Physics and Astronomy/Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences
Adilson Motter is an assistant professor of Physics and Astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. He joined Northwestern in 2006 after serving as a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and as a Guest Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany.
Adilson studies how information, influences, and perturbations propagate through complex networks and how they shape the large-scale behavior of systems as diverse as bio-molecular, socio-technological, and food web networks. His research touches upon issues underlying the root causes of spontaneous synchronization, behavioral cascades, and other collective phenomena observed in many natural and man-made systems. In particular, his group has recently developed the concept of synthetic rescue in network biology, which is a collective gene interaction effect that can compensate for cellular failures.
Adilson is an executive committee member of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO) and the chair of the organizing committee of the Dynamics Days Conference to be hosted at Northwestern in 2010. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and the 2009 receiver of the Weinberg Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research.
What does sustainability mean to you? Your definition, key features?
My operational definition is simple: the optimal compromise between short-term and long-term comfort. This includes, of course, the rational exploitation of natural resources and the long overdue quest for clean renewable energy sources. More important, however, this definition acknowledges that we are part of an evolving system and that the challenges in the future are bound to be different from those faced today, as these are from those faced in the past. Personally I think that enduring is not enough, and that sustainability efforts that tacitly assume a static environment are simply not realistic. I grew up in a town that goes by the self-explanatory name of Coffeeland. It lies near the shores of the lake powering the largest hydroelectric plant in the world and is one of the most environmentally responsible communities I have ever seen. Guess what is now produced there - it is not coffee.
How does your research/professional work connect to sustainability? How (or why) did you get involved?
I study complex systems, and the coupling of natural and human agents is complex par excellence. A central problem is that, because everything is connected to everything else, perturbations to a particular aspect of our environment can propagate and lead to unanticipated consequences elsewhere. What these consequences would be is precisely one of the questions that my research seeks to answer. Another is the identification of compensatory perturbations that can be used to mitigate the undesirable consequences. For example, a student in my group investigates possible approaches to prevent extinction cascades in severely perturbed food-web systems, which is an attempt to cope with natural and man-induced perturbations.
What role do you see for universities (broadly) in advancing sustainable practices?
The universities have an obvious role in advancing fundamental research that can lead to new technologies. Equally important, though, is the education of the general public, opinion formers, and policy makers about the best available solutions. For instance, one can no longer afford to ignore that nuclear energy is (by a large margin) environmentally safer than coal, or that Brazil would not be energy independent had they sought to produce ethanol from corn.
How can the university setting contribute practical, near-term solutions to the urgent and immediate needs for sustainability?
Undergraduate and graduate students are predisposed to engage transformative ideas. Sustainability encompasses numerous such ideas. In a country where 2/3 of the population attends college, the involvement of these students in the pursuit of and debate about new solutions is probably one of the most effective ways to transform the attitude of the general public towards sustainable practices.
What do you see as the key step or steps to achieving sustainability?
I place significant weight on the reduction of consumption. Efficient, if not sustainable, practices and products can be as important as technological breakthroughs. But in a longer term, population control should also be part of the debate, as nothing can be more unsustainable than an indefinite increase in the number of consumers.
If you could have one sustainability wish come true, what would it be?
Assuming that science will continue to deliver solutions, and I see no reason to believe it won’t, the magic bullet would be to associate economic value to sustainable practices and products. I thus wish ordinary consumers could be equipped to exert selective pressure on products according to the extent they are sustainable.
What’s your favorite sustainable product?
My mode of transportation: I walk to work. It is safe, keeps me fit, and saves me from the trouble of parking. I recommend it.
What is your environmental vice?
Are air conditioners and heaters sustainable yet? My range of comfortable temperatures is pretty narrow…
