email+followup+to+April+24+meeting

Hello everyone, Thanks to all of you who attended the meeting last Tuesday. It was very productive. Sorry for the slow follow up.

We agreed on the following (I've put action items in bold) -- I think this is everything. Please let me know if you would like anything added to our record of the meeting. **Below is the beginning of our list of interdisiplinary + sustainability oriented RPI faculty. Please send me additions from your department and school.**
 * RPI's signature strength in sustainability studies will likely come from its capacity for interdisciplinary research. While other institutions talk a lot about it, there really isn't much there in practice. There is real potential for this capacity at RPI, but it needs be cultivated. This should be a key goal of our task force. We need to build this interdisciplinary capacity, and then figure out how to make it our public face.
 * Plan a one-day symposium for exchange between sustainability-oriented RPI faculty across campus. The date we have set is **Saturday, September 22**. **Please try to keep this day for this event.** We will circulate a call for abstracts in May, asking people to indicate interest (in presenting, attending, or remaining on the our mailing list). Abstracts will be due around September 1. We are looking for a room in EMPAC for this event.
 * Beginning fall 2012, have bi-monthly lunch meetings for sustainability faculty across campus. **The best time slot seem to be Wednesdays, 11:30-1. Please try to keep this slot open.** Let me know if this slot will never work for you. We hope to have these meetings in Terra Cafe; I've been in touch to see if we can have Terra Cafe tables set aside for us.
 * Build a list of RPI faculty with demonstrated interest in interdisciplinary collaboration; this will become our outreach list for the September event, and continuing events afterwards. **Each person on our committee should contribute names.** I've started the list below, with suggestions made by Shengbai, and preliminary suggestions for HASS.
 * We did not have time for much discussion about a spring 2011 event, but agreed that it would be a larger, public event, likely the weekend of Earth Day, alongside an event being planned by Michael Century. **Earth Day weekend is April 21-22, 2012. Please hold these tentative dates for a public event hosted by our task force.**
 * We also had some discussion about how RPI should position itself within the emerging organization of NYState Working Group on Sustainability in Higher Education. As noted above, our group agreed that there is potential for making deep and durable interdisciplinarity in sustainability studies our identity within this group. We may host a fall meeting of this group at RPI, possibly focused on interdisciplinary examples, opportunities and challenges. **I've selected Sunday, October 7 as a very tentative date for this. If interested in this meeting, please check your calendar and let me know if this works for you.**


 * __ Interdisciplinary Sustainability Studies at RPI __**

EARTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE Peter Fox ( foxp@rpi.edu ) Peter's expertise is in data science, computation and geoinformatics;
 * SCHOOL OF SCIENCE **

Miriam Katz ( katzm@rpi.edu ) Mimi works on climate change using micropaleontology.

Bruce Watson Is interested in radioactive waste disposition, CCS, and the fundamental principles (kinetics and thermodynamics) underlying climate proxies --that is, chemical and isotopic signatures that provide information on past climates.

PHYSICS Toh-Ming Lu Vincent Meunier Jim Napolitano Gwo-Ching Wang Christian Wetzel Shengbai Zhang

ARTS Michael Century Kathy High
 * SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES, ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE **

STS Atsushi Akera Faye Duchin Kim Fortun Mike Fortun John Gowdy Abby Kinchy