Sustainability: Building Teams to Tackle Complex Problems

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TECHNICALThis project supports a workshop, entitled Sustainability: Building Teams to Tackle Complex Problems, to be held November 25-26, 2012 at the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting in Boston. The workshop is supported by the Divisions of Materials Research, Chemistry, Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS. The primary objective of this workshop is to present a broader view of sustainable development to the MRS audience. Specifically, the highly interdisciplinary nature of the sustainable development field will be emphasized, with particular attention to practical issues, such as generating serious interactions between scientists, engineers, industrial ecologists, economists and other practitioners in the diverse sustainable development arena. The forum goals are well aligned with the Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative and many other sustainability and disciplinary programs across NSF, including the new Sustainable Chemistry, Engineering, and Materials (SusChEM) investment.NON TECHNICALThis workshop will have broader impacts by fostering a holistic approach toward the science and engineering of sustainable development, and by addressing the practical challenges associated with successful interdisciplinary research and training for the next generation workforce in these techniques. The workshop will feature a diverse set of speakers and panelists, including women, underrepresented minorities, and early-career scientists, and it will expose a national and international group of researchers to the field of sustainable development. This group includes academic faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, post docs, and industrial and government researchers in all fields of science and engineering. In particular, the workshop will feature virtual contributions from student groups based at Stanford University and KAUST in Saudi Arabia (MRS's first university chapter outside of the U.S.). The workshop will foster new interdisciplinary, and potentially transformative, collaborations in this important research area, and will help researchers make their interdisciplinary research more effective. Thus, the broader impact on education, research and training of faculty members as well as graduate and undergraduate students will be substantial. Additional broader impacts will be created through disseminating information via the MRS Bulletin, Materials360, and using LinkedIn (MRS group and group on Materials for Energy and Sustainable Development), and through video capture and two-way streaming, as part of an MRS experiment toward virtual meeting activities. The workshop will also be held in conjunction with a four-day symposium entitled "Materials as Tools for Sustainability," which should bring a large audience to the workshop and educate them not only in the materials aspects of sustainability, but also in the broader, interdisciplinary nature of the field. Upon completion of the workshop, an evaluation will be sent to workshop participants to gauge the impact of the event, and a short document will be written to summarize best practices and challenges remaining for successful interdisciplinary sustainability research.