GoKawiilHand in hand
The coupling of climate and energy in Wang’s portfolio is strategic. “Energy and climate are two sides of the same coin,” she explains. “A major reason we are seeing climate change is that we haven’t deployed solutions at a scale necessary to mitigate the CO 2 emissions from the energy sector. The ways we generate energy and manage emissions are fundamental to any strategy addressing climate change. At the same time, the world demands more and more energy—a demand we can’t possibly meet through a single means.”
“Zero-emissions and low-carbon approaches will not be enough to supply the necessary energy or to reverse our impact on the climate … We need to do something truly transformational. That is the heart of the challenge.”
What’s more, she contends that switching from fossil fuels to cleaner energy, while fundamental, is only part of the solution. “Zero-emissions and low-carbon approaches will not be enough to supply the necessary energy or to reverse our impact on the climate,” she says. “We need to consider the environmental impacts of these new fuels we develop and deploy. We need to use data analysis to move goods and energy more efficiently and intelligently. We need to consider raising more of our food in water and using food by-products and waste to help sequester carbon. In short, we need to do something truly transformational. That is the heart of the challenge.”
That challenge seems destined to grow more daunting in the coming years. There are still, Wang observes, areas of “energy poverty”—places where people cannot access sufficient energy to sustain their well-being. But solving that problem will only drive up energy production and consumption worldwide. The explosive growth of AI will likely do the same, since the huge data centers that power the technology require enormous quantities of energy for both computation and cooling.
Wang believes that while AI will continue to drive electricity demand, it can also contribute to creating a more sustainable future.“We can use AI to develop climate and energy solutions,” she says. “AI can play a primary role in solution sets, can give us new and improved ways to manage intermittent loads in the energy grid. It can help us develop new catalysts and chemicals or help us stabilize the plasma we’ll use in nuclear fusion. It could augment climate and geospatial modeling that would allow us to predict the impact of potential climate solutions before we implement them. We could even use AI to reduce computational needs and thereby ease cooling demand.”
Change the narrative, change the culture
MIT was humming with climate and energy research long before Wang returned to campus in 2025 after wrapping up her work at ARPA-E. Almost 400 researchers across 90% of MIT’s departments responded to President Reif’s 2020 Climate Grand Challenges initiative. The Institute awarded $2.7 million to 27 finalist teams and identified five flagship projects, including one to create an early warning system to help mitigate the impact of climate disasters, another to predict and prepare for extreme weather events, and an ambitious project to slash nearly half of all industrial carbon emissions.
About 250 MIT faculty and senior researchers are now involved in the Climate Project at MIT, a campus-wide initiative launched in 2024 that works to generate and implement climate solutions, tools, and policy proposals. Conceived to bolster MIT’s already significant efforts as a leading source of technological, behavioral, and policy solutions to global climate issues, the Climate Project has identified six “missions”: decarbonizing energy and industry; preserving the atmosphere, land, and oceans; empowering frontline community action; designing resilient and prosperous cities; enabling new policy approaches; and wild cards, a catch-all category that supports development of unconventional solutions outside the scope of the other missions. Faculty members direct each mission.
With so much climate research already underway,a large part of Wang’s new role is to support and deepen existing projects. But to fully tap into MIT’s unique capabilities, she says, she’s aiming to foster some cultural shifts. And that begins with identifying ways to facilitate cooperation—both across the Institute and with external partners—on a scale that can make “something truly transformational” happen, she says. “At this stage, with the challenges we face in energy and climate, we need to do something ambitious.”
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