About

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In all our activities, we promote excellence, rigour and impartiality.

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UCL Energy Institute is a cross-faculty initiative within the built environment, set up by the Provost of UCL to unify and strengthen research and teaching efforts in the field of energy. Our multidisciplinary team now spans over 130 researchers and students.

Director Catalina Spataru and Deputy Directors Maria Kamargianni and Steve Pye are supported by a Management Advisory Group and professional services staff within The Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources (BSEER).

• Catalina Spataru, Director
• Maria Kamargianni and Steve Pye, Deputy Directors
• Philippa Shallard, BSEER School Manager
• Cathy Bridge, PA & Administrator
• Velvet Young, Communications Officer

UCL Energy Institute academic staff, students and support staff.

UCL Energy Institute was officially launched on 29 June 2009, but our roots lie much further back in the university’s history.

In his 1865 book, The Coal Question, the leading economist WS Jevons made an observation that flew in the face of common intuition. Jevons noted that improving the efficiency of a technology using a resource such as coal tended to provoke an increase in the consumption of that resource, rather than a decrease. The Jevons paradox, as the effect became known, has since become central to the study of energy demand and environmental economics. And since Jevons took up the professorship of political economy at UCL in 1876, it has been central to energy research at the university.

Until the institute was set up, that research, which also included work on fuel cells, nuclear power, efficient buildings and buses, was spread across traditional science and engineering departments. The institute has brought together in one place UCL-wide research and teaching in the vitally important area of energy demand, and given it focus, coherence and visibility.

The institute’s rapid growth suggests it answered a pent-up demand of its own. By the end of its first year, it had a portfolio of over £8m, £3m of which was won through an EPSRC grant for a Centre for Doctoral Training. Confirmation of this funding allowed us to pursue a much bolder course of sustained growth in our teaching, and our intake of students to our Masters programmes has grown year by year since.

In late August 2011 Harry Bruhns, Principal Research Associate within the UCL Energy Institute, sadly lost his long battle with cancer.

Having joined University College London in 1999, Harry initially worked at the Bartlett before becoming one of the founders of the UCL Energy Institute when it was formed in 2009.

Before moving to the UK from his home country of New Zealand in the early 1990s, Harry was awarded a Master of Science in Physics at Canterbury University (New Zealand) and then joined Victoria University (Wellington) as a Research Fellow.  At the Open University, Harry’s first role in the UK, work with the Department of Environment saw the beginning of many projects for the government.

Harry dedicated his working life to analysing building energy and floor area data and his extensive work underpinned the building industry in the UK for the past 20 years. He will be greatly missed within UCL and the wider industry.