This project supports a workshop, entitled Sustainability: Building Teams to Tackle Complex Problems, to be held November 25-26, 2012 at the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting in Boston. The workshop is supported by the Divisions of Materials Research, Chemistry, Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems, and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities in MPS. The primary objective of this workshop is to present a broader view of sustainable development to the MRS audience. Specifically, the highly interdisciplinary nature of the sustainable development field will be emphasized, with particular attention to practical issues, such as generating serious interactions between scientists, engineers, industrial ecologists, economists and other practitioners in the diverse sustainable development arena. The forum goals are well aligned with the Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative and many other sustainability and disciplinary programs across NSF, including the new Sustainable Chemistry, Engineering, and Materials (SusChEM) investment.
NON TECHNICAL This workshop will have broader impacts by fostering a holistic approach toward the science and engineering of sustainable development, and by addressing the practical challenges associated with successful interdisciplinary research and training for the next generation workforce in these techniques. The workshop will feature a diverse set of speakers and panelists, including women, underrepresented minorities, and early-career scientists, and it will expose a national and international group of researchers to the field of sustainable development. This group includes academic faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, post docs, and industrial and government researchers in all fields of science and engineering. In particular, the workshop will feature virtual contributions from student groups based at Stanford University and KAUST in Saudi Arabia (MRS's first university chapter outside of the U.S.). The workshop will foster new interdisciplinary, and potentially transformative, collaborations in this important research area, and will help researchers make their interdisciplinary research more effective. Thus, the broader impact on education, research and training of faculty members as well as graduate and undergraduate students will be substantial. Additional broader impacts will be created through disseminating information via the MRS Bulletin, Materials360, and using LinkedIn (MRS group and group on Materials for Energy and Sustainable Development), and through video capture and two-way streaming, as part of an MRS experiment toward virtual meeting activities. The workshop will also be held in conjunction with a four-day symposium entitled "Materials as Tools for Sustainability," which should bring a large audience to the workshop and educate them not only in the materials aspects of sustainability, but also in the broader, interdisciplinary nature of the field. Upon completion of the workshop, an evaluation will be sent to workshop participants to gauge the impact of the event, and a short document will be written to summarize best practices and challenges remaining for successful interdisciplinary sustainability research.
The primary objective of this forum was to represent a broader view of sustainable development to the materials community, specifically the highly interdisciplinary nature of the sustainable development field and practical issues, such as generating serious interactions between scientists and engineers of diverse backgrounds. This forum built on the outcomes from two previous MRS events which received NSF support: 1) the 2011 World Materials Summit, held October 9-12, 2011 in Washington, DC, and 2) The Many Facets of Sustainable Development forum, held at the 2012 MRS Spring Meeting. The previous forum focused on the importance of a holistic approach to sustainable development and included speakers from disciplines outside materials science, like the social sciences and economics. This forum built upon the previous forum’s message by addressing practical challenges researches face in building successful interdisciplinary teams to tackle issues in the field, through keynote presentations, interactive breakout and report-out sessions, and panel discussions. This forum was also able to leverage the audience and outcomes of Symposium G, entitled "Materials as Tools for Sustainability," as some sessions were held jointly. This forum provided an opportunity for materials scientists to understand how their work may integrate with a holistic view of sustainable development, including academia, government, and industry, and how they might go about assembling interdisciplinary teams to tackle these complex challenges. By hearing voices from industry, researchers learned the practical value of addressing sustainability, and how "simultaneous improvement of business performance and increased sustainable development are not at odds with each other," as said by Timothy Lindsay (Caterpillar Inc.), and how "we need to move a lot faster, faster than we’ve ever had to move before," as said by Linda Cadwell Stancin (Boeing, Inc.). The perspectives from various angles solidified the value of incorporating "sustainability" concepts into materials research and the return expected from learning the disparate languages of a range of fields to more efficiently develop and use materials research concepts.
