Alice Moncaster

Alice Moncaster (MA(Cantab) CEng MICE) is a Senior Research Associate at the centre, leading the Embodied Carbon and Energy in Buildings programme.

She is a senior member and Director of Studies at Newnham College.

Email: amm24@cam.ac.uk

Alice Moncaster is leading the development of a whole life embodied energy and carbon tool at the Centre.  This work forms part of a £1.1m consortium project to develop a whole life financial, energy and carbon costing tool for buildings, funded by the TSB and EPSRC, with BLP Insurance, Willmott Dixon and the UCL Energy Institute.  Alice is an invited participant in the International Energy Agency Annex 57, an international task group developing knowledge and data for the embodied carbon and energy in buildings. 

Additional current research includes: the carbon impacts of retrofit, through the South Cambs District Council pilot retrofit scheme at Rampton Drift; and design strategies for retrofitting existing buildings to cope with future climate scenarios, as part of the TSB-funded Design for Future Climates, the first national programme for building adaptation studies. Alice has also initiated a project with the Centre for Gender Studies at Cambridge and the Institution of Civil Engineers, looking at working conditions for women in civil engineering.

Alice's PhD was an interdisciplinary study into the decisions and engineering solutions for sustainability in four case studies of school building projects, funded by an EPSRC DTA grant in the School of Environmental Sciences at UEA.

Alice is also the Deputy Director of the postgraduate masters course in Interdisciplinary Design for the Built Environment, run jointly between the departments of Engineering and Architecture at Cambridge (www.idbe.org).  She is a Director of Studies in Engineering for undergraduates at Newnham College, and an Associate of Cambridge Architectural Research Limited (www.carl.co.uk).

A chartered engineer who has worked for several years as a structural and geotechnical design engineer, she has also designed her own low carbon two storey extension made from timber, lime and recycled materials.

Alice is particularly interested in research at the intersections between the social sciences and engineering, and between academia and industry.