News and Events

Climate change goals and oil production are clashing in the U.S.

National Geographic    ·    July 19, 2021

Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, emphasizes the importance of reaching net-zero emissions as fast as possible. “By pushing natural gas—which is indeed cleaner than coal, but it’s still a fossil fuel that releases a lot of CO2 and more importantly, a lot of methane—we are actually hurting renewables,” says Paltsev.

U.S. Department of Energy targets vastly cheaper batteries to clean up the grid

The New York Times    ·    July 14, 2021

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced a new goal to reduce the cost of grid-scale, long-duration energy storage by 90 percent by 2030. MITEI’s Nestor Sepulveda SM ’16 PhD ’20 says, “One big obstacle right now is that there’s no policy requirements for utilities to build long-duration storage.”

Meet the world’s most influential women engineers

Forbes    ·    July 3, 2021

Forbes has released a list of the 100 most influential female engineers across the globe. Four of the top 10 are MIT faculty members, including Barbara Liskov, the Ford Professor of Engineering, Dava Newman, the Apollo Professor of Aeronautics, and MITEI affiliates Daniela Rus, the director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Dina Katabi, the Andre and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.