Leadership
FACT Alliance Executive Committee
Renee J. Robins
- Executive Director
- Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab
Renee J. Robins is the Executive Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at MIT. Renee works closely with faculty director John Lienhard to develop and manage the lab’s activities, priorities, and strategy, including new funding opportunities and international collaborations.
Since 1998, Renee has worked on the conception, launch, and development of a number of large interdisciplinary, international, and partnership-based research and education collaborations at MIT and elsewhere. MIT programs she has worked on since she joined the staff in 1998 include the Cambridge MIT Institute (Associate Director for Graduate Programs), the MIT Portugal Program (Director for Program Integration), the Mexico City Program (Program Coordinator), and the Program on Emerging Technologies (Program Manager). From 2000-2011, she also served as Director of Special Projects for the Technology and Policy Program, where she was responsible for the development of a number of academic initiatives and major events. Before joining J-WAFS as executive director, she managed a $15M research program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education as it scaled from implementation in one public school district to 59 schools in seven districts across North Carolina.
Outside of MIT, Renee’s experience includes serving on the Board of Trustees for the International Honors Program (IHP) – a comparative multi-site study abroad program – and independent consulting work for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and program design and strategy consulting for Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique (UM6P), a new university in Morocco. For IHP, she conceived, initiated, and developed the “Cities in the 21st Century” program, which began in 1998 and is one of IHP’s most popular offerings with over 1000 alumni. She is herself an alumna of IHP, having studied comparative culture and anthropology in seven countries around the world, and also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Renee’s holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT (biology and humanities/anthropology), and a masters degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University.