Laur Hesse Fisher, Program Director

Laur Hesse Fisher leads the development and execution of public engagement on climate change for ESI. She focuses on cross-partisan collaborations, as well as bridging the divide between the public and scientists on tricky climate issues. She also hosts ESI’s podcast on climate change, TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate).

Laur has worked for public, private and non-government organizations in the US, Sweden, New Zealand, and Canada on climate change and environmental issues, and has experience in a wide range of fields, including carbon reporting, green building, waste management, communications, and crowdsourcing. Before joining the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, Laur worked at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence leading Climate CoLab, where over 100,000 people worked online with experts and each other to develop proposals on how to address climate change. She also founded and leads Civic Series (www.civicseries.org), an international non-partisan, volunteer-run 501c3 organization that helps people have meaningful conversations about the most important issues of our time.  Laur holds a self-designed Bachelor’s degree from Tufts University titled “Engaging Sustainability as an Innovative Process.” When she’s not working at ESI and Civic Series, you’ll find Laur hiking a mountain somewhere with her family, cycling along the Wissahickon, and fulfilling a lifelong dream of learning piano.

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