The School of Sustainable Construction:
- has active management membership on the Faculty Research Advisory Group
- participates in the Research Degrees Committee
- promotes interdisciplinary research via faculty Research Exchanges meetings
The School has a Director of Research to oversee staff research activity and a Departmental Postgraduate Tutor to oversee postgraduate MPhil and PhD programmes of study.
Research projects funded by funding councils, institutions and trusts, and funded from industry are conducted by principal investigators with responsibility for managing the research activity and expenditure.
UCL Grand Challenges
The UCL Grand Challenges addressed by the School's research are in the areas of Global Health, Sustainable Cities, Intercultural Interaction, and Human Wellbeing.
The built environment and the outputs from successful construction and project management link directly and indirectly to all these areas.
- Health
The School is actively engaged with research work contributing to health through research conducted into the operational consequences of choosing PFI/PPP to procure healthcare facilities.
This work has been in collaboration with KPMG, and via involvement in the HaCIRIC research programme into strategic design for emergency healthcare using scenario planning techniques.
- 2050 issues
There is growing research around the forces bearing on the built environment in say a generation's time - '2050 issues'.
This began with work commissioned by the National Platform on Construction's 2020 research agenda. It was subsequently developed as a major EPSRC bid. We are now working closely with the 2050 Group feeding into the work of the Government Chief Construction Advisor.
Meanwhile, interdisciplinary work across the Faculty is developing in support of this general direction of investigation.
- Sustainable cities
The above work and much of the other work conducted in The Bartlett that relates to enhances value creation in projects contributes towards inducing sustainable cities. This is particularly true of our work on infrastructure around PPP/PFI.
Significantly, Graham Ive was an advisor to Professor David Pearce in his seminal 2003 report on the economic and social contribution of the construction industry, now known as the Pearce Report. Similarly, much of the research output has an impact upon human wellbeing.