merit and the basic underlying thermodynamic, structural, transport, and physical principles, as well as to the means for fabricating devices exhibiting optimum operating efficiencies and extended life at reasonable cost. 

• Faculty: H. Tuller, I. Abate, Y. Chiang
• Th 1:30 - 3:00 PM

Fall 2024 | Critical introduction to key contemporary positions in urbanism to the ends of researching, representing, and designing territories that respond to the challenges of the 21st century. Provides an overview of contemporary urban issues, situates them in relation to a genealogy of urban precedents, and constructs a theoretical framework that engages the allied fields of architecture, landscape architecture, political ecology, geography, territorial planning, and environmental humanities. Comprised of three sections, first section articulates a framework on the urban as both process and form, shifting the emphasis from city to territory. Second section engages a series of related urban debates, such as density/sprawl, growth/shrinkage, and codes/exception. Third section calls upon urban agency in the age of environment through the object of infrastructures of trash, water, oil, and food. Limited to 25.

• Faculty: R. Ghosn

• W 2:00 - 5:00 pm

Fall 2024 | Presents artistic intelligence and modes of creative production as ways to contribute to and critically engage with climate science. In conversation with local stakeholders, students develop hybrid projects of art and design that negotiate between pragmatics and fiction to envision solutions to the climate crisis. Case studies and class participation examine dialectics between aesthetics and scientific knowledge related to environmental care and repair. Includes prototyping and publishing spatial, digital, and material experimentations to generate new work individually and/or collaboratively by way of diverse media explorations. Visiting speakers and field trips accompany lectures, readings, class discussions, and presentations. Additional work required of students taking the graduate version. Lab fee required.

• Faculty: Consult G. Urbonas
• MW 9:30 am - 12:30 pm

Fall 2024 | Fundamental research methodologies and ongoing investigations in building tehnology to support the development of student research projects. Topics drawn from low energy building design and thermal comfort, building systems analysis and control, daylighting, structural design and analysis, novel building materials and construction techniques and resource dynamics. Organized as a series of two- and three-week sessions that consider topics through readings, discussions, design and analysis projects, and student presentations.

• Faculty: Consult L. R. Glicksman, C. Mueller, C. Reinhart, L. K. Norford, J. Ochsendorf
• Th 3:00 - 5:00 PM

Spring 2025 | Presents the key elements required for new technical ideas and business practices to be successfully deployed in an open economy, subject to international trade and external environmental costs. Examines the challenges of climate change and increased international competitiveness as they relate to innovation. Offers recommendations for major policy changes to how innovation is encouraged in the United States and the global economy. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

• Faculty: J. Deutch
• TF 9:30 - 11:00 AM

Fall 2023 | Issues in international development, appropriate technology and project implementation addressed through lectures, case studies, guest speakers and laboratory exercises. Enrollment limited by lottery; must attend first class session. 

• Faculty: S. L. Hsu, B. Sanyal
• MW3.30-5, F 3:30-5

Fall 2024 | Issues in international development, appropriate technology and project implementation addressed through lectures, case studies, guest speakers and laboratory exercises. Enrollment limited by lottery; must attend first class session. 

• Faculty: Staff
• T Th 3:00 - 5:00 PM

Spring 2025 | Surveys energy technologies including solar, wind, and hydro power; cooking; indoor heating; irrigation; and agricultural productivity through an international development context to impart energy literacy and common-sense applications. Focuses on compact, robust, low-cost systems for meeting the needs of household and small business. Provides an overview of identifying user needs, assessing the suitability of specific technologies, and strategies for implementation in developing countries. Labs reinforce lecture material through activities including system assembly and testing. Team projects involve activities including connecting with pre-selected community partners, product design and analysis, and continuing the development of ongoing projects. 

• Faculty: D. Sweeney
• Lecture: MW 1:00 - 2:30 PM, Lab: F 1:00 - 3:00 PM 

Fall 2024 |  This class explores global greenhouse gas emissions from energy systems and potential levers for reducing emissions

• Faculty: J. Trancik

• T Th 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Spring 2025 | Leading experts guide discussions of how to safeguard the world against the greatest threats to our future. Topics range from the overt perils of pandemic and nuclear proliferation to the underlying coordination failures responsible for climate change, and from technological stagnation to transformative AI. Draws on the history of invention and science communication to explore which technologies are most likely to shape the future and how inventors and developers can influence outcomes, with the goal of determining how to accomplish as much good as possible. Emphasizes science writing and communication. Students write three op-eds on key issues and participate in a group project aiming to coordinate effective action. 

• Faculty: K. Esvelt, M. Specter
• Th 1:00 - 2:30 PM

Spring 2025 | Follow on to MAS.858. Introduces intersections between space technology and sustainable development by examining technical, policy and social aspects of seven space technologies: satellite earth observation; satellite communication; satellite positioning; human space flight and micro gravity research; space technology transfer; fundamental scientific space research; and small satellites. Lectures introduce the UN Sustainable Development Goals and show linkages to seven space technologies from the perspective of development practitioners. Students read scholarly papers, write weekly responses, give presentations, and write a research paper.

• Faculty: K. Esvelt, M. Specter
• M 9:00 - 12:00 PM

Spring 2025 | Explores how logistics management improves response to humanitarian crises stemming from natural disasters, armed conflicts, epidemics, and famine. Class sessions combine online and class lectures, practical exercises, case discussions, and guest speakers. Provides students from various backgrounds with knowledge of the humanitarian context and fundamental supply chain concepts, as well as practice applying new knowledge in developing and communicating plans and policies to address realistic problems.

• Faculty: J. Goentzel
• MW 1:00 - 2:30 PM, Rec Th 5:30 PM

Spring 2025 | Introduces strategic procurement fundamentals to enhance both competitive advantage and resilience to supply chains. Covers frameworks and tools that managers use to elevate purchasing from an operational function to a strategic one. Includes both classic resilience- and cost-based portfolios, as well as modern perspectives, which consider sustainability and power. Combines theoretical and applied perspectives and is designed for students with or without previous procurement experience. Assessment based on case analysis and a final project.

• Faculty: J. Rice
• MW 10:00 - 11:30 AM

Fall 2024 | Examines how science fiction is deployed as a political tool for enacting change in the present and how it has emerged as a privileged symbolic field for the expression of hopes and anxieties that drive both culture and tech industries. Explores how societies around the globe — both mainstream and in the periphery — are confronting a triple crisis that threatens not only civil order but also the very existence of certain forms of life: financial collapse which increased the awareness of mass inequality; climate change and loss of biodiversity; and the rise of ethno-nationalisms, which threaten representative democracies.

• Faculty: E. Nelson
• T 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm