Tenure promotions announced for two IDSS faculty

IDSS faculty members Noelle Selin and Jessika Trancik have both been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure.

“This is a well-deserved promotion recognizing their outstanding contributions to research and education in their fields,” said IDSS director Munther Dahleh in an announcement of the promotions.

Professor Noelle Selin is nationally and internationally recognized for her work on understanding the pathways from emissions to impacts for pollutants that are present in the atmosphere, in policy-relevant ways. Her research addresses, at a systems level, the full cycle that relates human behavior to policy. This is captured in the following cycle: human activity impact the levels of atmospheric pollutants, atmospheric pollutants can have health effects on humans, and such effects have economic effects that can impact policy—which in turn affects human behavior.

Selin came to MIT in 2007 as a postdoctoral associate at the Center for Global Change Science after completing her PhD at Harvard in Earth and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). She joined the Engineering Systems Division as an assistant professor in 2010 with a joint appointment EAPS. She was promoted to associate professor without tenure in July 2015.

Selin has served as associate director for the Technology and Policy Program (TPP) since July 2015. She is also a member of the campus sustainability task force, the Center for Environmental Health Sciences (CEHS) internal advisory committee, and the MIT Press editorial board. Externally, she is co-chair of the Chemistry-Climate Working Group, Community Earth Systems Model (CESM) (2014-present), and co-chair of the Working Group for International GEOS-Chem Steering Committee (atmospheric model oversight, 2011-present). She is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Conference on Mercury as a Global Pollutant (2017), and the Scientific Advisory Committee; the Center for Air, Climate, and Energy Solutions (CACES); Carnegie Mellon University; and others.

She has substantially contributed to the curriculum in ESD/IDSS and the Technology and Policy Program (TPP). She is the winner of several awards including the NSF CAREER Award, the Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and an Environmental Science & Technology best policy paper award. Her work has had an impact on environmental policy and has often been referenced by the EPA.

Professor Jessika Trancik is recognized by the energy community as an innovative researcher who has pioneered a unique and bold research program. Her research focuses on the understanding of energy systems, in the context of evaluation as well as the prediction of cost and innovation. The focus of her research is the impact such technologies have on climate change. In her work, she also considers social data that indicates the willingness of societies to adopt certain technologies beyond cost.

She received her PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002. She then spent 6 years at Columbia University, first as an Earth Institute fellow, and then as an associate research fellow. She held the position of an Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute for three years starting in 2006. She joined MIT in January 2010 as an Assistant Professor in the Engineering Systems Division (ESD).  She was promoted to associate professor without tenure in July 2016.

She has developed two classes in the area of energy technologies that are attended by a wide spectrum of students. She has contributed broadly to MIT by serving on various committees at IDSS and co-leading the International Policy Lab. Externally, Trancik’s contributions include serving as the Climate Change Mitigation Domain Editor for Wiley’s WIRES Climate Change (2014-present), and serving as a member of the Santa Fe Institute’s Steering Committee (2014-present). Most recently, she was invited to advise the White House ahead of the Paris climate negotiations (2016) for which she developed a report that was repeatedly cited during the negotiations.  Trancik was invited to present at the World Economic Forum (2017).