The Metis Center for Infrastructure and Sustainable Engineering seeks to provide the basis for understanding, designing and managing the complex integrated built/human/natural systems that increasingly characterize our planet in the Anthropocene – the Age of Humans. To this end, we combine research, teaching, outreach and public service in an effort to learn how engineered and built systems are integrated with natural and human systems.

The mission of Metis is to reshape how we design and build infrastructure and prepare engineers in the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene will be defined by rapid technological, environmental and social change, which will raise challenges for current infrastructure and engineering to meet changing needs. To build more resilient and sustainable systems that are capable of adapting to change in the 21st century and beyond, we will need to fundamentally rethink how and why we deploy and use infrastructure and train engineers. The Metis center seeks to establish an array of competencies to be able to respond to rapidly changing environments, technologies and services, for a future marked by complexity and uncertainty.