Prof D'Maris Coffman
Professor in Economics and Finance of the Built Environment
The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction
Faculty of the Built Environment
- Joined UCL
- 1st Sep 2014
Research summary
Infrastructure
Infrastructure Economics
Infrastructure Finance
Construction
Climate Change
Teaching summary
Professor Coffman teaches infrastructure economics and finance, environmental economics, macroeconomics, some behavioural economics and finance, and economic and financial history to undergraduate and postgraduate students, and she supervises MPhils and PhDs in these and related areas. At present, she primarily lectures BCPM0020 (Agency and Transaction Costs in Infrastructure Projects), which in practice means she teaches applications of intermediate microeconomics to infrastructure projects. This is a core module on the MSc in Infrastructure Investment and Finance (IIF). She also teaches an option module for the MSc in Construction Economics and Management (CEM) called 'Construction Booms and Slumps' (BCPM0003), which is a mix of economic analysis, behavioural finance, financial history and economic forecasting.
Education
- Advance HE / Higher Education Academy
- Other Postgraduate qualification (including professional), ATQ05 - Recognised by the HEA as a Principal Fellow |
- University College London
- Other Postgraduate qualification (including professional), ATQ04 - Recognised by the HEA as a Senior Fellow | 2017
- University of Cambridge
- Other higher degree, Master of Arts | 2011
- University of Pennsylvania
- Doctorate, Doctor of Philosophy | 2008
- University of Pennsylvania
- Other higher degree, Master of Arts | 2004
- University of Pennsylvania
- First Degree, Bachelor of Science (Economics) | 1999
Biography
Professor Coffman is the Director (Head of Department) of BSSC (formerly BSCPM) and the Professor in Economics and Finance of the Built Environment at the Bartlett. She is Editor-in-Chief and Coordinating Editor of Elsevier's Structural Change and Economic Dynamics and on the honorary editorial boards of The Journal of Cleaner Production, Economia Politica, and the editorial boards of Frontiers of Engineering Management and the Chinese Journal of Population, Resources and Environment. She is a Fellow of Goodenough College, where several of the school's doctoral students are residential members.
In December 2021, Professor Coffman was elected Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Department of Earth System Science at Tsinghua University. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Milan (Statale), a Guest Professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, and a Visiting Professor of Renmin University of China.
Before coming to UCL in 2014, she spent six years as a fellow of Newnham College where she variously held a junior research fellowship (Mary Bateson Research Fellowship), a post as a college lecturer and teaching fellow, and a Leverhulme ECF. In July 2009, she started the Centre for Financial History, which she directed through December 2014. It is still going strong, but has moved from Newnham College to Darwin College in line with the affiliation of its new director.
Professor Coffman did her undergraduate training at the Wharton School in managerial and financial economics and my PhD in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, her doctoral research in the UK was funded in part by the Mellon Foundation under the guise of an IHR pre-doctoral fellowship and an SSRC international dissertation fellowship. She holds both American and British citizenship, and lives in London with her husband, a consultant physician in intensive care medicine and clinical reader in critical care nephrology, and young son.