About the Lorenz Center

With all the heated rhetoric about climate change, it is easy to lose sight of the inherent wonder of the earth’s climate and the exciting intellectual challenge of understanding it. With this in mind, Dan Rothman and Kerry Emanuel of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences conceived the idea of a climate think tank that would restore to climate science that mode of curiosity-driven free scientific inquiry that has served science so well since the Enlightenment. It is their ambition to create a scientific oasis where the world’s leading scientists will congregate, attracted by the ability to interact with MIT’s best scientists, students, and postdoctoral fellows in an environment free of financial and political pressures and to pursue novel ideas about how our climate works. Dan and Kerry’s idea was taken up by MIT’s School of Science under the leadership of its then Dean, Marc Kastner, and with the enthusiastic backing of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, which plays a leading role in the exploration of our environment, from the core of the earth to the atmospheres of extra-solar planets. Together they created the Lorenz Center, named for their late EAPS colleague Edward N. Lorenz, the father of chaos theory and an inspiring example of what it means to be a scholar, free to pursue the most fascinating aspects of our physical environment. To learn more, see our foundational brochure.