- About the Lecture
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About the Lecture
President Susan Hockfield unveils MIT’s grand-scale initiative to confront “the urgent challenge of our time: clean, affordable energy to power the world.” In much the same way that MIT “played a decisive role in the Allied victory in World War II,” she calls for the Institute to muster its formidable forces to speed a transformation of the global energy landscape. Hockfield explains how MIT arrived at this “defining moment in its history.”
An overwhelming consensus of faculty and students expressed passionate concern about energy, says Hockfield, and “when a community as brilliant and diverse converges on one issue, it’s a folly not to heed them.” And beyond MIT, for the first time in a generation, the public and politicians have turned to the subject. This may be one of those rare moments, says Hockfield, when society looks itself in the mirror and “admits the truth”: our “comfortable lives are due in large measure to cheap and abundant fossil fuels” for which we will pay a steep price.
The “hydra-headed,” intertwined challenges of energy supply and demand, security, and environmental concerns mean that MIT must pursue a set of solutions simultaneously. But there is no better institution than MIT, with its practical mindset and engineering know-how, says Hockfield, to be a “catalyst for this technological phase shift.”
In his overview of MIT’s Energy Research Council (ERC) initiative, Ernest Moniz describes the “crying need for new technological and policy tools” to contend with a “perfect storm of energy challenges.” This interdisciplinary venture, which attempts to envision the next 50 years of energy use and impact, has crafted what Moniz calls a “a robust set of tools” for dealing with growing energy demand, uncertainties about energy supply and security, and climate change.
The ERC’s approach to this set of issues involves developing science and technology for a clean energy future; improving current energy systems; and designing advanced and efficient energy systems for a world undergoing rapid demographic and climate change. MIT will once again bring “muscle to bear on a complex societal problem,” believes Moniz, and while the Institute can’t do it all, it can make a significant difference in terms of science, technology and policy options.
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- About the Speakers
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About the Speakers
Dr. Susan Hockfield
MIT President
Professor of NeuroscienceSusan Hockfield has served as the sixteenth president of MIT since December 2004. A strong advocate of the vital role that science, technology, and the research university play in the world, she believes that MIT can best advance its historic mission of teaching, research, and service by providing robust and sustained support for the ideas and energies of its faculty and students.
A noted neuroscientist whose research has focused on the development of the brain, Dr. Hockfield is the first life scientist to lead MIT and holds a faculty appointment as professor of neuroscience in the Institute's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Under her leadership, MIT has launched a major Institute-wide initiative in energy research and education and continues to expand its activities at the intersection of the life sciences and engineering, with a particular focus on cancer research. The Institute has also embarked on a sustained effort to strengthen support for student life and learning, including undergraduate curriculum renewal, and is undertaking major campus construction and renovation projects with a combined value of approximately three-quarters of a billion dollars.
Before assuming the presidency of MIT, Dr. Hockfield was the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology and provost at Yale University. She joined the Yale faculty in 1985 and was named full professor in 1994. While at Yale, she played a central role in the university's leadership, first as dean of its Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1998-2002), with oversight of more than 70 graduate programs, and then as provost, the university's chief academic and administrative officer.
Dr. Hockfield earned her B.A. in biology from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. from the Georgetown University School of Medicine, while carrying out her dissertation research in neuroscience at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of California at San Francisco in 1979-80, and then joined the scientific staff at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in 1980. She served as director of the Laboratory's Summer Neurobiology Program from 1985 to 1997, concurrent with her teaching post at Yale, and more recently as a trustee of the laboratory. Her memberships in professional societies include the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society for Neuroscience.Ernest J. Moniz
Director, MIT Energy Initiative
Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems
Co-director of the Laboratory for Energy and the EnvironmentErnest J. Moniz has served on the MIT faculty since 1973. He was Under Secretary of the Department of Energy from October 1997 until January 2001. He also served from 1995 to 1997 as Associate Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President.
At MIT, Moniz was Head of the Department of Physics and Director of the Bates Linear Accelerator Center. His principal research contributions have been in theoretical nuclear physics, particularly in advancing nuclear reaction theory at high energy.
Moniz received a B.S. degree in physics from Boston College, a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford University, and honorary doctorates from the University of Athens and the University of Erlangen-Nurenburg. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Humboldt Foundation, and the American Physical Society and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Moniz received the 1998 Seymour Cray HPCC Industry Recognition Award for vision and leadership in advancing scientific simulation. - About the Host
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About the Host
Energy Research Council
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Opening Remarks
Overview of the Energy Research Report
- Dr. Susan Hockfield
Ernest J. Moniz - May 3, 2006
- Running Time: 53:56
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