Environmental Engineering & Toxicology

A team of eight MIT undergraduate and graduate students won two awards in this year’s U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Better Buildings Case Competition, out of more than 150 students from across the country. The win means MIT students have taken home not just one, but two, prizes from the competition each of the three years it has taken place.

Kevin Kung is a 2014 IDEAS Global Challenge Winner for SafiCoils, a low-toxin and loc-cost mosquito coil from char. Read more The annual MIT IDEAS Global Challenge awards ceremony awarded $79,500 on Monday night to 13 student-led teams to further develop inventions and ideas intended to solve pressing environmental and health challenges in developing countries.

Tony Haymet, former director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has heard hundreds of ocean cleanup plans. Late at night, over many beers, he's come up with a few dozen of his own. None of them, he says, has seemed likely to work. That includes this spring's offerings. A Dutch engineering student, Boyan Slat, envisions a contraption with massive booms that would sweep debris into a huge funnel. Songwriter and music producer Pharrell Williams wants to fund the monumental cost of any cleanup by turning recycled ocean plastic into yarn and then clothes.

Morello-Frosch explains that the traditional model of breast cancer research asks a very limited set of questions about the causes of breast cancer. “We are realizing that genetics, lifestyle, when you have kids, your weight, if you drink, all of that kind of stuff - much of which we as women have very little control over – maybe at best explains about 20% of breast cancer cases,” she says, even though these areas have been the focus of research for decades.

One of the ways our Fellows lead is by providing expert testimony before state and national legislative bodies. In March, Mike Wilson and Evan Hansen were called to testify before the U.S.

You work hard every day on issues affecting the health of residents in your state. You release reports about the dangers of fracking and other critical environmental issues. You try to link economic development with natural resource stewardship. You tweet and blog and host webinars to get the issues out to the public. But if you live in a state like West Virginia, you’re literally swimming upstream struggling for recognition of the big issues in the face of policymakers tied to a carbon-based future.

In October 2013, California's Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 711, making it illegal to use lead ammunition for hunting, a ban that will be phased in from 2015 to 2019. For UC Santa Cruz environmental toxicologists Donald Smith and 1998 Switzer Fellow Myra Finkelstein, the bill represents the translation of years of scientific research into a new policy to protect people and wildlife from lead poisoning.

When chemicals such as BPA mimic hormones, it leads to what’s called endocrine disruption. “The effect is not necessarily toxic in the traditional sense,” says Sarah Vogel, director of the health program at the Environmental Defense Fund and author of “Is it Safe? BPA and the Struggle to Define the Safety of Chemicals,” but it is a disruption.