Hannah Rajput is entering her second year in the Technology & Policy Program, where she is building on her background in the History & Philosophy of Science. She explores knowledge creation and translation from academia into diverse decision-making contexts. In her free time you can find her at a bookstore buying more books to add to her growing pile, lying in the grass at the park, or planning a party.
What is the focus of your research? What sort of knowledge and disciplines does it bring together? How will it make an impact?
My research focuses on the creation and translation of environmental and climate risk metrics from academia into communities. I work on the System for the Triage of Risks from Environmental and Socioeconomic Stressors (STRESS) platform at the Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3). STRESS currently maps county-level data across the United States for over 100 socio-economic and environmental metrics and allows users to combine a subset of these to create combinatory risk metrics. My work so far has focused on communicating complicated scientific metrics in coherent and meaningful ways to a general audience, doing public outreach, and investigating the epistemic basis for quantifying risks in different ways. I hope that my work will lead to increased use and usability of the STRESS platform and highlight the diverse ways that people conceptualize climate risk, which will inform future work and collaborations.
This summer you interned with Essex County Community Foundation (ECCF). Who did you work with and what did you do?
I worked with Essex County Community Foundation, which is just north of Boston, on their recently launched Climate Resiliency Coalition. This is a project within their ‘Systems Change’ philanthropic work, which focuses on identifying root causes of an issue and addressing these causes through collaborations across the county. This project is led by Kate Machet, who was my supervisor for the summer. I interviewed local non-profits to learn how they view climate risk and resiliency in their unique contexts, such as for commerce or affordable housing. I also worked on searching for and aggregating relevant socio-economic and environmental data to create maps used to communicate ECCF’s investment areas. This work was an excellent balance between working with qualitative and quantitative data and focusing on both the epistemic basis of climate risk metrics and the implications for the community.
How does the internship connect to your current research and future plans?
This internship provided an invaluable experience to work deeply within a community and better understand climate risk and resiliency in real world contexts. ECCF included me in many meetings, which helped me understand the ways in which federal, state, and local government shape communities and where philanthropy and non-profits fit in. Working on the STRESS platform allowed deeper investigation into the role technology plays in science communication. It was particularly meaningful for me to reflect on this this summer and see how it connected to my initial motivations for coming to TPP, which were rooted in knowledge creation and translation. My work this summer and the support I received along the way solidified this research interest and has inspired me to pursue public sector work and deeper academic exploration of risk quantification. I’d like to thank the MIT Pricilla King Gray Public Service Center (PKG) for their support. Without PKG funding, this internship would not have been possible.
