Collaborative Models for Innovation and Progress

Climate Leadership: Collaborative Models for Innovation and Progress

To meet global climate goals and avoid the worst impacts of climate change,�the world must drive net emissions of carbon dioxide to zero by mid-century. Achieving net-zero emissions requires the wide-scale deployment of existing tools and technologies, such as wind and solar, especially in this decade. It also requires rapid innovation to make available the new tools and technologies that will be needed to get all the way to net-zero around mid-century.

In this lecture, Dr�Maria T. Zuber, MIT�s vice president for research, will talk about MIT�s efforts in this area, using fusion energy as a case study to highlight ways that academia, industry, government, and civil society can collaborate to accelerate innovation.

Dr Maria Zuber

Vice President for Research
E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Maria Zuber is Vice President for Research and E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at MIT, where she is responsible for research administration and policy.
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She oversees MIT Lincoln Laboratory and more than a dozen interdisciplinary research laboratories and centers. She also oversees MIT�s Climate Action Plan for the Decade and is responsible for intellectual property; research integrity and compliance; research relationships with the federal government; and postdoctoral scholars and research staff.
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Zuber has held leadership roles associated with a dozen scientific experiments or instrumentation on ten NASA missions, serving as Principal Investigator of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. She is the first woman to lead a science department at MIT and the first to lead a NASA planetary mission.
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Zuber holds a BA�from the University of Pennsylvania and an ScM�and PhD�from Brown. She is a member of the National Academy of Science, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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In 2013, President Obama appointed Zuber to the National Science Board; she was reappointed by President Trump in 2018. In 2021, President Biden named Zuber as co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).