Sustainability Assessments Impact Fellow

The MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) Impact Fellowship Program is a postdoctoral opportunity for individuals who want to transcend academia and industry to apply their expertise to near-term change for a more sustainable future. MCSC impact fellows will work with MIT researchers and consortium industry members in collaboration with external organizations and communities to implement solutions needed for global economic transformation to address the global climate change and sustainability crisis. Throughout the program, impact fellows will prepare for leadership positions within the sustainability domain in a wide range of contexts, as well as prepare to drive research that advances breakthrough scalable solutions towards accelerated change.

The MCSC brings together large companies from different sectors to discuss barriers to the sustainable transition. MCSC impact fellows facilitate the discussion and use their expertise to drive the conversation towards sufficient detail to identify problems whose solutions have immediately actionable steps. Roadblocks to a sustainable transition are rarely contained within traditional boundaries of academic disciplines or market sectors. Thus, an impact fellow must have expertise in a field along with technical fluency in others to be able to traverse boundaries between disciplines during live conversations and problem-definition exercises. Impact fellows work in teams to construct problem definitions and potential solutions that draw from their expertise spanning social sciences, humanities, engineering, and physical sciences. Teams may be built with MIT faculty spanning multiple departments as well as corporate partners.

In this posting, we seek an impact fellow to work on sustainability assessment methodologies. Corporations have set ambitious climate and sustainability goals for carbon, water, and biodiversity. There is wide agreement that these are high priority topics for corporations and society, but the accounting methods could be improved for speed, geospatial coverage, and accuracy. Robust approaches for sustainability assessments are critical to measuring progress towards corporate and societal targets, as well as regulated and voluntary markets. The particular focus of this postdoctoral fellow position will be to:

• Summarize the state-of-the art in carbon, water, and biodiversity accounting methods, and GHG target setting and decarbonization pathway characterization.
• Characterize the available carbon, water, and biodiversity accounting and GHG target setting standards and practices used by corporations.
• Work with researchers at MIT and MCSC member companies to develop next generation sustainability assessments in one or more areas:
  1. Carbon accounting methods that consider the complexities of implementing mitigation mechanisms across markets and can be scaled across diverse product portfolios.
  2. Water accounting methods that encompass scarcity and security.
  3. Quantitative biodiversity metrics for flora and fauna.
  4. Science-based targets for GHG emissions using dynamic and equitable allocation approaches.
• Partner with MCSC member companies and other stakeholders to pilot and scale solutions.

Job Requirements:

• Ph.D. in a science or engineering discipline, or an interdisciplinary climate or sustainability program.
  • Experience with data science and programming is preferable.
• Candidates must be familiar with at least 3 of these 6:
  • Life cycle assessment, including attributional and consequential approaches.
  • Corporate greenhouse gas accounting, particularly for scope 3 GHG emissions.
  • Water footprinting.
  • Biodiversity metrics.
  • Science-based GHG emissions targets, including sectoral allocation methods and remaining carbon balance approaches.
  • Developing and deploying interactive software tools, designing user experience and interface, integrating user feedback.
• Experience in proposal writing, group management and coordination.
• Must be highly collaborative and able to work in a team environment with experts from diverse backgrounds.
• Strong communication skills (both written and verbal), including strong listening skills.