Hopkins recently announced the creation of a new Environment, Energy, Sustainability and Health Institute (E2SHI) which will serve as a virtual facility for coordination among professors and Hopkins schools in the name of reducing the University’s carbon footprint. In addition, the institute will also provide recommendations to fill in Hopkins’s gaps with regards to faculty and curriculum in this area.
E2SHI’s Associate Director Cindy Parker explained that the seeds for the institute were first planted almost four years ago. “Students were pushing the previous president, President Brody, to take climate change more seriously and to look at what role the University could play in getting the climate stabilized,” Parker said.
“That was a great active group of students and President Brody took them seriously, actually, and set up a task force with a number of components,” she added.
Professor Ben Hobbs, the director of E2SHI, is also the chair of the task force. “We came up with an overall report that landed on President Daniels’s desk the week he arrived,” Hobbs said.
The report has three sections, one managing the University’s activities such as what the school should do about energy conservation, the second research and academic-focused and the third dealing with community relationships or how Hopkins students and faculty could work to benefit Baltimore by working with community groups.
One of the recommendations of the task force was to create some sort of umbrella entity that would help oversee all the different types of activities going on.
This entity would be expanded from just being concerned with climate change to looking at sustainability more broadly. Thus, the idea of creating the institute was born.
Hobbs explained that while Hopkins has a tradition of individual faculty members having great ideas that grow into research groups there was no means of these research groups working together.
“What it means is you get these excellent research groups all over the place thinking about how they can coordinate to address a problem that requires skills from many disciplines,” Hobbs said.
According to Hobbs E2SHI was created to fill these gaps. “What the institute is trying to do is to break down the walls between disciplines and get people working together from different departments, to get different schools to respond to research opportunities to put together curricula and to have undergrads and grads respond to the new needs of sustainability,” he stated.
Deans of Krieger, Whiting and Bloomberg signed a charter for E2SHI this past fall outlining the institute’s plan for the next five years.
While the institute focuses heavily on research, it also has plans for courses.
“We’ve put out a call for proposals for student fellowships for our students that are interested in working on these interdisciplinary issues on sustainability and we’ve also put out a call for seed grants,” Parker said.
“We’d like to do more on the educational side of things like getting sustainability issues into more classes,” she added.
“For example, if there’s a statistics class, maybe we could work with interested statistics faculty to develop some case studies that have some relevancy to sustainability so students could learn both the statistics and sustainability at the same time,” Parker said.
Hobbs added that the institute will not only coordinate curricula, but also identify where there are holes and needs for more course offerings. “Or coordinate between departments that could be a good major,” he said.
“We’re not going to offer courses or hire more faculty, but in terms of faculty we may help identify needs; there may be certain topic areas that, ‘gee, if Hopkins just had somebody or a couple people in this area, we would be a lot more competitive in addressing certain types of environmental problems,’ for example we don’t have anyone in transportation,” he said.
No new faculty members will be hired specifically for E2SHI and as a virtual institute no new buildings will be built to house the institute.
Parker explained that the institute doesn’t really need a building.
“We’re kind of very spread out; the point is to integrate a lot of university’s actions, education, research, etc. to focus on these multidisciplinary issues,” Parker said.
Hobbs similarly emphasized the lack of an official building as increasing effectiveness of facilitating coordination among schools.
“I’m not interested in creating an empire; I’m interested in seeing great stuff happening among the schools,” Hobbs said.
While the institute’s opening was officially announced by President Daniels last spring, it only began working as an institute this past fall.
E2SHI’s big kickoff event is April 20th from 3-5 p.m. Daniels and others will be speaking and announcing the new institute.
Hobbs stated that Kathleen Hogan, the director of the Climate Protection Partnerships Division of the U.S. EPA, who created the Energy Star Program, will be speaking.
