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About

Noelle Eckley Selin is Associate Professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also served as Associate Director of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program (2015-2017). Her interdisciplinary research focuses on better understanding the formation, impact, and effects of policies that govern air pollution regionally and globally. This research combines methods from social sciences with natural sciences and engineering to trace the impacts of policies through social and biophysical systems, with the aim of informing more effective design and implementation.  She received her PhD (Earth and Planetary Sciences), M.A. (Earth and Planetary Sciences) and B.A. (Environmental Science and Public Policy) from Harvard University. Before joining the MIT faculty, she was a research scientist with the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

She has published 70+ articles in the peer-reviewed literature, addressing atmospheric chemistry, air pollution, and interactions between science and policy in international environmental negotiations. Her articles were selected as the best environmental policy papers in 2015 and 2016 by the journal Environmental Science & Technology.  She is the recipient of a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award (2011), a Leopold Leadership fellow (2013-2014), Kavli fellow (2015), a member of the Global Young Academy (2014-2018), an American Association for the Advancement of Science Leshner Leadership Institute Fellow (2016-2017), and a Hans Fischer Senior Fellow at the Technical University of Munich Institute for Advanced Study (2018-2021).

Her personal web site is at: http://mit.edu/selin

Selected publications: 

  • N. E. Selin. 2018. “A proposed global metric to aid mercury pollution policy.” Science 360(6389):607-609.
  • M. Li, D Zhang, C. T. Li, K. M. Mulvaney, N. E. Selin, and V. J. Karplus. 2018. “Air Quality Co-Benefits of Carbon Pricing in China.” Nature Climate Change, 8:398-403.
  • E. Czaika and N. E. Selin. 2017. “Model Use in Sustainability Policy Making: An experimental study.” Environmental Modelling and Software, 98:54-62.
  • R. D. Collins, N. E. Selin, O. L. de Weck, and W. C. Clark. 2017. “Using Inclusive Wealth for Policy Evaluation: Application to Electricity Infrastructure Planning in Oil-Exporting Countries.” Ecological Economics 133, 23-34.
  • P. J. Wolfe, A. Giang, A. Ashok, N. E. Selin and S. R. H. Barrett. 2016. “Costs of IQ Loss from Leaded Aviation Gasoline Emissions.” Environmental Science and Technology 50(17):9026-9033.
  • E. Czaika and N.E. Selin. 2016. “Taking Action to Reduce Waste: Quantifying Impacts of Model Use in a Multi-organizational Sustainability Negotiation.” Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 9: 237–255.
  • L. Stokes, A. Giang and N.E. Selin.  2016. “Splitting the South: China and India’s Divergence in International Environmental Negotiations,” Global Environmental Politics 16(4):12-31.
  • L. C. Stokes and N. E. Selin. 2016. “The Mercury Game: Evaluating a Negotiation Simulation that Teaches Students about Science-Policy Interactions.” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 6:597.
  • A. Giang and N. E. Selin. 2016. “Benefits of Mercury Controls for the United States.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 113(2): 286-91.
  • A. Giang, L. C. Stokes, D. G. Streets, E. S. Corbitt, and N. E. Selin. 2015. “Impacts of the Minamata Convention on mercury emissions and global deposition from coal-fired power generation in Asia.” Environmental Science and Technology 49, 5326-5335.

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