Massachusetts Institute of Technology
AC-4: Graduate Program

The Technology and Policy Program (TPP) educates students seeking leadership roles in the constructive development and use of technology—an area that is not well served by the traditional education of technical or social science specialists. TPP focuses on meeting the need for engineering leaders who are capable of dealing effectively with core technical issues in their full economic, political, and administrative contexts.

The TPP vision is oriented around a set of core values and purpose with a bold stretch goal. The core values in the TPP program are represented in the combination of leadership through the highest quality education, objective analysis, and integrity and excellence as the hallmark of the education and people. The core purpose is to help societies and companies identify and implement appropriate technological solutions that enhance human dignity and support justice. The goal is to make the program the most prestigious and sought after in the world and to produce the technological decision makers for the world.

The Master of Science in Transportation (M.S.T.) degree program emphasizes the complexity of transportation, lying at the intersection of technology, operations, planning, management, and policy-making. The program is interdepartmental, drawing on coursework, faculty, and research staff from across MIT. During the two-year program, students work closely with a research advisor to select an individually-designed area of focus within the realm of transportation. Requirements include coursework across different aspects of transportation, as well as specialized work in the designated area of choice.

Climate change is one of the great crises of our time and the transportation sector is a currently a major contributor of carbon emissions. MIT research has contributed to major advances in the design of mobility systems, vehicles and policies from a sustainability perspective. Research labs at MIT are working on such diverse problems as the design of sustainable neighborhoods, organizational culture change to reduce air travel and circular supply chains.

The master’s degree program—designed to be completed in two years—is suitable for motivated students with undergraduate degrees in geoscience, physics, chemistry, mathematics, or engineering. Students spend the first year taking classes and the second conducting research and thesis work. This program prepares students for scientific and management careers in the environmental, natural resources, and technical consulting industries.

The Climate Science Program capitalizes on the overlapping nature of the atmospheric, oceanic, and geological sciences as they relate to climate and climate change. Students have access to unique expertise in all aspects of climate including paleoclimatology and the geological record, all of atmospheric and oceanic physics and chemistry, fluid dynamical modeling of the climate system, hydrology, and geophysics. Ongoing research activities include the study of high latitude North Atlantic deep-sea cores as records of the climate of the past 200,000 years; coupled models of air-sea interaction developed in MIT’s Climate Modeling Initiative; studies of possible mechanisms of the Permo-Triassic Mass extinction; Atlantic Climate Variability; and global biogeochemical cycles.

The Sustainability Certificate was designed as a training-ground where emerging leaders use a sustainability lens to evaluate business-critical questions. Students build and challenge their knowledge in courses, picked from dozens of curated sustainability electives across MIT and MIT Sloan (School of Management). The curriculum provides a rich mix of action learning and conceptual content, while also providing the flexibility for students to discover their own distinctive career path. By the time students graduate with a Sustainability Certificate from MIT Sloan, they are practiced in putting their ideas about sustainability into action to improve the world. One required course for the Certificate is the S-Lab. The Sustainable Business Lab (S-Lab) provides students with a unique opportunity to explore the connection between business, the environment, and society. Through their S-Lab projects, students apply knowledge from the classroom to solve real-world problems and see firsthand how businesses are tackling the massive challenges of sustainability. In the process they develop and refine decision making tools that advance the sustainability field.

Environmental Planning Certificate
Students in the MCP and PhD program who complete a prescribed set of subjects are awarded a Certificate in Environmental Planning.

Modern society is faced with a growing array of increasingly complex economic and technical problems whose solutions require the expertise that is the hallmark of graduates of the Institute. Moreover, governments must make difficult decisions regarding how to distribute increasingly limited resources while balancing the interests of a wide range of stakeholders. Thus, the MIT Certificate Program in Science, Technology and Policy (STP) seeks to complement the outstanding academic experience MIT currently provides to its science and engineering PhD students with a rigorous introduction to the social and policy contexts in which their research is embedded. The required curriculum provides a coherent, rigorous introduction to the STP arena that can be reasonably integrated with the traditional PhD workload.