Symposium Speakers
Professor Shaun Fitzgerald
Climate Repair
Shaun is a Teaching Fellow at Girton. He supervises 1A engineers and is Director of Studies for the Part II students. At the Department of Engineering, he is Director of the Centre for Climate Repair where he leads projects on greenhouse gas removal and climate engineering. In addition to research and teaching experience at Girton he has spent time in industry, working for Bain & Company in the late 1990’s and then founding and leading venture-backed Breathing Buildings with a successful exit to Volution Holdings.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was awarded an OBE in 2021 and in 2023 was appointed by the UNFCCC Supervisory Body to serve as a Methodologies Expert on the Roster of Experts.
Dr Anna Clements
Sustainable energy transitions in East Africa
Dr. Anna Clements is the Lead Researcher for Tanzania for the UKAid-funded Modern Energy Cooking Services (MECS) programme (2018-2026). MECS aims to accelerate the transition to modern cooking, and the last 7 years have shown that electric cooking (eCooking) is the most sustainable, cost-effective, and long-term way to achieve that. Working on the intersection of cooking and electrification with MECS, Anna manages the £3.5m eCooking Scale and Support Programme in Tanzania, where eCooking is affordable, appropriate, clean and revenue generating for the electricity sector. She’s also Strategy Advisor for Smart Villages Research Group, a UK SME focusing on community-driven sustainable energy solutions that support economic development in the Global South. She’s an engineer by training (DPhil, MEng) but interdisciplinary by experience and approach, drawing on a range of practical experience in community engagement, human-centered design, and designing and implementing minigrids in East Africa.
Professor Colm Durkan
Developments in Engineering in Cambridge
Colm Durkan is a Professor of Nanoengineering Science at the University of Cambridge and is also the Head of the Engineering Department, which is comprises approx. 11% of the University. He is a fellow of St Catharine’s College. He was elected to a fellowship of the Institute of Physics in 2009, the Institute of Engineering & Technology in 2014 and the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2024.
Prof Durkan has led multiple projects with industrial partners (Including Samsung, Canon, Nokia, Unilever & BP-ICAM). Most recently, he has just secured £1M funding for a project looking into methods to mitigate against bubble formation on the surface of electrodes used for Hydrogen generation – this is one of the primary factors leading to low efficiency of the process.
Since starting as a faculty member in 2000, Prof Durkan has led a research group consisting of up to 15 members, been head of the Nanoscience centre for four years (2009-2010 and 2015-2016), published over 150 papers, given over 130 talks, and developed several pioneering scanning-probe microscopes and techniques for nanoscale fabrication as well as manipulation and characterization of the electrical, mechanical and chemical properties of materials. His research ethos is wherever possible to tackle industrially-relevant problems from a fundamental perspective. He has a particular interest in functional and 2D materials as well as nano-scale electronic and molecular devices, and charge transport at nanometre lengthscales.
He has published a textbook in Nano/quantum electronics and a popular science book on Nanotechnology and is currently completing a textbook on the fundamentals of circuit analysis for electrical engineers with Cambridge University Press. He teaches courses in Electrical Engineering, Quantum Mechanics & Nanotechnology.
As Head of the Department of Engineering, Prof Durkan is spearheading the move of the Department to CambridgeWest as part of the broader vision of creating an innovation district, and is also leading on a complete reform of the Engineering Undergraduate degree programme. Additionally, he has facilitated the creation of the Institute for Biomedical Innovation and is working on the creation of an AI/Robotics hub.
Dr Joel Gustafsson and Ms Maya Roy
The Decarbonisation of Girton College
Speaker profiles will be provided shortly.
