Harvard Science & Engineering to Navigate a Warming World

Harvard Science & Engineering to Tame a Warming World: Four climatech innovators walk into a bar.

Harvard Grid, which partners with researchers to help shape and lift science and engineering from Harvard labs out to market for impact, will dig into four world-changing inventions that are vastly more sustainable and hospitable for our planet…and their own bottomline. Some are still in the lab, some are rapidly shaping for launch, some are in the world starting to change how we do what we do. We will feature four graduate students with aspirations to see their work impact the world, whether by emitting less greenhouse gasses (GHGs), reducing atmospheric GHGs, mitigating the effects of a warming planet, or measuring markers to help inform how our actions affect global climate. Join us for a pint or bite at the Queen’s Head, a student-owned and -operated pub in Memorial Hall, and flow into conversation with four Harvard graduate students who plan to re-design the world and its climate with their science and engineering research.

Open to all Harvard Climate Action Week (HCAW) attendees on a first come basis (space is limited). Please visit the Salata Institute HCAW website for information.

PANELISTS

Alex Berkowitz MLA '23, Founder & CEO, Coastal Protection Solutions

Alex Berkowitz is the Founder & CEO of Coastal Protection Solutions (CPS). CPS was founded by Alex after her community of Rockaway Beach, NY was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012. CPS specializes in patent-pending offshore structures that dampen waves and absorb wave energy. CPS’s main system is called The Wavebreaker™ which acts as a 300-foot wave “speedbump,” dampening height and velocity, to protect communities from storms while also generating clean wave energy. CPS empowers cities globally to be resilient and independent in the face of rising sea levels and climate change. CPS has won the prestigious Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge and The Clinton Global Initiative Resiliency Award. Alex has a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She has spoken at World Ocean Day at COP28 and at The World Bank Spring Meetings. Alex and CPS have been featured in The Boston Globe, Nasdaq, and ABC News Boston.

Max Leaf, MBA student, COO, AgX

Max Leef is a first-year MBA student at HBS. He comes from the sustainable agriculture industry where he spent 3 years as the systems design engineer and product manager of a vertical aquaponic farm in Brooklyn, growing hybrid striped bass and leafy green vegetables. Prior to that, he worked in the aerospace/defense industry as a mechanical engineer. He is passionate about all things food, nutrition, and sustainability.   AgX is working to empower farmers and facilitate the transition to more sustainable and humane farming practices by utilizing hardware-enabled software. Currently, AgX provides livestock management software in conjunction with farm monitoring hardware, including cattle-tracking ear tags that virtually fence and monitor cows.

Corey Pederson, PhD student, Environmental Science and Engineering

Corey Pedersen is an Environmental Science and Engineering PhD student in Frank Keutsch's research group. His work involves laboratory experiments, high-altitude aircraft measurements, and global chemistry-climate modeling. Corey earned his BS in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin – Madison where he studied nano-film coatings on sea spray aerosols. His research seeks to understand the chemistry that happens on stratospheric aerosols to better inform our understanding and modeling of the stratosphere. This work is highly relevant to important issues such as ozone destruction and stratospheric aerosol injection as a form of solar radiation management geoengineering.

Benjamin Schafer, Co-Founder, MicroAvionics; PhD student, Experimental Physics and Chemistry

Ben Schafer is an applied physics PhD student in Joost Vlassak and David Keith's research groups. He is a co-founder of MicroAvionics, which aims to develop photophoretic levitation for near-space flight, and is a 2024 New Mexico LEEP fellow. He earned a BS in physics and chemistry from Hamilton College and has conducted research at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.