Infrastructure forms the backbone of modern society, and as challenges related to sustainability, efficiency, and security arise, innovation in infrastructure becomes even more crucial.
This webinar will bring together esteemed faculty from MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering to discuss cutting-edge research and developments in three intertwined areas: Food, Logistics, and Materials.
John Roberts has been Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations (Interim) since February 2022. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at MIT and returned to the university after a 20-year career in the pharmaceutical industry, joining the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) in 2013. Prior to his return, John worked at small, medium, and large companies, holding positions that allowed him to exploit his passions in synthetic chemistry, project leadership, and alliance management while growing his responsibilities for managing others, ultimately as a department head. As a program director at MIT, John built a portfolio of ILP member companies, mostly in the pharmaceutical industry and headquartered in Japan, connecting them to engagement opportunities in the MIT community. Soon after returning to MIT, John began to lead a group of program directors with a combined portfolio of 60-80 global companies. In his current role, John oversees MIT Corporate Relations which houses ILP and MIT Startup Exchange.
Benedetto Marelli is the Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He earned his B.Eng. and M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 2005 and 2008, respectively. In 2012, he completed his Ph.D. in Materials Science at McGill University. Following that, he served as a Postdoc in the Silklab at Tufts University, where he continued his research and academic journey.
Marelli works on natural polymers and nanomanufacturing to design biomaterials with applications in precision agriculture, food security, and food safety. His research group designs new strategies to fabricate biopolymers at scale, opening the door to the engineering of edible coatings that prolong the shelf-life of perishable food, microenvironments that boost seed germination in marginal land, and different solutions to precisely deliver payloads in plants. Technologies from his lab have received the FDA GRAS status and have been recently commercialized.
Food production is responsible for 26% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and more than 25% of municipal solid waste comes from food and its packaging, which is often non-recyclable. Furthermore, unpredictable climate events, a projected population of 10 billion people by 2050, and limited resource access will strain the agri-food systems' resilience. Food waste further aggravates food insecurity; more than 700million people are undernourished, whereas more than 30% of the total food produced, which could potentially feed 1.26 billion people, is never eaten, generating 6% of global GHG emissions and wasting 25% of global freshwater consumption.
As new technologies that are economically sustainable, scalable, and rapidly deployable to market are needed to address these challenges, an opportunity lies for biomaterials to lead innovation in the agri-food industry. Our laboratory strives to reinvent biopolymers as advanced materials for boosting food security.
In this webinar, we highlight recent developments in the nanomanufacturing of biopolymers to design: (i) Physical unclonable functions for food traceability. (ii) Packaging that are biodegradable yet possess good membrane proprieties, sense spoilage, and mitigate biotic decay. (iii) Microenvironments that boost seed germination in marginal land. These examples will provide an opportunity to discuss how the design of biomaterials for applications in food and agriculture leverages merits of non-toxicity and biodegradation to address challenges in procurement, synthesis at scale, and manufacturing by retrofitting existing techniques.
Saurabh Amin is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is a PI in the Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems. He is also affiliated with the Operations Research Center and the Center for Computational Science and Engineering at MIT. Since joining MIT in 2011, he has pursued research in the design of inspection and control algorithms for infrastructure systems.
His work builds on foundations in control theory, game theory, and optimization in networks. His papers have addressed problems in resilient network control, information systems and incentive design, and optimal resource allocation in large-scale infrastructure systems.
By focusing on the domains of highway transportation, electric power distribution, and urban water networks, he develops new theory and design tools for improving the performance of critical infrastructure systems in the face of disruptions, both stochastic and adversarial.
Professor Amin’s research focuses on the design of information and control systems to improve the resilience of societal-scale infrastructure. His work builds on foundations in control and optimization, machine learning, and game theory. His group has addressed problems in resilient network monitoring and control, cyber-physical security, and disaster response and recovery operations, with a specific focus on transportation, logistics, and energy systems.
A major challenge in ensuring that wood remains a sustainable construction material is our poor understanding of where, how much, and what type of wood is harvested and where it goes in the global trade of wood products. Many enforcement agencies lack effective tools to identify illegally harvested and traded timber despite new laws, satellites, and other monitoring technologies. As a result, uncontrolled deforestation continues to thrive and resulting carbon emissions are difficult to quantify and map. We adopt a systems-based approach to monitor the rates of harvest and conduct strategic inspection to detect illegally harvested or traded timber in the global supply chain. Our work builds on advances in machine learning, remote sensing, network modeling, and game theory.
In this webinar, we will discuss progress in supply chain network analysis to identify the flow of illegal timber throughout the global supply chain and strategic inspection to estimate the effectiveness of incentives and interventions in combatting illegal deforestation.
Josephine Carstensen is the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leads the Carstensen Group. Josephine has received several awards including the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award and the CEE Maseeh Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Josephine holds a Ph.D. and an MSE in Civil Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and a MSc and BSc in Building Structures from the Technical University of Denmark.
Professor Carstensen’s research focuses on new opportunities as the digitalization of design and manufacturing transforms how we create structures. Her group develops and evaluates new design methods and tools that use structural mechanics and mathematical optimization to advance design on length scales ranging from material architectures over components to large-scale structural design.
As in other sectors, industrial material use and its processing is a major source of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions in the building and construction industry. Recommended strategies to reduce these carbon emissions include using more environmentally friendly materials and/or less material through optimizing the structural design.
Automated design exploration can be powerful for exploring new sustainable low-carbon design solutions for both conventional and new structural materials. For designs in operation to perform as predicted, the automated design framework must capture the material behavior and any design limitations induced by the planned construction or manufacturing method.
Using the construction industry as an example, this talk will discuss the possibilities and implementation of automating the design of sustainable structures.