We define sustainability expansively.  What does economics teach us about inclusive growth, equality of opportunity, minimizing negative externalities, and the costs of low growth for job creation and skill acquisition?  How can countries, individually and collectively, leverage ecological sciences and engineering to scale energy sources that are both sustainable and practical, encourage environmentally sound consumption patterns, promote resource renewal and protect biodiversity?  What would sustainable global integration look like, and how would countries get there?  How is understanding the behavior of complex systems crucial to sustainability?  How can architecture and engineering build residences, workplaces, cities, and exurbs in smarter ways?  What can countries learn from sociology about supporting family structures, kin networks, and community institutions?  How might information science and technology render virtual public spheres civil while keeping them open, and promote a sense of shared truth?  How do changes in environmental quality and access to vaccines affect those that bear the heaviest burden of pollution and disease? How can societies use political science to improve governance, raise political participation, and manage a wide diversity of views that healthy societies must have?  Above all, how can countries create and propagate consensus narratives of sustainability that balance interests? 

Stephen Kotkin
Director of PIIRS
John P. Birkelund ’52 Professor in History and International Affairs in the Department of History
Director of the Program in History and the Practice of Diplomacy

Mohammad Wesam Al Asali
PhD in Architecture
University of Cambridge, England  

Sefa Awaworyi Churchill
Associate Professor/Principal Research Fellow
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), Australia

Uzuazo Etemire
Senior Lecturer/Acting Head of Dept. of Jurisprudence and International Law
Faculty of Law
University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Han Ul Min
PhD in Energy Engineering
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), South Korea

Andressa Monteiro Venturini
PhD in Science
University of São Paulo’s Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture, Brazil  

June Park
Researcher
National Research Foundation of Korea, Seoul, South Korea 

Anish Sugathan
Assistant Professor
Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, India