[E&E seminars] ESI News: ESI Springtime

[Dara Entekhabi]

To the ESI Community,

Spring has arrived, finally..I hope.and along with it comes a flowering of
new activity at ESI.

1.	Most notably, Kurt Sternlof has joined us as Executive Director.
Kurt brings a broad range of skills and experience to this key position,
including earth science research and education, science journalism and
public relations, and environmental and natural hazards consulting.  A
specialist in structural geology and geomechanics, he is also an MIT EAPS
alumnus (M.S.) with degrees from Yale (B.S.) and Stanford (Ph.D.). Kurt
brings a solid earth perspective to ESI that will enrich the scope of our
research.

You can find Kurt in 16-177 and reach him at kurtser at mit.edu or by phone at
3-6895.  He is looking forward to meeting everyone.

2.	ESI will be sponsoring three spring seminars on alternate Tuesdays
at 4:15 pm in 56-114.  The first talk is coming up this Tuesday, April 14,
when Professor John Sterman, Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management,  will
discuss and demonstrate C-ROADS, a user-friendly computer climate model
designed to produce real-time simulations in support of active climate
policy negotiations.  The title of his talk is: Rapid, Flexible Simulations
to Support Climate Negotiations.

The second seminar on Tuesday, April 28 will be delivered by EAPS Senior
Research Scientist Mick Follows, who will present work from the Darwin
Project in a talk entitled: Modeling the Community Structure and Diversity
of Marine Phytoplankton.

For the final talk on Tuesday, May 12, noted science writer and ESI Visiting
Scholar Deborah Cramer will present her latest book Smithsonian Ocean: Our
Water, Our World as a case study in communicating complex scientific
concepts to a general audience.  The beautiful images alone will be well
worth attendance.

3.	Kurt has created an administered email list using MIT's Mailman
system to facilitate our sending news and announcements to the ESI
community.  This email was distributed using
earth-system-initiative at mit.edu.  The information page for this list is
located at
https://mailman.mit.edu:444/mailman/listinfo/earth-system-initiative, where
you can both subscribe and unsubscribe.  Please forward this email and/or
link to anyone whom you think would be interested to join ESI.

4.	Finally, in cooperation with the MIT Energy Initiative and the Joint
Program for the Science & Policy of Global Change, we are pleased to
announce an ESI Symposium for 2009 on the topic of climate engineering. More
on that soon.  Please mark your calendars for September 24, 2009.
All the best for a fruitful spring,

Dara Entekhabi
Director, ESI


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