Richard Lester is Japan Steel Industry Professor and Head of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and the faculty co-chair and founding Director of the Industrial Performance Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on industrial innovation and technology strategy, with an emphasis on the energy and manufacturing sectors. He is also active in research and teaching on the management and control of nuclear technology. Professor Lester has led several major studies of national and regional productivity, competitiveness and innovation performance commissioned by governments and industrial groups around the world. Prof. Lester's new book, co-authored with Prof. David Hart of George Mason University, entitled, Unlocking Energy Innovation: How America Can Build a Low-Cost, Low-Carbon Energy System (MIT Press, 2011), dicusses the three urgent and interrelated problems of climate change, worldwide insecurity over energy supplies, and rapidly growing energy demand. His book on the sources of creativity and innovation in advanced economies, Innovation—The Missing Dimension, co-authored with Michael J. Piore, was published by Harvard University Press in 2004. Other recent books include Making Technology Work: Applications in Energy and the Environment (Cambridge University Press, 2004), jointly authored with John M. Deutch, and The Productive Edge: A New Strategy for Economic Growth (W.W. Norton, 2000.)
NEW BOOK
Unlocking Energy Innovation:
How America Can Build a Low-Cost, Low-Carbon Energy System
Lester's new book on energy innovation, co-authored with David M. Hart of George Mason University, shows why energy innovation offers us our best chance to solve the three urgent and interrelated problems of climate change, worldwide insecurity over energy supplies, and rapidly growing energy demand. More
How to kick-start new energy technologies
The world desperately needs innovation in energy technologies — but those innovations are unlikely to happen by themselves. A three-year study by a team of researchers based at MIT has now identified a suite of policy and investment strategies that could accelerate innovation in the United States, helping to meet our growing energy needs affordably and reliably, reducing carbon emissions and alleviating insecurity over energy supplies. More
New NSE strategy strengthens core, opens boundaries;
seeks better integration of technical and societal issues
Nuclear technology is inextricably bound up with great issues — energy, international security, climate change, and the environment, to name a few. MIT’s Nuclear Science and Engineering department, as part of a broad re-orientation, has put in place a new strategic plan that will extend its groundbreaking work in nuclear science and the engineering of nuclear systems, while also explicitly tying the department’s education and research to the interactions of nuclear technology with society. More
