Michaela Jarvis

Continuing their efforts to build networks pursuing cutting-edge policy research to help solve some of society’s biggest challenges, MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and the Technology and Policy Program (TPP) organized and hosted the Technology, Data, and Policy Conference June 16-18, 2024 at MIT.

“This meeting served as a way to build and reinforce research networks that can serve technology and policy students throughout their careers by meeting with other policy students from other schools,” says Frank Field ’78, SM ’81, PhD ’85, senior research engineer and interim director of TPP. “A student conference like this has proven to be a way to engender the kind of cross-fertilization of research ideas that can be so helpful, particularly for new members of the community.”

Research presented at the conference covered a broad range of topics, with deep dives into topics ranging from “Adapting drought indicators to climate change in glacier-fed river basins,” to “Cooperation and interdependence in global science funding.”

Gathering technology and policy researchers working on such diverse analyses creates connections that would otherwise require considerably more effort to create, says Noelle Selin, professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and IDSS and the IDSS interim director for the 2023-24 academic year.

“There are a lot of lessons to be learned across different domains about how technically focused policy analysis can be used to better understand systems and inform decision-making,” Selin says. “At the same time, there are few opportunities for cross-talk — that is, for people whose work is focused on, for example, energy to draw parallels to those who are working on, say, internet policy.”

“By creating community” with events like the June conference, Selin says, “we hope that the broader field, and the application domains within it, benefit from exchange of ideas and innovative techniques.”

This year’s conference had its origins in annual student conferences organized since 2002 by the Technology, Management, and Policy Consortium, which is made up of MIT’s TPP and similar programs at other universities, including Carnegie Mellon, TU Delft, and George Washington University.

“From my point of view, the most important thing is that we got the technology management and policy doctoral consortium meetings going again,” says Granger Morgan, professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.  “Since 2002, when the first meeting occurred at the Technical University of Delft, these meetings in which doctoral students present their work have moved back and forth across the Atlantic. Because of Covid, the meetings got suspended for a few years and then MIT took the lead with support from a number of others of us to get things started up again.”

According to Field, the conferences allow faculty to “see some of the rising researchers in the field, and there have been lots of faculty hires arising out of that student exposure.”

For Connor Mack, a graduate student from the University of California San Diego, the conference was a first. Mack’s award-winning flash talk presentation explored the scaling potential of marine carbon dioxide removal by creating models based on analogous industries.

Peter Heller SM ’24, who graduated from TPP in June, says that networking at the conference with colleagues from MIT and other institutions broadened his perspective. An awardee for his flash talk on the need for reassessment of federal household energy subsidies as decarbonization occurs, Heller points out that, “My research is important because, as we transition to a decarbonized world, it is increasingly important that we ensure that all households are brought along.”

Leah Kaplan, a Ph.D. candidate at George Washington University who won an award for her presentation on the impacts of autonomous taxi services, says the conference provided an ideal setting for networking with other graduate students and faculty doing similar research — and that she was able to connect with potential collaborators on her research.

Alumni of earlier conferences also attended, and several graduate students remarked on the support they felt from the more seasoned researchers.

Josephine Wolff SM ’12, PhD ’15, now an associate professor of cybersecurity at the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, says this year’s conference was her third. The first two she attended were when she was a graduate student.

“I attended this year because I think it’s hugely interesting and exciting as a scholar to get to see all the brilliant and diverse projects that current graduate students who are interested in tech policy are working on, and also because I think fostering a community for those students is really crucial for ensuring their long-term success as researchers and their understanding of how they connect to a broader field of technology policy researchers.”

Wolff says many of her friends and colleagues in academia are people she met at programs like the Technology, Data, and Policy Conference, and they represent a diverse set of specialties, from climate science to space policy. “I think this conference was a way to make sure that graduate students studying these issues have a chance to build that kind of diverse community of peers as well, early on in their research careers.”

Field says this year’s conference demonstrated that it and other past events have done what organizers set out to do.

“This year’s event ended up showing me the extent to which the TPP, Technology, Management, and Policy, and MIT network has developed and grown.”