Julie Newman, PhD and Earth5R: Exploring The Next Frontier of Sustainability

 Julie Newman, PhD and Earth5R: Exploring The Next Frontier of Sustainability

In the fifth edition of Earth5R’s Sustainable Futures podcast series, we dive deep into groundbreaking ideas that are set to redefine sustainability. Moderated by the visionary founder and eminent environmentalist Saurabh Gupta, this episode features Julie Newman, PhD, the Director of Sustainability at MIT, sharing her extensive experience in advancing sustainability initiatives within one of the world’s leading academic institutions.

Julie discusses the critical role that universities play in addressing climate change and fostering innovative solutions. She highlights MIT’s commitment to sustainability, exploring key projects and strategies that integrate environmental responsibility into campus operations and community engagement.

Join us as Saurabh Gupta and Julie Newman explore the next frontier of sustainability, inspiring a new era of innovative, tech-driven, and inclusive environmental action.

Conversation:

Julie Newman‘s Journey

Saurabh Gupta: We’re excited to have Julie Newman with us today. Julie is a true leader in environmental planning and sustainability. She’s the Director of Sustainability at MIT in the U.S., with over 20 years of experience. Julie has been at the forefront of advancing sustainability in higher education.

She joined MIT as its first Director of Sustainability in 2013, after previously founding and leading the sustainability program at Yale University in the U.S. Julie’s work focuses on how institutions can make sustainability a key part of their decision-making process and a long-term strategy. She also consults with universities globally and has been influential in shaping how we think about sustainable development in education. So, welcome to this podcast, Julie.

Julie Newman: Great, good morning and good afternoon to you. It’s such a pleasure to be here, and I’m so impressed with the work that you’re doing.

Saurabh Gupta: Thank you so much, Julie. Could you share a little about your journey to MIT and what sparked your passion for sustainability in the field of higher education?

Julie Newman: Right, well, I’ve actually been on this journey for a very long time. For me, it’s really been a calling. I’ve been interested in the environment and sustainability since middle school, if not even before. Like many kids, I was initially drawn to marine biology. 

Julie Newman, Director of Sustainability at MIT.

I followed my passion through high school, became a certified scuba diver at 15, and was captivated by what lived below the surface. Later, I went to the University of Michigan very purposefully because of its renowned School of Natural Resources. 

There, I found a mentor, and I think that’s one of the keys—finding mentors or guides along the way…coming out of the Rio area and went to grad school. I actually ended up getting two degrees, bridging between biology and this wonderful Environmental Policy program. 

I returned to my interest in oceans, studying fisheries, and embedded myself in a community dependent on fisheries. This community was observing the decline of fisheries and how science, policy, the regulatory environment, and economic impact affected them. It was a small Massachusetts community where the men fished and the women stayed home, a very rich dynamic that mirrored so much about environmental and community connections.

So, I tried to bring this back to my university, although it was challenging to work across disciplines. During grad school, I also worked with University Leaders for a Sustainable Future, where I met my next mentor, Tom Kelly. 

He suggested we explore how to take my case studies further, and at that time, we were just beginning to ask about universities’ roles in advancing sustainable development. The timing was perfect. For two years, I worked with Tom, engaging universities and learning how they could contribute to sustainable practices.

Then, Tom was hired to start the first Office of Sustainability in the United States at the University of New Hampshire, and I went with him. I thought I’d stay a year to help get things started, but I ended up staying seven years and earned my Ph.D. there. 

It was an opportunity to learn and do it simultaneously, which is really the essence of my career. I love immersing myself in work while learning, and that’s been my approach ever since.

After completing my Ph.D. and those seven years at UNH, I went on to found the Office of Sustainability at Yale, which was a tremendous experience, and later, I was brought to MIT to launch our Office of Sustainability here. 

Along the way, I’ve built networks across the Northeast, the U.S., and even internationally. What keeps me engaged in this field is the incredible people—problem-solvers and partnership-builders. I see myself as a bridge in all of this, learning every day with humility.

Julie Newman addressing the ILP Health Science Technology Conference at MIT, 2024.

Saurabh Gupta: That’s very inspiring, Julie. Hearing the behind-the-scenes story of your journey, from being inspired by rivers, scuba diving, and going to Guatemala, is fascinating. Sometimes, we don’t see the real journey that shaped you. 

Thank you for sharing this.I also learned from our previous conversation that you’re a natural people connector and networker. You like to learn from others and inspire them.

Julie Newman: Yes, I’m still connected to my community in Guatemala. I go back, almost 30 years later—they’re like family. In fact, I was just looking at tickets this week to visit. There’s a part of me connected there, though the way we work here in the U.S. is different.

Saurabh Gupta: Exactly, but we’re all asking similar questions, right? We’re all looking for healthy lifestyles and human connections because our core needs are the same.

Julie Newman: Absolutely. One thing that has continued to drive me, especially after completing my Ph.D., is this burning question about organizational structures and behaviors. What types of organizational structures and behaviors are responsive to, alter, or influence our climate sustainability trajectory? 

I’m constantly exploring this intersection between the regulatory environment, built environment, human behavior, economics, and culture. What can we manage behind the scenes, and what requires individuals to make changes themselves? Navigating that tension is an ongoing challenge.

Saurabh Gupta: Opportunities, I think things do have to happen systemically to go become a sustainability major.

Julie Newman: All right. In fact, when I run off from this today, we’re managing a decarbonization forum to frame our own work at MIT. And I’m bringing in the person responsible for the energy transition for the state of Massachusetts, and the person responsible for, getting to zero for the city of Cambridge, and myself. And then my team will be nearby too, because we have to work across these scales.

We can’t decarbonize as an organization, as a city, and as a state independently. It’s a complete intersection across them. So I’m now applying my learning and really bringing it to the forefront of our work at MIT.

Saurabh Gupta: And your network as well, putting your network into action.

Julie Newman at Sustainability Connect 2016, Discussing Ideas for Campuses at a Global Level.

Julie Newman: Well, of course, So I get to be the test bed to see how those interactions work. So I think that this is where, as I also understand your journey, that relationship building has been one of your fortes, which is also helping you to do the systemic changes.Yeah, it’s all about the people.

Strategies used in MIT

Saurabh Gupta: Yeah Julie, what are some of the best strategies you have seen so far for weaving sustainability into the daily lives and culture at universities like MIT and Yale? These are top universities in the world, and there must be certain methods and strategies.

Julie Newman: Well, I think maybe going back to what I was just saying, one of the early lessons was that it was hard to ask people at a university to do something differently if the university itself wasn’t doing it, right? 

So if we were saying to you, we need you to, you know, back in the days before laptops, right? What people were asked to do was to go turn off their desktop computers. And some people would turn around and say, ‘I’ll turn off my desktop computer, but you know, this university has got to turn all the lights off at night! What’s the value of me turning off my computer if all the lights of the institution are left on all night long?’ 

That was a totally fair question, because the desktop was only small. So I think the strategy that I began to embed in that exposure again—that was 20 years ago in desktop times, now we’re in data center times, right? So that’s going to be a whole different challenge. We’ll get to that maybe at the end, but how do you balance what the university or the institute, or the college—whatever that framing is that you relate to—what do we have to do at the systemic level to say, ‘This is actually what we’re committed to. 

We’re going to create some policies around this; we’re going to make some investments in this; our standards will reflect this.’ And then, you as an individual, this is what we need for you to do while you’re intersecting on campus.

And so there’s a lot of examples across all of our universities where we’re all trying to, you know, fast-forwarding 25 years, many of us are trying to figure out how to decarbonize the institute, right? Sorry, I use the term ‘institute’ at MIT; what I mean by that, for your audience, is ‘university.’ MIT is an institute by trade, but please, that can apply to a college, university, or school, okay.

So I think it’s really important that if you’re asking people to do something, the university is doing it as well. A great example, you know, at MIT that we have is if we’re asking people to say, ‘Please leave your car at home,’ we’re not saying, ‘Figure that out on your own.’ 

So many years ago, we said, ‘Listen, we do need to reduce single-occupancy vehicles on campus because there’s congestion, it’s very expensive to build parking garages, and we have—I’m not going to say excellent because we have to improve Boston public transportation—but very good access to trains and buses.

After many years of—and this is a great example also, excuse me, of looking at the role of research and operations coming together. So uniquely at MIT, we actually have something called the Transit Lab, and they were actually studying this and wanting to look at behavior. What would incentivize individuals in a university to leave their car at home? 

What were those needs? Why were people driving? Many people, like myself included, have a kid they have to bring to and from school, and it’s hard to navigate that on public transportation. Or people were doing elderly care, or people were living in places where there wasn’t public transportation. 

The researchers then said, ‘Well, let’s hone in on the area where we have great public transportation to and from Cambridge, and then let’s look at the zip codes of where the MIT community lives, particularly with a focus on staff and faculty.’ And lo and behold, a great majority of people do live within this range, and only a handful of people live further out. So then the strategy could hone in on this area. 

So they said, ‘What would it cost if we did a long-term reinvestment analysis to actually incentivize and give free public transportation to everybody that works at MIT, staff and faculty, as a way to incentivize them to take public transportation?’ And they piloted it, and lo and behold, people left their cars at home because it was expensive. And they also shifted the whole strategy to thinking about, rather than becoming a parker—because we all tend to identify—why don’t you just become a traveler, if you will, a flexible traveler. 

One day, you could park and pay for that one day, as opposed to a parking pass for a year, which is the old way. And another day, you could say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got flexibility today; I’m going to take the train.’ And within a couple of years, it actually reduced our single-occupancy vehicles to campus by, I think within two years, by 15%.

Saurabh Gupta: Wow, that’s a lot!

Julie Newman:Yeah, and then that helps us with future costs in terms of projecting how much parking will be needed five, 10, 15, 20 years down the line. Because of that reduction, it stayed

Saurabh Gupta: And when did you start that program?

Julie Newman: It has been, yeah, it was 20—I want to say 2018. It was right before COVID, and we were just, I think we were two years before COVID started. And then, of course, nobody came to campus, nobody used public transportation, and then we had to regain trust in public transportation because there was a lot of fear from a public health standpoint. 

But now what’s interesting is we’ve shifted to a hybrid system. So that combination of being hybrid—in at least in Cambridge, where you don’t have to go to campus five days a week—combined with…it’s like an equation: it’s like hybrid plus free access to public transportation has just reduced demand tremendously.

Julie Newman addressing the Trans-atlantic Symposium on Sustainable Development at MIT.

Saurabh Gupta: Fascinating trajectory, And is there any sort of incentive other than—do you also incentivize people for not taking the car?

Julie Newman: Well, the incentive is you have free public transportation.

Saurabh Gupta: Okay, free public transportation.

Julie Newman: Yeah, it’s all free. I don’t have..so the incentive is that you have in your MIT ID there’s something called a Charlie Card—it’s a chip so you can go on and off of the train and the bus for free with that chip. So that’s your incentive.

Finding the balance

Saurabh Gupta: So talking about the systemic level, how do you find the right balance between the urgency to act quickly on sustainability and the need for long-term planning in your leadership role? Because it’s a tricky situation; you also have a responsibility as a leader, but at the same time, balancing the two. How do you find it?

Julie Newman: I really grapple with that. Of course, we have to act quickly, but we need to act super strategically. So I think this actually, this transportation example is an example of acting pretty quickly. I mean, it took a number of years to get it up and running, but you know, this has already been going for, what’s that, six years? 

We didn’t wait for the…you know, Boston is investing a lot of money in the public transportation system, so just trying to answer your question, rather than waiting for the T and the bus system to be perfect, we already knew that it definitely existed. 

We had a lot of people who were willing to take it based on a lot of surveys we did, and it demonstrated that MIT was willing to make an investment in our own staff.Faculty, you know, having access to public transportation, and also recognizing there are days when a train line might be down. 

So, you’re not penalized—you can drive that day if you need to. By providing that flexibility, we’re balancing the urgency to reduce emissions with the practical challenges. We’re working with the city and the state to see what can be done rapidly at the grid level and figuring out how to transform our 100-year-old legacy infrastructure to decarbonize it.

Saurabh Gupta: Right.

Julie Newman: One area where we’ve made relatively quick progress is in building design. When I started, there were maybe one or two LEED-certified buildings on campus—LEED being the U.S. standard for energy-efficient buildings. 

Now, we have over 25, maybe 27, within a decade. It’s part of building high-performance spaces that meet occupant needs but also adhere to sustainable standards. And it’s also about capacity-building within our planning and construction teams to adapt to these goals.

Saurabh Gupta: That’s impressive, and it’s a big shift in a short time frame, especially given the urgency of climate issues.

Julie Newman: Absolutely, and in terms of energy, MIT and other research lead by example. Institutions are adopting dual strategies because we all know the shift from fossil fuels to renewable, zero-carbon options takes time. 

Ensuring a resilient, 24/7 supply of electricity, heat, and water is critical—particularly from a U.S. perspective, which we know is privileged. The strategy is to make those transitions while still relying on older steam systems and converting them gradually.

Saurabh Gupta: So, in the meantime, what other steps are being taken?

Julie Newman: MIT recognized the urgency a few years back and decided to leverage its financial standing to invest in large-scale renewable energy in the U.S. We’ve formed a consortium with other universities, cities, and healthcare partners to reduce a million metric tons of emissions by 2026. This collaboration focuses on investment in wind and solar energy.

Saurabh Gupta: That’s a unique approach—working as a group in such a densely populated area with complex infrastructure.

Julie Newman in a Valuable Discussion at Oxford, 2024.

Julie Newman: Yes, and that adds to the complexity. MIT has a responsibility as a global university at the forefront of innovation. There are expectations, but there’s also legacy infrastructure that can’t just be changed overnight.

MIT Sustainability and Global Impact

Saurabh Gupta: Absolutely. Given MIT’s position, how do you see it making a global impact on sustainability?

Julie Newman: Great question. I’d answer it in three ways. First, we started by considering sustainability impacts across scales—from the individual, to the campus, city, state, nation, and globe. So, every action we take on campus has this layered, broader perspective.

Second, building a global network of universities is key. By sharing best practices, we’re creating commitments around decarbonization. Just recently, I was on a call with representatives from 32 universities in Japan, and I work closely with the International Sustainable Campus Network, which I’ve been a part of for 17 years. We exchange what works, what doesn’t, and learn from each other.

Third, MIT has launched the Climate Project with six missions, from policy to empowering marginalized communities and innovative technology. The idea is to address global impacts and work with partners worldwide on impactful projects.

Saurabh Gupta: That’s a comprehensive approach. And you’re also creating platforms for city leaders, CSR heads, and educational leaders to come together.

Julie Newman : Exactly! Sustainability isn’t something one institution or city can achieve alone. Collaboration is key.

You know, I wonder…something I’ve been very curious about—maybe not something that keeps me up at night, but it’s been on my mind. There’s a lot of replication happening. For example, I attended Climate Week in New York City and spent time with an industry group called Climate Group, who are doing amazing work, and then I attended an event for the Earthshot Prize, focusing on innovation and philanthropy. 

There’s a lot of crossover, which is wonderful—no bad news there! I was totally inspired by everything I saw. But my curiosity lies in how we might better optimize efforts because so much of it overlaps.

Saurabh Gupta: Exactly, which is why we need to break down silos, come together, and share best practices. Collaboration is key—it’s like you always say, “All hands on deck, egos at the door.” Where are we replicating, and where can we truly learn from each other

Julie Newman: Yes, exactly. And that’s why I’ve stayed within the university system, embedded in both the city and the state—like what we’re demonstrating today. We know there’s no one-size-fits-all global solution; each location has its unique, local regulatory landscape. 

When I visited Oxford, they’re dealing with 700-year-old infrastructure while we’re concerned with 10