C. Alan Short

Professor C. Alan Short M.A., Dip.Arch., Ph.D. (Cantab)

Professor Alan Short was a Senior Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge before continuing studies at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. He is the 5th Professor of Architecture in the University, succeeding Sir Leslie Martin and Sir Colin St. John Wilson, the architect of the British Library. He leads a highly interdisciplinary group working on how to deliver very low carbon buildings and cities, assembled from across the Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics, the BP Institute for Multiphase Fluid Flow, the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Infectious Diseases, History of Art, Engineering and the Institute of Atmospheric Science, with close collaborators in other leading institutions, Imperial, Kings College London, Loughborough and Reading in the UK and in China where he is a Ministry of Education Distinguished Professor co-directing the national research centre in green buildings and a Guest Professor at Zhejiang University. He has built important sustainable buildings for real, winning the Green Building of the Year Prize, the RIBA President's Research Award and numerous other prizes. His last major work was the passive downdraught cooled UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in Bloomsbury at the centre of the London Urban Heat Island. He was the 2014 George Collins Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians and 2013-14 Geddes Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. His research group has produced a film of its work on the adaptation potential of the NHS Estate, ‘Robust Hospitals in a Changing Climate’ at http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1559781 which won the tv/e Global Sustainability Film Award 2013. He was appointed to administer and monitor the NHS Energy Efficiency Fund 2013-14 with the Professor of Sustainable Engineering Peter Guthrie, reporting to the Under Secretary of State for Health.

He was the Principle Investigator for the UK-China EPSRC/NSFC funded ‘Low carbon climate-responsive heating and cooling of cities’ (LoHCool) focussing on carbon reduction opportunities in mega-cities in China. The film of the outcomes 'A Low Carbon Future for Cina's Furnace Cities' won the tv/e 2019 Global Sustainability Film Award, https://gsfa.tve.org/tve_2019_film_awards/ beating David aAttenborough's film on whales, and has just won Best Short Documentary at the Vegas Film Festival Awards.

Through the COVID-19 epidemic he has been working with the BP Professor and the Head of the Vet School on 'Making Emergency Hospitals Safer' focussing on proposals for adapting marriage halls in India. The film of the experiments and designs is on the University website. The findings were reported on the front page of the Daily Telegraph underneath a huge picture of Boris Johnson.