Climate and Sustainability Scholars Seminar Series
Climate and Sustainability Scholars Seminars are dedicated to climate, sustainability, and environmental work done by Harvard students and fellows. Its goal is to embrace the interdisciplinary nature of sustainability research that can’t be confined to a single Harvard school and help like-minded people connect with each other. In Spring 2025, we will meet monthly at the Harvard University Center for the Environment located at 26 Oxford Street, Cambridge. In each session, we will have a few brief talks from different disciplines and perspectives followed by a vegan dinner and discussion. Meeting dates are scheduled as follows:
- Tuesday @ 6 PM, February 4
- Tuesday @ 6 PM, March 4
- Tuesday @ 6 PM, April 15
Call for Speakers
This semester we are trying a new format: to facilitate community connections, we’ll have monthly evening seminars with 3-5 brief talks from different disciplines and perspectives in the first hour followed by a community dinner and open discussion.
We are looking for graduate students, postdocs, and fellows who can engage a multidisciplinary audience of peers with a 12-minute short talk for a multidisciplinary audience (approximately 10 min talk+2 min discussion) regarding their CSE-related research or work at Harvard.
We ask you to please keep your slide deck to about 5 slides and start with introducing yourself, your program at Harvard, and your field.
We’ll continue accepting applications on a rolling basis while the speaker slots last! If you don’t hear back within a week, please email us!
Thank you for considering this opportunity, and we are looking forward to having you as part of our series!
Questions? Mauro Morabito mauromorabito@hks.harvard.edu, Oksana Makarova, oksana_makarova@g.harvard.edu, James Mixon jamesmixon@hds.harvard.edu
Upcoming Events
April 15 | 6 – 8 pm
- Zaneta Hong — GSD, Visiting Assistant Professor, “Edible Ecologies: Exploring entanglements between food and design”
- Nurit Nobel — FAS, Post-doc at The Sustainability Transparency Accountability Research (STAR) Lab, “Close to Home: Using Proximal Cues to Enhance Climate Resilience”
- Kali Auckly — Harvard Chan SPH, MPH Candidate, “Communicating with Purpose: How Strategic Design Drives Impact”
- Aufar Satria — HKS, MPA Candidate, “Implementing Solar PV + Battery solutions for cheap, reliable, and green energy in off grid areas”
- Sappho Gilbert — Harvard Chan SPH, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, “Socio-environmental determinants of store-bought nutrition in the Canadian Arctic”
- Mark Inkster — Harvard College, Advanced Leadership Institute Fellow, “Southeast Asia Climate Tech”
- Lizette Pizza — GSAS, Postdoctoral Fellow, “Does Believing That Humans are Part of Nature Matter for Children’s and Adults’ Environmentalist Attitudes?”
- Nihaal Khan Rahman and Leo Rui — Population Health Sciences PhD Candidate, HKS MPP Candidate, “Theories of change and the polycrisis – reflections from the course ‘Reweaving Ourselves and the World’”
Past Events
Spring ’25
February 4
Challenges to Native Plants in Residential Landscapes
Sakiko Isomichi, GSD, Master’s student in Landscape Architecture
Assessing the Scalability of US Recycling: The Case of Flexible Plastic Packaging
Oksana Makarova, SEAS/MIT, PhD Candidate in Engineering Sciences
Transitioning to Nature Positive Economies: Developments, challenges, and opportunities
Bhuvan Ravindran, HKS, Graduate Student
March 4th
1. Prajakta Kharkar, HKS, JFK Fellow, midcareer Master in Public Administration student
Title: Preserving Indigenous Languages Endangered by Climate Change
2. Yi Jian, Harvard Law School, Senior Fellow in US-China Food System
Title: Food Systems Transformation in China
3. Minghao Chen, SEAS, PhD Candidate in Computational Science and Engineering
Title: Mapping the Future of Bioenergy: Leveraging Marginal Lands and Machine Learning for Sustainable
4. Lakshmi Priya Manirangu Sobhana, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Masters in Public Health student
Title: Health Disaster Resilience Assessment: A Method of Quantifying Disaster Resilience of Healthcare Facilities, learning from India
Fall ’24
Week 1 | September 11
Greening the Black Gold: Transforming Saudi Arabia’s Oil-Driven Economy Through Sustainable Energy Innovations
Noura Mansouri, HKS, MPA
Modeling Tropical Islands in Climate Models
Nathanael Wong, GSAS, PhD Candidate in Earth and Planetary Sciences, GSAS
Week 2 | September 17
Developing the Green AI Index: A Framework for Sustainable Computing
Jerry Huang, GSAS, MS in Computer Science
Assessing the Scalability of US Recycling: The Case of Flexible Plastic Packaging
Oksana Makarova, GSAS/MIT, PhD Candidate in Engineering and Applied Sciences
Week 3 | September 25
Politics of Water Shortages in Chile
Magdalena Larreboure, Ph.D Candidate in Public Policy, GSAS
AI and the Energy Revolution
Rowen VonPlagenhoef, Lemann Program Fellow, FAS
Week 4 | October 1
Breaking the mould- Understanding opportunities for off-grid sector in West Africa
Manali Jain, HKS, MPP
Week 5 | October 9
Inefficient Policies in the Green Transition
Juan Dodyk, GSAS, PhD student in Government
Week 6 | October 15
The role of root exudation in the global carbon cycle
Nikhil Chari, GSAS, PhD student in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Week 7 | October 23
Promoting Climate Justice Through Greening Curriculum
Ranjitsinh Disale, GSE, MS
Week 8 | October 29
Confessions from a former Oil and Gas professional
Mohamed Abdelgaleel, HKS, MidCareer-MPA, policy director at African Caucus
Week 9 | November 6
COP29 Negotiations: What to Expect and Why It Matters
Alice Soewito, HBS and HKS, Joint MPP-MBA
Week 10 | November 12 at noon
Energy Transitions in Mexico
Santiago Creuheras, HKS, Weatherhead Fellow/Visiting Scholar
Week 11 | November 20 at 6 pm
Inequality in outdoor occupational exposure to heat waves in India
Arpit Shah, FAS, Postdoctoral Research Scholar
Assessing the Scalability of US Recycling: The Case of Flexible Plastic Packaging
Oksana Makarova, SEAS/MIT, PhD Candidate in Engineering Sciences
Spring ’24
Week 1 | February 7
“What is the cheapest way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Lessons from carbon abatement costs” with Roxana Shafiee, Environmental Fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment
Week 2 | February 15
“Project of Hope: Indigenous Land Recovery & Ecological Restoration” with Leyla Uysal, Harvard GSD
Week 3 | February 21
A dual talk on transformative sustainability strategies featuring Lingling Jiang, founder of Intrapreneurs with Purpose (IWP) and an MPA student at HKS, and Elena Indar Athwal, LL.M. Candidate in International Environmental & Energy Law at HLS.
Week 4 | February 29
“The role of Substantive Youth Participation and Representation in Advancing Climate Change Policies” with Neringa Tumenaite, Ph.D. Candidate, SOAS University of London, Fulbright Schuman Fellow at FXB Center for Health & Human Rights, Harvard University
“Data-driven lessons from accessing international forest carbon funding for Costa Rica and Côte d’Ivoire” with Rafael Monge, Mid-Career Master’s in Public Administration student, Harvard Kennedy School, Former Director of the National Center of Geoenvironmental Information of the Ministry of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica
Week 5 | March 6
“Potential threats to ocean biodiversity in the transition to renewable energy” with Jacqueline Evans, an MC-MPA 2024 student at the Harvard Kennedy School from the Cook Islands in the Pacific
Week 6 | March 20
“Geospatial Machine Learning: Data-focused algorithm design, development, and evaluation” with Esther Rolf, a postdoctoral fellow with the Harvard Data Science Initiative and the Center for Research on Computation and Society
“Isotopes as a Tool to Investigate Organic Aerosol Emissions and Atmospheric Oxidation Pathways” with Daniel Crocker, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Week 7 | March 28
“From Meat to Greens: Transforming Taiwanese Diets for a Sustainable Future” with Sarah Wang
“Modeling Nutrition Transitions at Both Poles: the Arctic & Madagascar” with Sappho Gilbert
Week 8 | April 3
“Lithium Ion Battery Manufacturing” with Adhitya Raghavan, HBS
“Deliberative Climate Politics – Comparing the Irish Citizens’ Assembly and the French Citizen Convention for Climate” with
Postdoctoral research fellow, Ash Center, HKS
Week 9 | April 11
“Can Doughnut Economics Guide Urban Development in Balance with People and Planet?” with Emil Bender Lassen in Public Policy student at HKS
“Regenerative Agrivoltaics as a path to net zero- the case for widespread implementation” with Anastassia Nefedova, Graduate Student (ALM) in Sustainability at the Harvard Extension School
Week 10 | April 17
“Private Wind Rights and Their Public Consequences” with Dolly Bai, 3L J.D. candidate at HLS
“Environmental History of Brazilian Hydropower: Reflecting on Past Experiences with Low-Carbon Energy” with Matthew P. Johnson, an environmental historian and 2022-2024 postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment