Professor William Swan
School of Science, Engineering and Environment
Current positions
Professor in Buildings and Energy
Biography
Professor Will Swan is the Director of Energy House Laboratories (EHL) at the University of Salford, where he has led the energy and buildings research for more than 10 years. The labs include the award-winning Salford Energy House, a whole Victorian house in a climate-controlled chamber, the Smart Meters Smart Homes Lab and the award-winning £16m Energy House 2.0.
Will is a member of a number of groups concerning retrofit and energy efficiency of buildings; he was one of the founder members of the UK Building Performance Network, is Chair for the Low Carbon Buildings Challenge Group in Greater Manchester, and a member of the Retrofit Task Force.
Areas of research
Building and Energy, Retrofit
Areas of supervision
Building and Energy, Retrofit, Sustainability, Socio-technical Systems
- Retrofit
- Construction management
I have a specific research interest in issues surrounding net zero new and existing homes. I am the leader of a large research team, Energy House Labs, that focuses on issues including fabric and building performance, systems performance, internal environments and digital.
We operate 2 unique facilities that allow building scale experiments to be undertaken under repeatable conditions, Salford Energy House and Energy House 2.0. We undertake a lot of commercial and grant funded research work with partners such as Barratt Developments, Bellway, Persimmon, BEAMA, and Saint Gobain. We address not only system performance in the lab and in the field but also explore methods for evaluating buildings.
The wider research team have considerable experience of energy and buildings as well as access to research partners. Our recent projects have included HAVEN (Innovate UK), exploring demand side response, Homes as Energy Systems, DEEP (retrofit), as well as the 3 year Energy House 2.0 project which established a globally leading research facility.
Qualifications
- PhD
- FCMI
Memberships
- Member of Greater Manchester Low Carbon Hub Buildings Group
- Chair of Greater Manchester Retrofit Innovation Network
- Member of National Refurbishment Centre
- Fellow of Centre for Refurbishment Excellence
- Fellow of Institute of Sustainability
- Member of Constructing Excellence Board
- Member of Zero Carbon Hub Performance Gap Group DV0
- Co-Chair of Retrofit 2012 Conference
- Invited Speaker at Housing Forum, Retrofit Roadshow and Eco Build
- Chair of North West Construction Awards