Director's Message

The following message is from the founding director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment (VIEE).

We're at a time in our history when meeting resource demands while controlling and reversing environmental degradation are among our most important problems. The focus for VIEE is at the intersection of these two fundamental areas. How can we manage the intersecting resources needed to supply food, energy, and water? How can we use our knowledge of the environment - gained through scholarship and research in engineering, natural sciences, and social sciences - to our best advantage in balancing our resource needs while protecting the environment? The Institute seeks to encourage work at Vanderbilt to tackle these questions. It has a broad mandate with ambitious goals for scholarship, teaching and outreach. Our vision for VIEE is to become an international leader in contributing to the resolution of critical issues by fostering links among diverse fields of human thought and action in unprecedented collaborations.

To reach our goals, it is absolutely essential that we learn how to work together within interdisciplinary teams on social, economic, legal and technical aspects of problems. VIEE seeks to engage members of the faculty, graduate students, undergraduate students and post-doctoral researchers from various disciplines and schools at Vanderbilt, along with partners from other universities, industries, non-governmental organizations and government agencies in our enterprise. VIEE-affiliated faculty conduct work that is academically rigorous and yet fosters practical advice to the external world where decisions must be made, regulations must be established, and policies must be implemented.

Sincerely,
George Hornberger