Roland Clift


Roland Clift is a chemical engineering professor widely known for his work and media contributions on the topic of sustainability.

Career

Clift was born 19 November 1942 and studied Chemical Engineering at Cambridge, achieving first class honours in 1964. He received a PhD from McGill University in 1970 for work on particle-fluid interactions, and this was his main research area in subsequent years. He became Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Surrey in 1981.
His growing interest in the application of engineering principles to environmental issues led him in 1992 to establish the Centre for Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey, a multidisciplinary group of engineers, scientists and social scientists. In this Centre he was an advocate of Clean Technology, Life Cycle Assessment and Sustainable Development. He is presently Professor Emeritus at the CES.
He has made a number of criticisms of government policy with respect to energy and the environment.
He moved to British Columbia in 2018. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia and the University of Victoria.

Positions

Member, Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Visiting Professor in Environmental systems analysis at Chalmers University, Sweden. Expert Adviser to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee enquiry into Energy Efficiency. Member of the Science Advisory Council of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs . Vice-President of Environmental Protection UK. President of the International Society for Industrial Ecology 2009–10.. Visiting Professor at Chalmers University of Technology since 2000.

Honours

He is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Arts. In 1994 he was made an OBE for his initiative in promoting research in Clean Technology, and a CBE in 2006 for services to the environment. He received the Sir Frank Whittle Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering for 2003, for 'an outstanding and sustained engineering achievement contributing to the well-being of the nation'. He received the 2007 Hanson Medal and the 2016 George E. Davis Medal of the Institution of Chemical Engineers.

Selected publications