Events

Join us on Monday, April 13, 2026, at 4 pm in the Nexus, Hayden Library, for a talk led by Catherine Coleman Flowers, an environmental and climate justice activist bringing attention to the largely invisible problem of inadequate waste and water sanitation infrastructure in rural communities in the United States.

Science and Technology: A Collaboration for Justice

This lecture will explore how partnering science and technology with community engagement can mitigate environmental harms. Using storytelling and citing the space program as an example, one will be challenged to expand the definition of profit to also include community wellbeing.

About Catherine Coleman Flowers

As the founding director of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice(formerly the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise), Flowers builds partnerships–from close neighbors, to local elected officials and regional nonprofits, to federal lawmakers and global organizations–in order to identify and implement solutions to the intersecting challenges of water and sanitation infrastructure, public health, and economic development.

Flowers spearheaded a collaboration with tropical disease researchers focused on intestinal parasitic infections spread by way of insufficient water treatment and waste sanitation. The researchers found that hookworm–long thought to have been eliminated from the South–is in fact prevalent among the residents of Lowndes County, prompting the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to undertake a similar, larger study across the rural American South. Flowers’s testimony to the U.S. Congress led to the introduction of legislation in 2019 to address neglected diseases of poverty in the United States.

Flowers is broadening the scope of environmental justice to include issues specific to disenfranchised rural communities and galvanizing policy and research to redress failing infrastructure that perpetuates socioeconomic disparities in rural areas across the United States.

In addition to leading the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, Flowers sits on the Board of Directors for the Climate Reality Project, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the American Geophysical Union, as well as serving as a Practitioner in Residence position at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. In 2021, her leadership and fervor in fighting for solutions to these issues led her to one of her most notable appointments yet — Vice Chair of the Biden Administration’s inaugural White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Previously, Flowers has worked as a high school teacher in Detroit, Michigan, and Washington, D.C. She has published articles in Anglican Theological Review, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, and American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, among others, and her first book, Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret, came out in November 2020. Flowers was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship–commonly referred to as the “Genius Grant” –in 2020.

To Attend the Lecture:

Please fill out this RSVP form if you plan to attend in-person, as space is limited. To access the lecture virtually, please use this zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/94664936448

This talk is free to the MIT community and open to the public. See the attached flyer for more details, we hope to see you there!

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