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March 27 |  Zoom Panel 10:30 am - 11:30 am  & Lunch 12:00 pm - 1 pm | SEC West Atrium | Open to all SEAS | Register here

Professor Desirée Plata

School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Climate and Energy

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Clay minerals are among the most abundant and sustainable on earth, and due to this and their low-cost they are found in many traditional applications that exploit their physical and chemical properties, including their mechanical stability, their non-toxicity and in effect their underlying 2D nanoscale character.

A Harvard Climate Action Week book talk with Prof. Michael B. McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies at Harvard University, and Prem Shankar Jha, Former Visiting Fellow, Harvard-China Project; author and journalist

REGISTER HERE for the Zoom Link

Join us for this MDE Talk to hear from Juliet Russell, Head of Sustainability at Stella McCartney.

With experience working across a variety of industries in Impact and Sustainability and spending time at brands including Stella McCartney and PANGAIA, Juliet explores what it means to work in this space within the fashion industry, whilst bringing an academic perspective to what is often of creative & business dominance. 

The clean energy transition is imperative for mitigating climate change and ensuring a sustainable future. Electrochemical technologies such as batteries, powered by abundant and cheap renewable electricity, will play an important role in the energy transition. The electrolyte is an indispensable component of any electrochemical system, impacting the electrochemical stability, reaction kinetics and transport properties.

A Harvard-China Project Research Seminar with Haiyang Lin, Harvard-China Project Postdoctoral Fellow

Nanostructured materials can be designed with sophisticated features to fulfill the complex requirements of advanced material applications. Our laboratory has developed organic and inorganic nanoparticles and nanocomposites for advanced drug delivery, antimicrobial, stem cell culture, and tissue engineering applications. In addition, we have nanofabricated microfluidic systems for drug screening, in vitro toxicology, and diagnostic applications.

The 2025 Dean’s Dialogue Panel will explore the sustainability of electric vehicles (EVs) by discussing their environmental costs and benefits. Across the world, policymakers and car manufacturers are championing EVs as a critical solution to reducing oil consumption and combating climate change. But are EVs truly as eco-friendly as they claim to be? This panel will delve into the complex realities of EV sustainability, examining the environmental impacts of electricity production, the extraction of raw materials, and the recyclability of EV components.

Machine learning can significantly improve performance for decision-making under uncertainty
in a wide range of domains. However, ensuring robustness guarantees and satisfaction of risk
constraints requires well-calibrated uncertainty estimates, yet there may be many valid
uncertainty estimates, each with their own performance profile—i.e., not all uncertainty is
equally valuable for downstream decision-making. To address this problem, we developed an
end-to-end framework to learn uncertainty representations for stochastic, robust, and