Professorships at MIT
A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by MIT Spectrum about my current role as Faculty Director of the MIT Center For Real Estate and also as a leader of the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab. This was quite an opportunity to share my vision and appreciate all the hard work that has been done at MIT to address global challenges, mainly fast urbanization and climate change.
MIT is not only an environment where we can all develop ourselves and do research on our fields but also a place that enables collaboration across multiple disciplines. That is unique in a research environment. MIT is widely known for its innovative reputation through its top-notch engineers. Over the past few decades, it has also shown an excellent research capacity in economics, architecture, and many other fields.
As we face new global challenges, no single answer and no single discipline can address them. Thus, I sincerely believe that the only way is through multidisciplinary collaboration.
In addition, this is also my first semester as Faculty Director for the Center for Real Estate. I have been investigating the Real Estate markets since I obtained my Ph.D. from Tsinghua University back in 2005. Surprisingly or not, buildings account for more than 50% of the carbon emissions in the cities. Isn’t that incredible? Whole massive concrete blocks that last for so many years are one of the primary producers of carbon. I still cannot believe it. However, I think we can address this issue. It is neither out of our scope nor impossible to research how real estate developers and managers can meet the new zero-carbon goals in the following years.
Don’t think that I am naïve. I know that there is so much work to do regarding this and so many interests involved. So, in the next few months, I will be reaching out to many other researchers to look for opportunities to collaborate and find how we can aid the real estate industry and the urban planners to achieve a more sustainable development path. I trust that MIT is the right environment to pursue this kind of challenge, and I ask my colleagues and fellow researchers to approach me if you want to collaborate. We, as a group, are more than the sum of the individual parts. Let’s change the future. For us, for our kids, for the ones that come after us. We owe them.
