Professor Brian Norton PhD DSc DUniv(h.c.) FIAE MRIA is Head of Energy Research at Tyndall National Institute, Research Professor at University College Cork and Professor of Solar Energy Applications at TU Dublin.
He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, Ireland’s highest academic distinction, and a Fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Building Services Engineers. His awards include; the CIBSE Napier Shaw Medal for the development of the degree-hour building energy-use correlation; the Energy Institute’s Roscoe Award which recognized his research comparing the embodied environmental impact of all renewable and non-renewable energy sources and the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award for the book “Comprehensive Renewable Energy”. He has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Solaris Conference series and “Solar Energy” Journal Best Paper Award in Photovoltaics.
He is currently a Principal Investigator in MaREI, the Irish national research centre for Energy, Climate and Marine and leads its Energy Efficiency research area. He is an Honorary Professor at Universities in Northern Ireland, China and USA. He has given numerous invited and keynote lectures including to the Maddox series at Texas Tech University, the Solar Energy Seminar Series at Purdue University, the GIAN initiative, India and the Annual David Hall Memorial Lecture to the United Kingdom Solar Energy Society. He is currently Vice-President and Treasurer of the European Sustainable Energy Innovation Alliance and serves on the Steering Committee of the Daylight Academy. He has led international collaborative research programmes, IEA and COST activities. He has undertaken strategic reviews of energy research; including those for the UK, Estonia and several universities internationally.
Professor Norton has supervised over fifty doctorates. His extensive research outputs have received over 12,000 citations with an h-index of 57.
As Secretary for Policy and International of the Royal Irish Academy, he serves on the European Academies Science Advisory Committee (EUSAC) and the EASAC Energy Panel.
As immediate past-President of Dublin Institute of Technology, he played a major role in the creation of Technological University Dublin and in the realisation of its flagship Dublin city-centre campus at Grangegorman. Previously he held posts at Ulster and Cranfield Universities. Originally qualified as a Physicist, he holds Doctorates in Engineering from Cranfield and Nottingham Universities and an Honorary Doctorate from Universite de Technologie de Troyes.