Chris Rabe leads Universal Climate and Energy, a new foundational offering from MIT Open Learning designed to make climate education more accessible across the globe. He is also the Education Program Director at the MIT Climate Project, where he helps shape how climate and sustainability are taught across MIT.

His work centers on expanding climate and sustainability education with a focus on climate and environmental justice. He’s especially interested in how emotion, community engagement, and the ethics of science and technology shape our collective response to climate change. His research has appeared in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, the Journal of Environmental Justice, and Contingencies: A Journal of Global Pedagogy.

As a practitioner-scholar, Rabe bridges research and practice by mentoring students, supporting faculty, developing open-source curriculum, and co-teaching courses such as Environmental Justice, Science, and Technology in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Before joining MIT, he taught at UMass Boston, where he also earned an MA in Applied Linguistics and a PhD in Higher Education.