2024 MIT Sustainability Conference: Welcome Remarks

Conference Video|Duration: 10:13
October 22, 2024
  • Video details
     
    Welcome and Introduction
    Gayathri Srinivasan
    Executive Director, MIT Corporate Relations
    Rebekah Miller
    Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
    Yuri Ramos
    Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
  • Interactive transcript
    Share

    GAYATHRI SRINIVASAN: Wow, that was inspiring, wasn't it. We solve big problems, right? Welcome to the 2024 MIT Sustainability Conference. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Gayathri Srinivasan, Executive Director, MIT Corporate Relations. I'm about 8 and 1/2 months old in this role, so I'm still learning. So you have a lot to teach me.

    Today, you're going to hear from Professor Richard Lester, who is the interim vice president for MIT Climate, five climate project mission directors. You're going to hear from eight startups in the sustainability space, and you're going to hear from several MIT faculty, researchers, and industry collaborators. I just wanted to start with, what is MIT? I know you heard, you saw the video, but what is MIT?

    MIT is comprised of 17,180 employees. I'm one of them, about 1,100 professors and faculty, out of which 28% are women, 4,500 undergraduates and 7,300 graduate students, a total of almost 12,000 graduate students-- students at MIT, and 29% are international. What else. We have five schools and we have one college.

    Schools are more defined based on the home of the faculty member or the research, whereas the college comprises of interdisciplinary interaction between the different schools, and making it more impactful in terms of research that touches different areas of access. In addition to the schools, we have 65 plus DLCs is what we call research labs, centers, and programs. And we have about $840 million on campus that comes through sponsored research. 20% of that is industry-sponsored research, and half of the industry-sponsored research is through Industry Liaison, ILP members.

    We have 592 patents filed in FY '23, 362 patents issued. We have $40 million in revenues through licensing of MIT innovation inventions, and about 23 start up companies that were spun off in FY '23. We are all about innovation. You hear about innovation, innovation, innovation, ecosystem that drives innovation here at MIT. But what exactly is innovation?

    At MIT, we think of innovation as the process of taking an idea through impact, right? So that's what we strive for and that's what we make happen.

    Our research priorities, as you heard President Kornbluth talk about, we have three areas that we want to focus on as institutional priority. We have climate and sustainability, we have life science, and we have AI. And we want to solve big problems. We don't want to solve small problems.

    We want to talk about what is the global challenge and we want to address it. And again, we want to address it in a very evidence-based manner. The climate project, I don't want to talk any further about it because you're going to hear all about it today through the climate mission directors and through Professor Richard Lester and others.

    But what is Industry Liaison Program? Some of you are members and have benefited from it. Some of you are not members and may benefit from it. And so who are we? We are all about looking at what we have at the Institute to offer, research, innovation, students, and education. That's what, as an Institute, we have to offer.

    And that's what I feel, as industry partners, you may want to leverage and engage with us on. And you can leverage and engage with us from learning and understanding through webinars, through conferences like these, through workshops, and through programs like Professional Ed, Exec Ed, and other such learning opportunities for you and your employees. You can learn, discover, and solve problems.

    You can meet with faculty members, program leaders to share with them what your problems are and then perhaps figure out a solution to those problems. And then, of course, network, right? Network not only through colleagues in industry, through to faculty and researchers, through students that are engaged, and also in terms of startups, right? And we talk about Startup Exchange. You will hear from eight different startups.

    But what is Startup Exchange? It's a way for us to connect startups within the MIT ecosystem to the industry partners across and make those fit happen. With that, I want to thank you, but I want to give a huge shout out to three different entities. One is Rebekah Miller and Yuri Ramos, who actually helped make this a vision of the sustainability conference into actual action here. So thank you. You'll hear from them over time.

    [APPLAUSE]

    I wanted to also thank the communications and events team sitting across, behind us, working behind the scene tirelessly to make this actually possible and make us all look good. And then lastly, I wanted to thank the Startup Exchange team, working with and identifying the right startups for pitching and bringing to your forefront, so that you can see and hear from them. So thank you to all. And thank you audience to be here and contribute to making this a success.

    [APPLAUSE]

    REBEKAH MILLER: Thank you, Gayathri. What a warm welcome. We're already feeling the love from our audience, so thank you for that. And thank you for joining us today. I just wanted to say good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all of our wonderful in-person attendees, as well as the hundreds of people joining our live stream feed today. So we're thrilled you can join and contribute to today's interaction and exploration of this critical space.

    So we've already heard from MIT President Sally Kornbluth on MIT's commitment to this crucial area of sustainability, and we'll continue exploring throughout the day MIT's actions in this area, ranging from the launching of the six climate missions through MIT's Climate Project. You'll hear from a panel of the climate mission directors how we're leveraging AI to tackle challenges in the climate space. But also the flip side, this extreme demand, energy demand from these data centers and the AI boom.

    We'll be talking about a number of strategies for enabling decarbonization of industry, ranging from aviation, construction, chemical manufacturing, and mobility, among others. And we'll hear from a lot. We'll also, this will be the message we'll hear from expert faculty, cutting edge startup companies, leading global corporations such as yourselves, and the government stakeholders that enable these breakthrough technologies, new business models, and policy incentives. But first, allow me to introduce my colleague, Yuri Ramos, program director with MIT's Office of Corporate Relations.

    YURI RAMOS: Good morning. Thank you, Rebekah. Let me introduce you to my colleague, Rebekah Miller, or Dr. Rebekah Miller, also a program director. We had the challenge, we shared the challenge of putting this conference together. We do hope you folks enjoy it as much as we did planning it.

    For the companies in this dynamic space, the message is very, very clear. Investors are seeking green opportunities. Customers prefer environmentally responsible businesses. Organizations' sustainability reputation is increasingly vital for attracting talent. On the one hand, we're seeing an urgent concern for business resilience and competitiveness, including from facility damage, supply chain disruptions, and service outages.

    On the other hand, as you'll hear in our afternoon panel, the business of sustainability, and also by our keynote speaker, Brian Deese, we see significant opportunities that will unlock billions in market potential, create new jobs, and strengthen economies while advancing sustainability. I want to show you a chart by Bloomberg. According to Bloomberg, you can see behind us, pay special attention to the last four years.

    Global investment in the low carbon energy transition reached a record of $1.8 trillion last year, reflecting the resilience of clean energy despite geopolitical challenges, high interest rates, and inflation. Tough days. Together with your fellow attendees representing over 100 major corporations today, either here at the Marriott or online, you can explore collaboration, networking, idea sharing, and engagement.

    We truly hope that you, as I said in the beginning, that you enjoy this event, the exchange of ideas, as much as Rebekah and I did enjoy planning this day for you. Thank you.

    REBEKAH MILLER: So to help enable this idea sharing and engagement that Yuri just mentioned, we'd like to invite you to use the Pigeonhole tool. You can see on the screens at the right and at the left of the room. This allows you to submit questions to the speakers and also to upvote questions if you think you see one that you're really interested in the speakers answering. So you can access the site, just using the QR codes and also through the Pigeonhole website using the passcode Sustainability 24.

  • Video details
     
    Welcome and Introduction
    Gayathri Srinivasan
    Executive Director, MIT Corporate Relations
    Rebekah Miller
    Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
    Yuri Ramos
    Program Director, MIT Industrial Liaison Program
  • Interactive transcript
    Share

    GAYATHRI SRINIVASAN: Wow, that was inspiring, wasn't it. We solve big problems, right? Welcome to the 2024 MIT Sustainability Conference. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Gayathri Srinivasan, Executive Director, MIT Corporate Relations. I'm about 8 and 1/2 months old in this role, so I'm still learning. So you have a lot to teach me.

    Today, you're going to hear from Professor Richard Lester, who is the interim vice president for MIT Climate, five climate project mission directors. You're going to hear from eight startups in the sustainability space, and you're going to hear from several MIT faculty, researchers, and industry collaborators. I just wanted to start with, what is MIT? I know you heard, you saw the video, but what is MIT?

    MIT is comprised of 17,180 employees. I'm one of them, about 1,100 professors and faculty, out of which 28% are women, 4,500 undergraduates and 7,300 graduate students, a total of almost 12,000 graduate students-- students at MIT, and 29% are international. What else. We have five schools and we have one college.

    Schools are more defined based on the home of the faculty member or the research, whereas the college comprises of interdisciplinary interaction between the different schools, and making it more impactful in terms of research that touches different areas of access. In addition to the schools, we have 65 plus DLCs is what we call research labs, centers, and programs. And we have about $840 million on campus that comes through sponsored research. 20% of that is industry-sponsored research, and half of the industry-sponsored research is through Industry Liaison, ILP members.

    We have 592 patents filed in FY '23, 362 patents issued. We have $40 million in revenues through licensing of MIT innovation inventions, and about 23 start up companies that were spun off in FY '23. We are all about innovation. You hear about innovation, innovation, innovation, ecosystem that drives innovation here at MIT. But what exactly is innovation?

    At MIT, we think of innovation as the process of taking an idea through impact, right? So that's what we strive for and that's what we make happen.

    Our research priorities, as you heard President Kornbluth talk about, we have three areas that we want to focus on as institutional priority. We have climate and sustainability, we have life science, and we have AI. And we want to solve big problems. We don't want to solve small problems.

    We want to talk about what is the global challenge and we want to address it. And again, we want to address it in a very evidence-based manner. The climate project, I don't want to talk any further about it because you're going to hear all about it today through the climate mission directors and through Professor Richard Lester and others.

    But what is Industry Liaison Program? Some of you are members and have benefited from it. Some of you are not members and may benefit from it. And so who are we? We are all about looking at what we have at the Institute to offer, research, innovation, students, and education. That's what, as an Institute, we have to offer.

    And that's what I feel, as industry partners, you may want to leverage and engage with us on. And you can leverage and engage with us from learning and understanding through webinars, through conferences like these, through workshops, and through programs like Professional Ed, Exec Ed, and other such learning opportunities for you and your employees. You can learn, discover, and solve problems.

    You can meet with faculty members, program leaders to share with them what your problems are and then perhaps figure out a solution to those problems. And then, of course, network, right? Network not only through colleagues in industry, through to faculty and researchers, through students that are engaged, and also in terms of startups, right? And we talk about Startup Exchange. You will hear from eight different startups.

    But what is Startup Exchange? It's a way for us to connect startups within the MIT ecosystem to the industry partners across and make those fit happen. With that, I want to thank you, but I want to give a huge shout out to three different entities. One is Rebekah Miller and Yuri Ramos, who actually helped make this a vision of the sustainability conference into actual action here. So thank you. You'll hear from them over time.

    [APPLAUSE]

    I wanted to also thank the communications and events team sitting across, behind us, working behind the scene tirelessly to make this actually possible and make us all look good. And then lastly, I wanted to thank the Startup Exchange team, working with and identifying the right startups for pitching and bringing to your forefront, so that you can see and hear from them. So thank you to all. And thank you audience to be here and contribute to making this a success.

    [APPLAUSE]

    REBEKAH MILLER: Thank you, Gayathri. What a warm welcome. We're already feeling the love from our audience, so thank you for that. And thank you for joining us today. I just wanted to say good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all of our wonderful in-person attendees, as well as the hundreds of people joining our live stream feed today. So we're thrilled you can join and contribute to today's interaction and exploration of this critical space.

    So we've already heard from MIT President Sally Kornbluth on MIT's commitment to this crucial area of sustainability, and we'll continue exploring throughout the day MIT's actions in this area, ranging from the launching of the six climate missions through MIT's Climate Project. You'll hear from a panel of the climate mission directors how we're leveraging AI to tackle challenges in the climate space. But also the flip side, this extreme demand, energy demand from these data centers and the AI boom.

    We'll be talking about a number of strategies for enabling decarbonization of industry, ranging from aviation, construction, chemical manufacturing, and mobility, among others. And we'll hear from a lot. We'll also, this will be the message we'll hear from expert faculty, cutting edge startup companies, leading global corporations such as yourselves, and the government stakeholders that enable these breakthrough technologies, new business models, and policy incentives. But first, allow me to introduce my colleague, Yuri Ramos, program director with MIT's Office of Corporate Relations.

    YURI RAMOS: Good morning. Thank you, Rebekah. Let me introduce you to my colleague, Rebekah Miller, or Dr. Rebekah Miller, also a program director. We had the challenge, we shared the challenge of putting this conference together. We do hope you folks enjoy it as much as we did planning it.

    For the companies in this dynamic space, the message is very, very clear. Investors are seeking green opportunities. Customers prefer environmentally responsible businesses. Organizations' sustainability reputation is increasingly vital for attracting talent. On the one hand, we're seeing an urgent concern for business resilience and competitiveness, including from facility damage, supply chain disruptions, and service outages.

    On the other hand, as you'll hear in our afternoon panel, the business of sustainability, and also by our keynote speaker, Brian Deese, we see significant opportunities that will unlock billions in market potential, create new jobs, and strengthen economies while advancing sustainability. I want to show you a chart by Bloomberg. According to Bloomberg, you can see behind us, pay special attention to the last four years.

    Global investment in the low carbon energy transition reached a record of $1.8 trillion last year, reflecting the resilience of clean energy despite geopolitical challenges, high interest rates, and inflation. Tough days. Together with your fellow attendees representing over 100 major corporations today, either here at the Marriott or online, you can explore collaboration, networking, idea sharing, and engagement.

    We truly hope that you, as I said in the beginning, that you enjoy this event, the exchange of ideas, as much as Rebekah and I did enjoy planning this day for you. Thank you.

    REBEKAH MILLER: So to help enable this idea sharing and engagement that Yuri just mentioned, we'd like to invite you to use the Pigeonhole tool. You can see on the screens at the right and at the left of the room. This allows you to submit questions to the speakers and also to upvote questions if you think you see one that you're really interested in the speakers answering. So you can access the site, just using the QR codes and also through the Pigeonhole website using the passcode Sustainability 24.

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