Uniting students across campus, 19th university-wide Tufts Energy Conference sparks connection

By Courtney Foster, F’24

This past fall, a group of students from the Fletcher School, the Tufts Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Program (UEP), and the Tufts School of Engineering came together in a small study room in the Tisch Library on a mission to determine a theme for the 19th annual Tufts Energy Conference (TEC). From an outsider’s perspective, a relatively normal day—but at the Fletcher School and across the Tufts universe, a rare occurrence of breaking the silos of academic programs to unlock creativity and interdisciplinary learning in a unique cross-campus effort to bring a storied event to life.

Current students chat with Fletcher alums staffing the Young Professionals in Energy table at the employer showcase.

Jointly leveraging the strengths of its many academic programs and research centers is very much a Tufts signature, and Fletcher students interested in energy, climate, and the environment regularly take advantage of cross-registration opportunities with UEP, the Friedman School, and other institutions. Showcasing the fruits of this collaboration to the rest of the Tufts and Somerville communities, however, happens too little, but the Tufts Energy Conference stands out as an exemplar of what is possible when minds meld across class years and disciplines.

After weighing many options and stitching ideas together in various formations, the group of five in the Tisch Library, of which I was a member as this year’s TEC Director of Marketing, settled on our 2024 conference theme—Innovation Odyssey: Climatetech and the Economics of the Energy Transition.

Despite a conference date set at the end of February, planning began in a whirlwind during the fall, anchored by the Directing Team’s Fletcher contingent. Business Development Director Tim Mines F’24 headed up sponsorship for the event, including the development of an employer’s showcase featuring energy companies, consulting firms, startups, and the Massachusetts state government. Operations Director Jenna Clark F’25 masterfully handled logistics, setting Cabot’s auditoriums and the Hall of Flags abuzz with students, community members, and panelists for two days of thought-provoking programming.

Kevin Knobloch, CEO of Greentown Labs, delivering opening remarks.

With Content Team Director Tiffany Wu of the Tufts Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Program and Managing Director Alexia Oltramare of the Tufts School of Engineering at the helm, students across Tufts, including undergraduates at Tufts College and the School of Engineering as well as graduate students at the Fletcher School, explored their own interests through the development of seven cross-cutting panels reflecting the diversity of scholarly and professional fields which the organizers brought to bear. The conference opened with a bang, featuring remarks from Kevin Knobloch, CEO of Greentown Labs, the largest climatetech incubator in North America based here in Somerville, Massachusetts. Reflecting the theme of the innovation odyssey, Knobloch walked attendees through a history of climate policy and climatetech development up to today’s policy and technological advances.

The first day of the conference proceeded with noteworthy contributions from Fletcher students. Manjulika Das F’25 and Anthony (Tung) Vu F’25 co-created the panel discussion, Mobilizing Finance for the Energy Transition: Opportunities, Risks, and Solutions, moderated by Climate Policy Lab Research Fellow Seth Owusu-Mante, followed by Edward Yu F’25 and Sophie Liu’s, panel Energy Resilience in a Changing World: Strategies for the Future, moderated by Assistant Professor of International Energy and Resource Policy Melissa McCracken.

On its second day, the conference hit its stride with a keynote address from Brian Deese, former 13th Director of the National Economic Council under President Joe Biden and former Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama. Deese played a major part in advancing climate policy during his tenure in these roles and currently serves as an Institute Innovation Fellow at MIT.

Brian Deese delivering TEC’s keynote address.

Rich panel discussions followed, including Fueling the Future: Economics of Sustainable Aviation, Climate Risk and Big Data: Forecasting Extreme Events, Economics of the Clean Energy Transition in the Global South (organized by Nabiya Imran F’25), Fossil Fuels: Its Economics, Geopolitics, and Way Forward (designed by Kristen Weller F’25 and Sreedevi Nair F’25), and Incubators and Accelerators for Equitable Impact. Imran’s panel included guest speakers from USAID, UNDP, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Columbia University, and the MIT Energy Initiative, and was moderated by Qi Qi, Postdoctoral Scholar at the Tufts Climate Policy Lab. Weller and Nair’s panel similarly spotlighted Fletcher expertise, featuring moderation from Professor Barbara Kates-Garnick and remarks from Amy Myers Jaffe, a former Fletcher professor and current Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Climate Policy Lab. With a nod to the upcoming International Women’s Day, the concluding event of the conference featured an all-women panel, which panelist Rebecca Pearl Martinez, Executive Director of the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability, noted was a first in her career thus far. The discussion focused on the climatetech startup ecosystem and was moderated by Tufts CSO Dano Weisbord.

If university conferences discussing the theme of equity, as in the case of the energy transition, are to model what their organizers advocate for, I strongly believe that organizers should walk the walk. In my role as the conference’s Director of Marketing, handling traditional media and web-based coverage, I was always proud to share that TEC tickets were free of charge to all as I focused on both student and community outreach for the event, taking the novel step of using some of our budget to advertise the conference to the broader Somerville, Medford, and Cambridge communities. At the registration table each day, I could see our efforts fielding results. An older community member who had attended the bulk of the event with a friend asked me eagerly if more events like this would be held at Fletcher, and I carried on a long conversation with a mother interested in the environmental movement journey; she told me that with so many problems in the world, she would Google issues such as climate change but not know where to begin. With our international focus at Fletcher, it can be easy to forget that sparking change and impacting the trajectory of another’s life can start with one connection. At the Tufts Energy Conference, we aimed to do just this—because, as Rebecca Pearl-Martinez stated in her remarks, we have the technologies we need to power the energy transition, but the question of how we as humans behave remains unanswerable as of now.

Courtney Foster is a MALD student at the Fletcher School, Tufts University.