The transition of worldwide energy systems to cleaner sources, and at the same time, providing energy to over 1.3 billion people currently without access to electricity, whilst simultaneously maintaining the quality of supply for those already with access, is one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century. A necessary requirement on solving this challenge is to equip future generations with the best possible appreciation of the complexity involved in developing these new energy systems and, an important step towards ensuring that industry and government policy can effectively address these challenges. The fundamental transformation of energy systems required calls for a new kind of domain expertise, systems thinkers, who combine excellence with interdisciplinary breadth. These people will need to be able to recognise the multi-dimensional nature of the problem across technical, social and economic areas.

The newly approved Masters in Energy Systems, due to start in October 2019, builds on contributions by the world leading Oxford Energy network to include the host department, Engineering Science as well as Physics, Materials Science, Chemistry and the School of Geography and the Environment. Successful graduates from the course will be highly sought after individuals, the first academically trained systems thinkers in energy. Tuition will include knowledge from cutting edge research teams from across Oxford University departments and beyond. We will ensure students are also able to connect to a broad range of non-academic stakeholders in the public sector and industry for relevant components of the course. As well as creating graduates who think differently about these complex problems we are also aiming to recruit the student cohort as broadly as possible. Part of this strategy is to encourage and broaden participation in the course by supporting study as either full time or part-time attendance.

Speaker: Professor David Wallom is an Associate Professor in the Oxford e-Research Centre, Department of Engineering Science, where he leads the Energy and Environmental Informatics Research Group. Alongside work on climate change and its impact the group works on the digitization of the energy system in a number of different areas including, smartening the distribution system through making computational and data services available as a service to the systems operator and connecting consumption with drives of usage at the domestic and non-domestic levels. He will be the founding course director for the MSc.