We recently interviewed Dr Frances Hill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for CAT’s MSc Sustainability in Energy Provision and Demand Management, about her work teaching at our Graduate School.

Please introduce yourself and your work at CAT.

I lecture on heat transfers in buildings, heating, cooling and ventilation, and lighting. I run practical sessions on solar water heating, carbon calculators, and energy modelling. And I also teach study skills including data analysis.

What’s been on your to-do list this week?

This week, I have supervised dissertation students in Rio, Manila, Berlin and Cardiff. I’ve worked with students interviewing Kenyan Maasai to learn more of their worldview relating to sustainability. And I’ve been marking assignments on subjects including Glasgow’s circular economy, hemp growing in Ireland, and working with Welsh farmers towards tree-planting targets.

What interesting dissertation projects have students been working on?

I have a student at the moment looking at energy and carbon saving in deep retrofit projects. She’s exploring whether the penalties of working on the low-hanging fruit first, rather than doing things in the ideal order, are over-ridden by the benefits in energy saving.

Another student is working with a city council to develop a tool to help them prioritise which of their social housing portfolio to retrofit, given their limited resources.

It’s not all UK-based – we had a student in Tanzania, for example, who looked at the impact of painting school roofs white to reduce overheating, a small intervention that could have a significant impact.

Those are just a few recent examples, and obviously I’m focused on the energy and buildings side of things. We also have students working on projects relating to ecology, behaviour change, food production, and more – with a really wide range of research topics.

How does a CAT MSc prepare a student for their career?

MScs are about skills, not just knowledge, so a lot of our workshops help students to develop their skills. CAT students come from a wide range of backgrounds, many of them changing careers or having had little previous academic experience but lots of relevant work experience. I help students develop numerical skills if needed, or those who come from less of an essay-focused background to develop their writing skills.

Dissertation supervision requires me to work in tandem with students, helping them find the best way to develop their skills and source the material they need. They’ll often know more than I do about their topic by the end of the dissertation, but I’m there to help them through the process and to develop their research skills.

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