The McGill Sustainability Systems Initiative (MSSI) brings together more than 200 principal investigators and 1,000 graduate students from across McGill University to build a robust and vibrant community of sustainability researchers. Launched in fall 2017, the MSSI is committed to building a network of researchers, from social sciences and humanities to natural sciences and engineering, to develop sophisticated, cross-disciplinary responses to address some of the world’s complex sustainability challenges. The MSSI supports research through four (soon to be five) research themes led by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, three annual funding competitions for bold and innovative research projects, and numerous opportunities for McGill researchers at all levels and from all disciplines to convene across broad topics in sustainability through symposia, workshops and other events.
The MSSI Sustainability Collaboration Dashboard
Most recently, the MSSI has developed a Sustainability Collaboration Dashboard that showcases McGill’s research and collaborations in the area of sustainability. The dashboard is publicly available and allows users to search McGill researchers who self-identify as conducting sustainability-related research by faculty, keyword and United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG). It also offers insights into the impacts of researcher publications and highlights the numerous connections between sustainability researchers across faculties.
The first mapping simply matches research to the 17 SDGs in order to better understand which goals are being addressed at McGill and by whom. This mapping also assists researchers from different disciplines who work on similar SDGs to connect. The next phase of dashboard development will map MSSI member research to specific SDG targets and indicators.
Links
The MSSI Sustainability Collaboration Dashboard: https://db.mssi.mcgill.ca/dashboard/pages/index.php
The MSSI website: https://www.mcgill.ca/mssi/
