Meet Dr. Nathan Melenbrink

NEET Lecturer and Founding Lead Instructor, Climate + Sustainability Systems

Nathan Melenbrink, Ph.D., is the Lecturer and the Founding Lead Instructor of the NEET Climate and Sustainability Systems thread at MIT, leading hands-on prototyping courses centered around high-impact, cross-disciplinary projects, including a collaboration with the National University of Mongolia. Dr. Melenbrink's work aims to inspire the next generation of engineers to tackle pressing global challenges related to climate change and the energy transition. With a background in robotics and building sciences, Dr. Melenbrink integrates cutting-edge technological solutions with a practical approach to climate challenges, encouraging his students to think creatively about how engineering can address pressing environmental issues.

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Previously, Dr. Melenbrink spent 4 years as a Postdoctoctoral Fellow at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), working on a NASA grant for space habitat automation. Prior to that, he was a staff electromechanical engineer at Wyss Institute at Harvard, where his research focused on distributed robotics for construction automation. He has taught courses related to design, computation, robotics, and CAD/CAM at institutions such as Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Virginia Tech, and the University of Hong Kong.
Dr. Melenbrink's industry experience as an architect and computational designer includes offices such as UNStudio, Playze, and ECADI. He holds a Bachelor's of Architecture from Virginia Tech, a Master's in Design Studies in Technology from Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), and a Doctorate of Engineering from the Institute for Computational Design and Construction at the University of Stuttgart.

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