Sustainable Building and Urban Future Brings Together Academia and Industry at Harvard Climate Action Week

During Harvard Climate Action Week 2025, leading professors and industry experts came together for the panel discussion “Innovating Sustainable Buildings and Urban Development in the Era of Climate Change.” The session introduced Sustainable Building and Urban Future — a new cross-disciplinary research cluster focused on advancing innovations in materials science, AI sensing, and grid-aware controls to create scalable, sustainable building solutions.

The panel discussion included cluster members Ali Malkawi (Harvard Graduate School of Design); Joanna Aizenberg, Na Li, and Vijay Reddi (Harvard SEAS); Jarad Mason (Harvard University); and industry partners Taiil Kim (Schneider Electric), Fei Sha (Google), and Michel Nasilowski (Saint-Gobain). Together they explored the urgency and challenges of bringing breakthrough building technologies from research labs to the built environment at scale.

Read the full panel coverage here: Scaling “smart, low-carbon” buildings, from lab to millions of homes.