Uploaded February 2025 | Updated September 2026, 15 hours ago

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Join the MIT Club of Boston and the Association of MIT Alumnae (AMITA) for a program from October 23, 2024, featuring MIT Professor Susan Solomon of the Earth and Planetary Science Department. 

Professor Solomon is internationally known for her work connecting chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) emissions to the Antarctic ozone hole, one of the indisputable signs that human activities can seriously harm the environment. Her work contributed to the Montreal Protocol, the international agreement to limit global CFC emissions. She later co-led the team that developed the IPCC Group 1 (science) climate report (2007). The IPCC team shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore that year. In 2008, she was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Her book Solvable: How We Healed the Earth and Can Do it Again was published this summer.

Since coming to MIT in 2012 to the Ellen Swallow Richards Professorship, Professor Solomon has been leading a group working to understand the interactions between chemistry and climate. Their atmospheric research was the first to definitively show that the Antarctic ozone hole is beginning to recover due to the international agreement to stop making ozone depleting chemicals.

Professor Solomon’s talk will focus on how scientific findings were transformed in the public arena into policy and are now saving the ozone layer.   She will describe how the work she has done at MIT has led the effort to show that humanity really did save the ozone layer, and what to expect in the future.