The Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy & Society

Every summer, Dartmouth's Irving Institute becomes the meeting ground for early-career geographers, engineers, economists, and more—all united by a shared interest in solving one of humanity's most pressing challenges: the transition to sustainable and equitable energy systems. Since 2022, the Irving Institute's New Energy Summer Summit has brought together 84 scholars from 64 universities across the globe for four intensive days of lightning talks, breakout sessions, workshops, and the kind of unstructured conversations that ignite unexpected collaboration.

The Institute welcomed its fifth cohort in late July, and 28 participants reflected on an experience many describe as transformative. "This has been one of the most impactful academic experiences of my life," said Lior Hamovitz, a Political Science PhD candidate at Boston University. "It's so different—providing new tools and new insights into what shapes different perspectives."

A Deliberate Departure from Academic Norms

The Summit aims to build the capacity of early-career energy and climate researchers to accelerate progress toward a healthy climate through interdisciplinary scholarship. Achieving that mission requires participants to do something academia rarely asks of them: step entirely outside their disciplinary silos and learn to communicate, collaborate, and even think differently.

For Hamovitz, a political theorist accustomed to working alone on highly conceptual research, the shift was striking. "We work alone—that's the sub-disciplinary norm," she explained. "The conferences and journals I'm exposed to don't typically engage with STEM research. So being in this space has been interesting. Even those working on highly technological projects are interested in the impact on communities, but they aren't well versed in social science methodologies. The Summit brings all these people together into one room so we could all learn from one another."

That mixing of methodologies and vocabularies is by design. Sarah Greene, a PhD candidate in Global Governance at the University of Waterloo's Balsillie School, described the experience as "an exercise in learning different languages." Working alongside engineers and geographers on a shared problem, she noticed something crucial: "We often use the same words with different meanings across disciplines. By asking questions across the group, we got a better understanding of everyone's perspectives."

Mehrnush Golriz '15, a UCLA PhD candidate studying lithium governance in Chile's Atacama Salt Flats, found her own discipline offered a useful bridge. "Geography is interdisciplinary—I'm trained to speak across niche focuses," she said. "My discipline is very attentive to location so it's been interesting to speak with engineers who are designing without a location in mind."

The Art of the Five-Minute Story

Among the Summit's signature exercises is the lightning talk, which challenges scholars to distill years of specialized research into just a few minutes for an audience of non-experts.

"It's hard to capture five years of research in five minutes," Golriz reflected. "What is most important to someone who doesn't know anything about my research? I took the approach of developing questions to help the audience understand the research questions I'm interested in."

Ryan McCord, a postdoc at Duke University, whose research examines electricity access in low- and middle-income countries, emphasized the power of narrative. "It pushes you to bring people into your world and make clear what made you passionate about the topic in the first place. Storytelling and imagery can be really powerful."

Greene pointed to a fellow participant's talk that pushed her to reconsider her own framing. "In my research, I'm phasing out an energy source that some communities don't even have access to," she said. "It highlighted the need to contextualize the message to the audience and environment."

Learning to Collaborate Across Differences

Perhaps the Summit's most distinctive contribution is its explicit focus on collaboration as a skill in itself, not an assumed byproduct of putting smart people in a room together.

"We had to identify our collaboration superpower—its strengths and weaknesses—and how those strengths can create barriers," Golriz said. "We aren't trained in collaboration." McCord agreed: "I do a lot of team science, but I was never trained how to be a better team member. It's a useful reflection."

That training was put to the test in breakout groups, where small, deliberately curated teams worked together on a shared project. Hamovitz's group, made up of an electrical engineer, a mechanical engineer, a geographer, and Hamovitz, herself a political theorist, built a research framework for community engagement in the energy transition, aimed at building real stakeholder buy-in in low-income communities. "This could only happen with the diversity of the group that was brought together," she noted.

Greene's team designed a community resilience hub—a sustainable energy grid concept for disaster preparedness—which surfaced real differences in how disciplines approach problem-solving. "Their brains are more solution-focused," she said of the engineers on her team, compared to the "backcasting" approach favored by policy scholars and geographers. Still, she found the friction energizing: "There is a lot of enthusiasm."

Golriz's group navigated a tension between those who wanted to write and those who wanted to build. "The social scientists are more interested in writing articles; the engineers, in developing products," she observed. McCord summed up what made these collaborations work despite the friction: "It's most fruitful when there's shared passion."

Growing a Community for Impact

Beyond the structured exercises, the Summit’s lead organizer, Megan Litwhiler, assistant director of academic programs at the Irving Institute, along with co-facilitator Sarah Kelly, research scientist and head of the Energy Justice Clinic, have cultivated something harder to design: a genuine sense of psychological safety that allows scholars to take intellectual risks. That foundation is what allows the "New Energy Network," now more than 100 alumni strong, to function as a living resource long after the Summit ends.

Greene already sees the practical value. "There is amazing technical expertise in this group—I can reach out to these people or collaborate on a written piece," she said, pointing to a potential future project with Golriz on the intersection of lithium extraction and electric vehicle policy.

Five years of Summits have reinforced a consistent message: meaningful energy and climate solutions require scholars fluent not just in their own disciplines, but in the languages, methods, and worldviews of others.

Learn more about the Irving Institute’s New Energy Summer Summit