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About Energy Research at Newcastle University
Our vision and mission
At the Centre for Energy Research, our vision is to unify efforts and raise ambitions towards a new way of thinking about energy systems.
Our mission is to contribute to the delivery of clean and affordable energy – the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 7.
A new way of thinking
By bringing together a wealth of expertise across disciplines, at the Centre for Energy Research, we aim to unify efforts towards a new way of thinking about energy systems:
- Across scales – from individual electrons to global trading systems
- Across geographies – from the individual home and household, to communities of villages and towns, to mega cities and nations
- Across disciplines – from materials science, the engineering of systems, social sciences, the law of energy policy and regulation, public health, and AI. A multitude of disciplines are needed to address this complex problem
- Across applications — such as domestic, industry, transport, and services
We aim to deliver advances in:
- technology and engineering
- materials science
- economics and policy studies
- cyber security
- lifecycle analysis
- ethics and justice
- business models
- behaviour
- design and infrastructure
This will help the Centre for Energy Research to progress towards the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.
Dr Sara Walker is currently a Reader in Energy and Director of The Centre for Energy at the School of Engineering. Her research is on energy efficiency and renewable energy at the building scale.
Dr Walker spent eight years at De Montfort University, where her research and teaching focussed on renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies.
Her PhD investigated the impact of electricity sector deregulation on renewable energy market share. During that period with De Montfort University, Dr Walker worked on a number of research projects around renewable energy and energy efficiency, primarily funded by the European Commission.
In September 2015, Dr Walker joined Newcastle University in the School of Mechanical and Systems Engineering. She was Degree Programme Director for the MSc Renewable Energy Flexible Training Programme (REFLEX) and MSc Renewable Energy and Enterprise Management (REEM) until 2017. In 2017, she became Director of Expertise for Infrastructure research and member of the School of Engineering Executive Board.
Her research continues to focus on renewable energy and energy efficiency in buildings, energy policy, energy resilience, and whole energy systems.
Libby is currently a Reader in Energy Materials and Co-Director of the Centre for Energy.
Libby took up a lectureship at Newcastle in September 2014 and was promoted to Reader in 2018. Previously, Libby was awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship and a University of Nottingham Anne McLaren Research Fellowship 2010, having spent three years as a post-doc at the Centre for Molecular Devices, Uppsala University, Sweden, developing dye-sensitised solar cells. Libby completed her PhD in 2007 at the University of York, supervised by Robin Perutz FRS and Anne-Kathrin Duhme-Klair.
Research in Libby’s group focuses on solar cell and solar fuel devices that function at a molecular level and challenge the conventional solid-state photovoltaic technologies. We specialise in dye-sensitised nanostructured NiO electrodes, which are less well understood than conventional TiO2 devices pioneered by Grätzel, but when coupled with TiO2 give very promising tandem dye-sensitised solar cells. Our activities span from fundamental science and physical chemical characterisation of these complex molecular systems to development of new material components such as nanostructured photoelectrodes, dyes, and electrolytes.