Cloudy with a Chance of Solutions: The Future of Water
The Radcliffe Institute’s annual science symposium will focus on the important and challenging topic of water. Water is a theme that encompasses issues as varied as environmental contamination, public health, agricultural shortages, and geopolitical disputes. “Cloudy with a Chance of Solutions: The Future of Water” will focus on the ecological and human health hazards of environmental contaminants, the threats to drinking water of fracking, the promise of new technologies for water treatment, the need for national water policy, and the role of urban and other areas in conservation. The majority of the talks will focus on the “hard science” of water-related issues; others will offer the perspectives of experts from the policy, business, or urban-planning worlds to put the scientific discussions in a broader context and to link them thematically.
The event is free and open to the public.
Event Videos
Welcome, Menachem Elimelech, and Bruce E. Rittman
WELCOMING REMARKS
Lizabeth Cohen, Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Department of History, Harvard University
Joan Ruderman, Senior advisor to the science program, Academic Ventures at the Radcliffe Institute and Marion V. Nelson Professor of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School
"The Future of Seawater Desalination"
Menachem Elimelech, Yale University
"Water as Part of the Solution to Renewable Biofuel, Not a Roadblock"
Bruce E. Rittmann, Arizona State University
Martin V. Melosi and Charles Tyler
"Water is Not the Next Oil"
Martin V. Melosi, University of Houston
"Impacts of Environmental Endocrine Disruptors and Other Emerging Contaminants on Fish and Fish Populations"
Charles Tyler, University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Patricia Hunt and Sandra Steingraber
"Are Environmental Contaminants Affecting Your Reproductive Health?"
Patricia Hunt, Washington State University
"Fracking Our Water: Emerging Threats to Drinking Water in an Age of Extreme Fossil Fuel Extraction"
Sandra Steingraber, Ecologist and Author
Gerald E. Galloway and Peter P. Rogers
"Dealing with the Whole: The Need for National Water Policy"
Gerald E. Galloway, University of Maryland, College Park
CLOSING REMARKS
Peter P. Rogers, Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Engineering, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and faculty associate, Harvard University Center for the Environment
