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The Program Structure

    | Research Team | Associates | Affiliates | Sponsors | Facilities |

Organization

Consistent with its interdisciplinary nature, the MIT Global Change Joint Program is led by Co-Directors representing the Program's two parent organizations (CEEPR & CGCS): Henry (Jake) Jacoby, Professor of Management in the Sloan School and CEEPR Director, and Ronald Prinn, TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science in the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) department and CGCS Director. For guidance and to assist the co-directors there is a Joint Program Board consisting of an executive director, associate director for research, and assistant director, along with other leaders from the centers involved and their parent organizations.

[structure diagram]

The Research Team     top
The Program's multi-disciplinary research team includes MIT faculty, staff, and students, along with affiliated researchers from outside MIT who are engaged through cooperative agreements. The team builds on a foundation of faculty in global change science including meteorologists, atmospheric chemists, oceanographers, and hydrologists. Similarly, the social science and policy analysis faculty are drawn from the Sloan School of Management, the School of Engineering, and the Departments of Economics and Political Science. The participating group includes economists with special expertise in energy and environmental quality, decision analysts, energy technologists, and scholars of the international policy process. In addition, through cooperation with the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory, specialists in ecosystem science are involved.

As shown in the list of Program personnel, the resereach team involves approximately thirty faculty members and fifteen professional research speacialists, including staff, post-doctoral fellows and researchers involved through cooperative agreements. The research staff includes specialists in the modeling of atmospheric and biospheric chemistry, ocean circulation, climatology, economics, energy and transportation, agriculture, and terrestrial ecosystems (at MBL). The Program also encourages effective interaction with sponsors and outside researchers, which is fostered in particular by Visiting Scholar appointments.

A strong cadre of students are also involved, including both graduate students (master's and doctoral), and undergraduates who become involved through MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Approximately twenty-five graduate students and two undergraduate researchers directly participate in Program research each year. To help stimulate interdisciplinary scholars to work at the intersection of science and policy of the climate issue, the Program also provides partial support to several additional graduate research projects that fill gaps in the available disciplinary research, or that are assisting in the preparation of policy assessments.

Administrative support is provided by a combination of personnel dedicated to the Program and portions of the effort of staff who also serve roles in the two parent centers, the CGCS and CEEPR. In this way the work of the Program is well supported with a minimum administrative overhead.

Associates     top
To strengthen key areas of Program research and policy analysis, cooperative relationships have been formed with research organizations and individuals around the world. Through such alliances, researchers from outside MIT become direct contributors to the work. Cooperative arrangements with the Ecosystems Center at MBL bring to the Program expertise on impacts of climate change on critical systems. And we continue to work closely with colleagues at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in the development of the climate model, which is based on earlier collaborative MIT and GISS efforts. Significant ties with climate researchers at both national and international research organizations are also maintained. Work on detection and attribution of climate change is carried out in cooperation with the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory at Oxford University, and colleagues at the U.K. Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research.

Through the CGCS and the Alliance for Global Sustainability, the Program is involved in formal cooperation with the University of Tokyo and the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland. The Program faculty and staff are also in frequent contact with other groups who are conducting integrated assessments of climate change, and with the various contributing disciplinary communities. This interaction occurs within a number of multi-group studies and model assessment activities, such as the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum and through the participation in international climate research organizations.

Affiliates     top
To facilitate increased outside cooperation, the MIT Joint Program has formalized Affiliate relationships. This mutual designation of a substantive relationship expands the networks for dissemination of research results and policy studies, and enhances the work of each institution by gaining access to the views of a wider audience. The relation involves a free exchange of publications and other research materials, opportunities for research visits and participation in meetings organized by the other program, joint meeting sponsorship, and other modes of collaboration.

Current Program Affiliates include the following three organizations:

Facilities     top

The main offices of the Joint Program's multi-disciplined professional research staff and students are located in Building E40, along with the CEEPR, the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment (LFEE), the Energy Intiative, and other interdepartmental programs. Other Program members and some administrative personnel are housed within the CGCS in Building 54. Building E40 is centrally located, and it provides easy access by the science faculty and the social science and policy faculty who are participating in the effort. The co-location of the Program's research staff and students facilitates collaboration essential for the interdisciplinary effort. Also, it provides housing for visitors from sponsor organizations, and others cooperating in the research. An adjacent conference room hosts weekly meetings of the Program's faculty and staff.

The Program has a set of dedicated computer facilities including several workstations, a number of high-level personal computers, and a Beowulf cluster setup. The Beowulf system, which utilizes off-the-shelf PCs, contains 60 processors interconnected by a high-speed local network, with each node providing a processing speed roughly equivalent to a 2GHz Pentium 4 machine. The Beowulf system enables a timely computation of the many century-scale integrations of the IGSM that are necessary to evaluate the feedbacks, assess uncertainty, and carry out policy studies. For example, to conduct an ensemble of 250 runs of a 175-year simulation of the full IGSM used in uncertainty studies (2D atmosphere, 2D ocean configuration, including EPPA, TEM, NEM, and urban and global atmospheric chemistry) can be completed in about one week.

Supporting Partnership     top
The Program is sustained by a partnership of government and industrial sponsors. Support from the U.S. federal government is primarily in the form of individual grants for specific projects. Some components of the work receive targeted support from particular industry groups or corporations, but most of the funding from industrial sponsors is without specification of particular work tasks. The Program's total revenue in Fiscal Year 2007 was approximately $4.4 million, of which 49% was from U.S. Federal Agencies, and 51% was from industrial corporations and institutes, and a foundation. It is important to emphasize that the climate science input to the integrating activity is leveraged through approximately $5 million annually in federal research grants directly to faculty in the CGCS. The souces and allocation of funds in MIT Fiscal Year 2007 are depicted in the pie charts below. (MIT's FY runs July through June.)

financial graph

The international consortium of government, industry and foundation sponsors of the Program continues to evolve, and currently includes the organizations shown below. Continuing efforts are aimed at adding to the size and breadth of the group of sponsoring organizations, with a special focus on expansion of the base of support in Europe and Asia, and to recruitment of corporations from the manufacturing and transport sectors.

Support from the U.S. government has included several grants for specific tasks, as well as general support of Program development. Examples of ongoing projects that are contributing to the Joint Program's research efforts include the following:

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