Professor Tim Broyd is Professor of Built Environment Foresight at University College London as well as an Honorary Professor of Civil Engineering at the same university. He is the founding Director of UCL’s Institute for Digital Innovation in the Built Environment. He moved to UCL in 2012 following a career in industry, and has substantial experience as corporate director of technology, innovation, knowledge management and sustainability for globally operating engineering design consultancies. Within his current role he works with leading individuals in industry, government and academia to understand and prepare for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Tim is a leading advocate for Digital Transformation and Digital Twins and has provided advice in this area to the development teams of a number of large infrastructure projects. In 2005 Tim launched Buildoffsite, an industry-wide network to develop technologies and market uptake of offsite construction technologies and techniques.

A past President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, he is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers, the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

Seminar topic:

• Innovation and the search for low carbon buildings and infrastructure

The construction industry has a bad reputation for failing to meet traditional targets of quality, cost and time, and also for lack of innovation in processes, methods and materials. The reality is not quite so bleak, but it is certainly the case that there is little formal research. And yet we are now facing the greatest challenge the industry has ever had to meet, that of climate change.

This seminar will start by summarising the changes that have occurred during a single career span, particularly in the development and adoption of digital ways of working. It will consider the need for a consistent and long-term shift to ‘whole life thinking’ being a necessary attribute before real change can be made. It will demonstrate how industry and government need to work closely together to meet the minimum needs of society. And in doing so, it will suggest that only by closely co-ordinated international efforts can the worst effects of climate change be averted.

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