Alumni
A Better World in the Making
June 2021 marked the successful conclusion of the MIT Campaign for a Better World. As part of that campaign, MIT Sloan’s call to action was to make a better world our business. And working toward the shared goal of a better world over the last 10 years, we found ways to create stronger partnerships and collaborate more deeply with colleagues and students around the Institute and with alumni and friends around the world.
Since the earliest days of my tenure as dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, I have thought about the long-term future of the school, about the tools and resources the school needs, and the people who, through their work at MIT Sloan and what they learn here, are building a brighter tomorrow. Thanks to your support and dedication, the MIT Campaign for a Better World has enabled the school to seize myriad opportunities, and grow programs that will ensure the school’s position well into the future. It was remarkable, though no surprise, to see this MIT Sloan community respond to the priorities set forth in the campaign, with nearly 15,000 of you supporting our goals and contributing significantly to the $6.24 billion Institute-wide campaign total.
It is your philanthropy that enables MIT Sloan to develop leaders who will invent the future and to support research that is impactful for all. Your generosity during this capital campaign established professorships, revolutionized MIT Sloan’s spaces, and expanded fellowship funding. It enabled the school community to invent ideas made to matter, develop new curricula, and grow our partnerships with institutions and individuals around the globe. Your support of our many research centers and initiatives helped the school to leverage the thought leadership being cultivated here to create change for the better. And even when the final years of the campaign brought us a global pandemic and its many unexpected challenges, your commitment to the school only strengthened. Your dedication to MIT Sloan and to each other helped to bring us to a more resilient and more hopeful place.
In the pages that follow, you will find highlights from the decade-long MIT Campaign for a Better World and the important work that has stemmed from it. I hope you enjoy reading about the profound impact you have made through your generosity.
David Schmittlein
John C Head III Dean
MIT Sloan School of Management
A Better World in the Making
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Alumni Impostor Syndrome and Its Surprising Upside
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Alumni Can Food Become Renewable Biofuel?
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Alumni Building Better, More Transparent Supply Chains
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Alumni Simulations to Predict Climate Change
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Alumni Fixing the Biotech “Valley of Death”
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Alumni A Bra for Heart Disease
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Alumni Misinformation Research in Latin America
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Alumni Making the Next Generation of Manufacturing
Smarter Together
Imagine a world in which profit and human prosperity are inextricably linked. In which economically viable healthcare is a given, technology enhances human work, and sustainability is at the center of every corporate agenda. In a world like this, tough problems wouldn’t be considered intractable, but solvable.
Investing in Innovation
Today, MIT Sloan remains fully invested in developing the next generation of principled, innovative leaders—those entrepreneurs who are always endeavoring to make a better world with big ideas and bigger actions. Nowhere is this dedication more evident than in the school’s ongoing efforts to cultivate a more disciplined form of entrepreneurship—so that the innovations created by its world-class faculty, students, and alumni can achieve an even greater impact.
Read "Investing in Innovation"
A Healthy Humankind
As the third decade of the 21st century approaches, it is increasingly evident that the fields of economic theory, data analytics, and management science are every bit as crucial to create the health system of the future as is biomedicine. No wonder, then, that in environments built upon cross-disciplinary collaboration such as MIT Sloan, those mind-and-hand–melding partnerships are unlocking new approaches to long-standing quandaries.
The Evolution of Work
In the massive leaps technology has taken over the last few decades, we see opportunities to accomplish the work of the world in new ways through AI, automation, and robotics. We can free human and financial capital, empower and augment the abilities of workers across industries, and—perhaps most tantalizingly—provide powerful new ways to take on the epoch-defining threats we face today: issues like inequality, education, health, and global climate change.
A More Sustainable Future
Here at MIT Sloan, much of our wide-ranging work continues to be focused on the critical goal of a sustainable business future: one where the truly epochal benefits of trade itself are balanced with the needs of the planet and its people. While the expansion of trade has driven the kind of technological innovation and poverty reduction our ancestors could only dream of, we also witness a world in which unchecked growth—and reckless business practice—endangers the fundamental well-being of populations and biospheres alike.