The geologic record demonstrates that our environment has changed over a variety of time scales from seconds to billions of years. This course explores the many ways in which geologic processes control and modify the Earth’s environment and serves as an introduction to Environmental Earth Science Field Course (12.120), which addresses field applications of these principles in the American Southwest.

This graduate seminar is taught in a lecture and lab exercise format. The subject matter is tailored to introduce Environmental Engineering students to the use and potential of Geographic Information Systems in their discipline. Lectures will cover the general concepts of GIS use and introduce the material in the exercises that demonstrate the practical application of GIS.

This class is one of the core requirements for the Environmental Masters of Engineering program. It is designed to teach about environmental engineering through the use of case studies, computer software tools, and seminars from industrial experts. Case studies provide the basis for group projects as well as individual theses. Past case studies have included the MMR Superfund site on Cape Cod; restoration of the Florida Everglades; dredging of Boston Harbor; local watershed trading programs; appropriate wastewater treatment technology for Brazil; point-of-use water treatment for Nepal, Brownfields Development in Providence, RI, and water resource planning for the island of Cyprus. This class spans the entire academic year: students must register for the Fall term, IAP, and the Spring term.

This class is one of the core requirements for the Environmental Masters of Engineering program, in conjunction with 1.133 Masters of Engineering Concepts of Engineering Practice. It is designed to teach about environmental engineering through the use of case studies, computer software tools, and seminars from industrial experts. Case studies provide the basis for group projects as well as individual theses. Recent 1.782 projects include the MMR Superfund site on Cape Cod, appropriate wastewater treatment technology for Brazil and Honduras, point-of-use water treatment and safe storage procedures for Nepal and Ghana, Brownfields Development in Providence, RI, and water resource planning for the island of Cyprus and refugee settlements in Thailand. This class spans the entire academic year; students must register for the Fall and Spring terms.

This class explores the foundations of the environmental justice movement, current and emerging issues, and the application of environmental justice analysis to environmental policy and planning. It examines claims made by diverse groups along with the policy and civil society responses that address perceived inequity and injustice. While focused mainly on the United States, international issues and perspectives are also considered.

This seminar introduces students to basic principles of environmental justice and presents frameworks for analyzing and addressing inequalities in the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens from the perspectives of social science, public policy, and law.

Through site-specific client-based work, this course will allow students to materially contribute to redevelopment decision-making regarding a former inner-city industrial site. The course will focus on generating and analyzing pragmatic redevelopment scenarios given the issues of brownfields and environmental contamination, community preferences, regulatory constraints and economic realities.
The course is designed along two parallel and mutually reinforcing educational tracks: Field learning and classroom reflection, with ample time built into the schedule for both. As the course will focus on an actual site, there will be a sizeable portion of student time spent on location and in the surrounding community.

This class provides a general introduction to the diverse roles of microorganisms in natural and artificial environments. It will cover topics including: cellular architecture, energetics, and growth; evolution and gene flow; population and community dynamics; water and soil microbiology; biogeochemical cycling; and microorganisms in biodeterioration and bioremediation.

This course explores the proper role of government in the regulation of the environment. It will help students develop the tools to estimate the costs and benefits of environmental regulations. These tools will be used to evaluate a series of current policy questions, including: Should air and water pollution regulations be tightened or loosened? What are the costs of climate change in the U.S. and abroad? Is there a “Race to the Bottom” in environmental regulation? What is “sustainable development”? How do environmental problems differ in developing countries? Are we running out of oil and other natural resources? Should we be more energy efficient? To gain real world experience, the course is scheduled to include a visit to the MIT cogeneration plant. We will also do an in-class simulation of an air pollution emissions market.

This class explores the interrelationship between humans and natural environments. It does so by focusing on conflict over access to and use of the environment as well as ideas about “nature” in various parts of the world.

This course focuses on the thermal, luminous, and acoustic behavior of buildings, examining the basic scientific principles underlying these phenomena and introducing students to technologies and analysis techniques for designing comfortable indoor environments. Students are challenged to apply these techniques and explore the role light, energy, and sound can play in shaping architecture.

Modern industrial activities - which MIT engineers and scientists play a major role in - have significant environmental and social impacts. Trends towards further industrialization and globalization portend major challenges for society to manage the adverse impacts of our urban and industrial activities. How serious are current environmental and social problems? Why should we care about them? How are governments, corporations, activists, and ordinary citizens responding to these problems.
This course examines environmental and social impacts of industrial society and policy responses. We will explore current trends in industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, analyze the impacts these trends have on human health, environmental sustainability, and equity, and then examine a range of policy options available for responding to current problems. The course will present key trends in both domestic and international contexts.
We will examine four policy problems in particular during the course: (1) regulating industrial pollution; (2) regulating “sweatshops” and the broader impacts of globalization; (3) protecting ecosystems; and (4) protecting urban environments during development. We delve into specific cases of these challenges, including: chemical safety and toxins; computers, e-commerce, and the environment; biotech and society; sweatshops; and food production and consumption. Through these cases, we will explore underlying processes and drivers of environmental degradation. Finally, we will analyze opportunities and barriers to policy responses taken by governments, international institutions, corporations, non-governmental organizations, consumers, and impacted communities.
Objectives and Aims

An understanding of the complexity of environmental and social impacts of industry;
An ability to critically analyze policy responses;
An understanding of the roles of different actors and institutions in environmental and social controversies;
Means to evaluate institutional barriers to environmental and social policies;
New ideas for better integrating industry, environment, and equity;
New strategies for regulation in the global economy;
An understanding about personal responsibilities and roles in environmental and social problems.

A great variety of processes affect the surface of the Earth. Topics to be covered are production and movement of surficial materials; soils and soil erosion; precipitation; streams and lakes; groundwater flow; glaciers and their deposits. The course combines aspects of geology, climatology, hydrology, and soil science to present a coherent introduction to the surface of the Earth, with emphasis on both fundamental concepts and practical applications, as a basis for understanding and intelligent management of the Earth’s physical and chemical environment.

Communities have always wrestled with the multiple purposes of education: to train young people for careers, vocations, and college; to prepare them for their roles as citizens; to develop habits of reflective, ethical adults; and to create a common experience in a pluralistic society while meeting the needs of individual learners. As the world changes and grows more complex, returning to these important questions of purpose can help guide schools in their growth and strategic change.
To ensure our schools are effective, we need to routinely reimagine what the high school graduate of the future will need to know and be able to do. The artifact that communicates these ideas is called a graduate profile. Making explicit the capabilities, competencies, knowledge, and attitudes for secondary school graduates, and inviting key stakeholders like students and community members to be engaged in the process, can help you and your school to focus your vision of success and drive school innovation efforts.
This course is part of the Open Learning Library, which is free to use. You have the option to sign up and enroll in the course if you want to track your progress, or you can view and use all the materials without enrolling.

During development a single totipotent cell gives rise to the vast array of cell types present in the adult human body, yet each cell has essentially the same DNA sequence. As cells differentiate, distinct sets of genes must be coordinately activated and repressed, ultimately leading to a cell-type specific pattern of gene expression and a particular cell fate. In eukaryotic organisms, DNA is packaged in a complex protein super structure known as chromatin. Modification and reorganization of chromatin play a critical role in coordinating the cell-type specific gene expression programs that are required as a cell transitions from a pluripotent stem cell to a fully differentiated cell type. Epigenetics refers to such heritable changes that occur in chromatin without altering the primary DNA sequence. This class will focus on the role of epigenetic regulation with respect to developmental fate and also consider the fact that the epigenetic mechanisms discussed have broad implications, including how seemingly normal cells can be transformed into cancerous cells.
This course is one of many Advanced Undergraduate Seminars offered by the Biology Department at MIT. These seminars are tailored for students with an interest in using primary research literature to discuss and learn about current biological research in a highly interactive setting. Many instructors of the Advanced Undergraduate Seminars are postdoctoral scientists with a strong interest in teaching.

This course explores equity as a key value, measure, and framework for operationalizing local economic development plans and policies. It examines the implementation of local policy initiatives for equity in U.S. cities and investigates a wide range of contemporary theory and practice in the field of urban economic development, from contracting and municipal procurement to arts and culture-driven approaches.

This course introduces students to iterative decoding algorithms and the codes to which they are applied, including Turbo Codes, Low-Density Parity-Check Codes, and Serially-Concatenated Codes. The course will begin with an introduction to the fundamental problems of Coding Theory and their mathematical formulations. This will be followed by a study of Belief Propagation–the probabilistic heuristic which underlies iterative decoding algorithms. Belief Propagation will then be applied to the decoding of Turbo, LDPC, and Serially-Concatenated codes. The technical portion of the course will conclude with a study of tools for explaining and predicting the behavior of iterative decoding algorithms, including EXIT charts and Density Evolution.

This course introduces the theory of error-correcting codes to computer scientists. This theory, dating back to the works of Shannon and Hamming from the late 40’s, overflows with theorems, techniques, and notions of interest to theoretical computer scientists. The course will focus on results of asymptotic and algorithmic significance. Principal topics include:

Construction and existence results for error-correcting codes.
Limitations on the combinatorial performance of error-correcting codes.
Decoding algorithms.
Applications in computer science.

This half-semester course introduces computational methods for solving physical problems, especially in nuclear applications. The course covers ordinary and partial differential equations for particle orbit, and fluid, field, and particle conservation problems; their representation and solution by finite difference numerical approximations; iterative matrix inversion methods; stability, convergence, accuracy and statistics; and particle representations of Boltzmann’s equation and methods of solution such as Monte-Carlo and particle-in-cell techniques.

This course is designed to be a survey of the various subdisciplines of geophysics (geodesy, gravity, geomagnetism, seismology, and geodynamics) and how they might relate to or be relevant for other planets. No prior background in Earth sciences is assumed, but students should be comfortable with vector calculus, classical mechanics, and potential field theory.