Noelle Eckley Selin

Noelle Selin is the Director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, a program incorporating and succeeding both the Center for Global Change Science and Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change while adding new capabilities to produce leading-edge research to help guide societal transitions toward a more sustainable future. Previously, she served as the Interim Director for MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society and Director of the MIT Technology and Policy Program.

Selin’s research uses modeling and analysis to inform sustainability decision-making, focusing on issues involving air pollution, climate change and hazardous substances such as mercury and persistent organic pollutants (POPs). She also co-leads Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge, an MIT Climate Grand Challenges project aimed at developing fast emulators of full climate models to democratize access to climate information.

She received her PhD and MA (Earth and Planetary Sciences) and BA (Environmental Science and Public Policy) from Harvard University. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, she was a research scientist with the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. In addition to her scientific work, she has published articles and book chapters on the interactions between science and policy in international environmental negotiations, in particular focusing on global efforts to regulate hazardous substances. She was also a research associate with the Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a visiting researcher at the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen, Denmark, and worked on chemicals issues at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

As critical challenges such as climate, health, energy, and food security increasingly affect people’s lives around the world, decision-makers need a better understanding of the Earth in its full complexity.

Noelle Eckley Selin