Professor Jonathan M Cullen
DPhil Engineering, MPhil Engineering, BSc Chemical and Process Engineering
Professor of Sustainable Engineering, Fellow of Fitzwilliam College
About me
Jonathan Cullen is Professor of Sustainable Engineering at the University of Cambridge. He leads the Resource Efficiency Collective (www.refficiency.org) and has a reputation for top-down studies of resource systems, bringing skills in developing new metrics to reflect both energy and emissions consequences of materials production.
Jonathan's research interests span energy and material systems, efficiency limits, circularity and zero carbon transition pathways. He currently leads C-THRU: carbon clarity in the global petrochemical supply chain (c-thru.org), and is a co-investigator on: CCG: Climate Compatible Growth (climatecompatiblegrowth.com), TransFIRe: Foundation Industries Research and Innovation Hub (transfire-hub.org), S2uPPlant: Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging from Plants (UKRI), and UK FIRES: Locating Resource Efficiency at the heart of Future Industrial Strategy (ukfires.org). He is a lead author for the IPCC AR6 Industry chapter and co-authored the book Sustainable materials: with both eyes open, which pioneered the concept of material efficiency for energy-intensive industries (www.refficiency.org/publications/smwbeo/(Opens in a new window)).
Course
Publications
Allwood, J.M., Cullen, J.M., et al. (2012). Sustainable materials: with both eyes open. UIT Cambridge, UK.
Cullen, J.M., Cooper, D.R. (2022). ‘Material flows and efficiency’. Annual Review of Materials Research (52) 525-559.
Creutzig, F., Niamir, L, Bai X, Cullen JM, et al. (2021). ‘Demand-side solutions to climate change mitigation consistent with high levels of wellbeing’. Nature Climate Change, online version. DOI:10.21203/rs.3.rs-127928/v1
Grubler, A., Wilson, C., Bento, N., Boza-Kiss, B., Cullen, J.M. et al. (2018). A’ low energy demand scenario for meeting the 1.5 °C target and sustainable development goals without negative emission technologies’. Nature Energy, 3: 515–527. DOI:10.1038/s41560-018-0172-6
Levi, P.G., Cullen, J.M. (2018). ‘Mapping global flows of chemicals: from fossil fuel feedstocks to chemical products’. Environmental Science & Technology, 52 (4): 1725–1734. DOI:10.1021/acs.est.7b04573
Cullen, J.M., Allwood, J.M. (2010). ‘The efficient use of energy: tracing the global flow of energy from fuel to service’. Energy Policy, 38(1): 75–81. DOI:10.1016/j.enpol.2009.08.054