DOING CLIMATE

“As I consider the difference I can make for my grandchildren and so many other generations that follow, there is no more important cause,” said entrepreneur Clay Wilkes of climate change at the announcement of the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy in August 2022. The Center is named for him and his wife Marie who, through their foundation, gifted $20 million to the University of Utah.

Clay Wilkes, Founder of Galileo Financial Technologies, a provider of payments and financial services technology, which was acquired by SoFi in 2020, grew up in computer labs at the start of the information and technology age. He says the topic of climate is “the computer science of our day” and that the U “can be to universities what Google and Apple are to the tech world.”

The new Wilkes Center is auspiciously situated. By dint of its geography and ecology, the state of Utah is a living laboratory for the deleterious impacts of climate change and the potential for innovative solutions based in climate science. “Our ability to address these urgent and immediate problems, locally and internationally,” said Wilkes, “will serve as a model for governments and communities throughout the world. With this new center, the University of Utah is leading by example, and we challenge every other university within the state and beyond to do likewise.”

Now approaching the end of its inaugural year, the Wilkes Center has had an accelerated start, from the establishment of prize money for boots-on-the-ground solutions based on scientific data to student scholarships and from new faculty to the Wilkes Center’s first annual summit staged in May of this year.

As part of its support for the Wilkes Center, the U and the College of

Science have invested heavily during the past year in fields related to climate science and policy. In addition to providing salary and research support packages for the Wilkes Center director and leadership team, the U hired two tenure-track faculty members working in climate-related areas of need. These researchers include experts on air quality and climate interactions and land surface modeling.

This past spring, the U also extended tenure-track offers to four additional climate-focused researchers. Negotiations for these roles will continue into the summer with the hopes the candidates will accept and join the faculty either in January or July of next year. Since these appointments include ongoing salary lines and research start-up packages, the hires represent a substantial longterm commitment by the U to increase the institution’s capacity and impact in climate research.

SUPPORTING THE U’S DUAL MISSION

The University and College have also made substantial commitments to the stated dual mission of the U: education and research. In these spaces, the College is supporting scholarships and research stipends for undergraduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty members participating in the Science Research Initiative (SRI). This first and second-year program is designed to introduce undergraduates to facultydriven research early in their academic careers and includes several climatefocused research projects. To expand climate research activities, the U also funded graduate and postdoctoral fellowships to support current faculty projects. These graduate students and postdocs play essential roles in research, often doing much of the day-to-day data collection and analysis. Due to an overwhelming response to a university-wide seed grant call, the Office of the Vice President for Research and College of Science together contributed over $90,000 in additional support to fund more projects. The U sees this as a good investment since some previous initiatives have seen up to 17:1 returns in federal research dollars for each internal dollar invested.

the President’s Climate Leadership Commitment designed to achieve carbon neutrality and improve climate change resilience. Randall also announced that the University will accelerate its net-zero pledge completion date from 2050 to 2040. As part of those efforts, the U’s Climate Commitment Task Force continued work on a Climate Action Plan with actionable goals around reducing the institution’s emissions from university operations and preparing for climate change’s current and future impacts. The U also allocated capital improvement funds to install energysaving equipment and infrastructure.

AMERICA’S INLAND SEA

time has nearly run out.” The Strike Team was a joint project with the Utah State University Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air and the University of Utah’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute.

‘DOING CLIMATE’

At the institutional level, the U has continued to expand activities related to its overall climate footprint. President Taylor Randall re-signed

Within the suite of climate activities and outlays, it was the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, which the Wilkes Center helped to chair, that has received the most press. The group’s report was designed to support legislative decision makers as they considered potential policy opportunities for the Lake. “There’s a belief along the Wasatch Front that says that any drop of water that runs to the Great Salt Lake is a wasted drop of water,” Wilkes recounted last August. “We’ve been living that for fifty years. And now

The topic of climate is already manifesting impacts in Utah and throughout the Intermountain West. Not only is the nation’s largest terminal (or endorheic) lake rapidly drying, allowing the “lofting” of potentially hazardous dust, but the mountains around the capital city are plagued by dying forests and temperature inversions in populated basins which trap particulates from even far-away wildfires. The state’s farmers and its residents are currently experiencing water scarcity from the ongoing mega-drought in the Southwest, impacted by and itself contributing to global warming dynamics.

“Doing climate,” intones Wilkes, instead of just talking about climate, is where Utah can lead out, tying

Wilkes Center Climate Summit

On May 16 and 17, the Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy convened over 400 scientists, inventors, business and government leaders, and student researchers in a collective effort to explore the best solutions for a warming planet. The inaugural Science & Policy Summit provided a broad variety of perspectives from different sectors like healthcare, government, and entrepreneurship on the challenges and innovations for dealing with climate change. Along with the awarding of the student innovation prizes, the event also featured pitches from the top five finalists for the $1.5 million Wilkes Climate Prize.

U mathematician Ken Golden delivered opening remarks in which he reminded participants that basic research in math, science, and engineering is the lifeblood of major technological advances and innovations that can accelerate climate solutions and propel society toward a more sustainable future.

More at science.utah.edu the new Center to other state and university sectors, including the U’s Health Sciences campus. Also fertile ground for collaboration is the U’s David Eccles School of Business with its established imperative for practical solutions that can be incubated, resourced and scaled-up, something the Beehive State is known for and encourages.

“The entrepreneurship piece,” says Peter Trapa, Dean of the College of Science, “is a distinguishing feature of the Wilkes Center. We don’t typically think of entrepreneurship and corporate innovation in the same breath as basic research, but problems of this magnitude require an ‘all of the above’ kind of approach to source impactful ideas.”

President Randall, whom Wilkes often cites as being the engine behind the new Wilkes Center and its growing list of partners, agrees. “Thousands of students from various disciplines will participate in [Wilkes] Center programs each year and have the chance to work with the Center’s research faculty. We will educate a new generation of entrepreneurs and innovators, advance basic and applied research, and address some of the most difficult and important questions posed by climate change. We are grateful for Clay and Marie’s foresight and dedication to this effort.’’ The U’s reduction of its own carbon and energy footprints and established models for clean energy throughout the state are an important pre-text for actually “doing climate.”

A Summit Of Expertise

Housed in the College of Science, the Wilkes Center, under the direction of associate professor of biology and world-renowned ecologist William Anderegg, is clearly advancing climate deliverables by swiftly laying the groundwork for several programs that have already elevated its reputation nationally and internationally. During the Wilkes Climate Summit that took place in May, for example, international experts addressed a themed set of issues around climate change.

“It’s a really exciting opportunity to bring together a huge amount of the expertise that we have across campus and generate practical and innovative solutions to one of the most pressing challenges in the 21st century,” says Anderegg. “A key part of the Center is to provide tools and evidence for making decisions. We want to get the best science in the hands of decisionmakers and policymakers.

The summit also featured presentations from the finalists of the Wilkes Center Climate Prize at the University of Utah, an $1.5 million international award given to a project with demonstrable potential to have a scalable impact on communities, economies, or ecosystems. The Wilkes

Prize winner will be announced on September 22.

A Defining Challenge Of Our Time

As with the integral and integrated components of climate and the environment, the Wilkes Center is already energizing, informing, and leveraging the work of the College of Science and its recent merging with the College of Mines & Earth Sciences. A new Earth and Environmental Science major is attracting students who are looking for quantitative studies directly linked to what Anderegg has called “one of the defining challenges facing humanity in the 21st century.”

The Wilkes Center is also a serendipitous complement to the already established SRI which places first-semester undergraduates into a research setting so that students can learn by doing from their freshman year on. New SRI research tracks, or “streams”—from Pollinator Networks to Big Data for Climate Science and from Urban CO2 Emissions to Seed Ecology—are being added and facilitated by the new teaching labs and classrooms on the third floor of the Crocker Science Center, part of the new Crocker Science Complex that will encompass the Applied Science Project, currently under construction and slated for completion in 2024. The Project involves retrofitting the historic Stewart Building and erecting a new structure, which will serve as the new home for the Physics & Astronomy and the Atmospheric Sciences departments. The Wilkes Center will then move to the new facilities as well, closing the loop, as it were, of the College’s half centuryplus ethic for scientific inquiry and innovation, now as it relates to the climate challenge.

In accord with the “One Utah” campaign to be the university for the state of Utah, the Wilkes Center is, of course, ultimately about the people of the state and the world beyond. Its parameters are porous ones, outwardlooking and poised for collaboration within the U, the state and the global community wherein climate, dynamic and complex as it is, fully animates.

“Our state stands to benefit directly from the important work the Wilkes Center will be conducting,” responded Utah Governor Spencer Cox, “— not only from the standpoint of Utah’s people and environment, but from the national and global leadership in science-based policy and business innovation the University of Utah can demonstrate. As people around the globe seek solutions, the world’s eyes will turn to the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy.”

“When other eight-year-olds were out playing,” Wilkes reminisced, “I was riding my bike to the University of Oregon and hanging out in the computer labs in the early days.”

If climate science is the computer science of our day, as Clay Wilkes believes, it stands to reason that the critical mass that is the Wilkes Center could potentially be a climate science vanguard to every university and every state in the Union.

Wilkes continued, “Utah can become a leader not just in terms of what the amount of the Wilkes gift [is] or what is the amount that the University of Utah is willing to spend on climate, or how much policy money the U of U can generate by virtue of its involvement in climate influence from the state of Utah, but it can [also] influence nearly every other state as they follow suit.”

Making A Difference

Admittedly selective in their philanthropic giving, Clay and Marie Wilkes are motivated to make a difference for their children and grandchildren and have thus taken on the challenge of climate change. Through The Red Crow Foundation, named for Marie’s third greatgrandfather, a chief of the Blackfeet Nation, they say, we are “putting our name on something that would have to mean something.’’ The Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy “is the most important thing that we will ever do.” <