MIT Climate Nucleus' inaugural Fast Forward Faculty Grant

Prof. Siqi Zheng is receiving the MIT Climate Nucleus' inaugural Fast Forward Faculty Grant.

MIT Announcement:

In April 2023, MIT released the call for proposals for this inaugural program. It said "Ideally, the aim is to provide funds to one faculty member from each of the five schools plus the College of Computing. An explicit focus of this from the start is that these faculty members will then be positioned to serve as connective tissue across the Institute on climate. A key part of the goal is to forge and/or strengthen Institute-wide climate and sustainability connections. The Fast Forward Faculty Fund recipients will form a cohort. Over the course of two years, this cohort will come together regularly (e.g., monthly) for climate leadership and faculty development and for networking. Ideally this will enable them to serve as climate ambassadors across the Institute, helping to identify new opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration."

Prof. Zheng formed a cross-interdisciplinary team together with Prof. Roberto Rigobon (Sloan) and Prof. Christopher Knittel (Sloan and MITEI). This team also includes Juan Palacios, Fabio Duarte, Bram van der Kroft, Johnattan Ontiveros (TPP). Their proposal is entitled "Climate Crisis and Real Estate: Science-based Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies".  The team based the proposal on two on-going projects with Chris and Roberto: (1) Investigate the role of institutional investors (e.g., pension funds; REITs) in promoting sustainable upgrades in real estate assets (with Roberto); (2) Advance the adoption of building decarbonization technologies (with Chris).

This team is among the (only) six teams (one from each school) to be on this MIT climate leadership cohort.  This will definitely help the CRE and also the SUL Lab to gain great visibility at the Institute for our research on climate and real estate; and we will play an important role in identifying key research topics and cross-school collaborations in MIT's current very bold climate agenda. In addition, this will further strengthen collaboration with the climate, sustainability, applied economics groups at the Sloan School.

(Special thanks to Bram and Johnattan for their diligent work on this proposal in May.  Besides funding for faculty members, Johnattan will also receive a fast forward climate fellowship which can provide generous funding for his tuition and stipend for his second year at the TPP Program.)