Thought Leadership and the Team

Foresight Transitions specialises in the following areas:
(1) Anticipatory Regulation; (2) Social Co-production; (3) Socio-Legitimacy; and (4) Procedural Justice.

The Foresight Transitions approach is based on the understanding that it is not techno-centric-mechanistic perspectives that matter to make (radical) change happen, but the socio-constructive-cultural ones. We therefore focus on the following three main areas:

CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT
To understand: Inclusive processes create a values-based perspective of the problem-space in iterative partnership with stakeholders rather than separate from them.

CLARITY
To provide strategic insight: Employment of tools to allow decisions to be made which accommodate the extent of the uncertainty which is encountered in the problem space.

CONSENT
To provide purpose to act: Allow audiences to ‘buy-in’ to initiatives in a socio-constructive, participatory way, and therefore co-own the plan (be inclusive).

  1. Is the provision of systematic, thoroughly evidenced and timely propositions tailored to address customer needs.
  2. It develops a deep understanding of customers, creating a rich experience via the establishment of a relationship based on listening and trust.
  3. The pace and cadence of decision-making within Foresight Transitions enables effective process innovation and an anticipatory dimension to proposition development.

We are focused on addressing humanity’s grand challenges with particular specialisation in:

  • Energy innovation and transitions
  • Rebalancing the carbon cycle (negative emissions)
  • Environmental and climate change
  • Strategic Foresight
  • Decision-making under Deep Uncertainty
  • Science communication—especially around climate change

Meet the Team

Dr Mark Workman

Director

Mail
mark [at] foresighttransitions.co.uk
Phone
+44 (0) 7788 110802

Dr Mark Workman, Director at Foresight Transitions, is a Coastal Engineer (University of Southampton), Military (Queens Gurkha Engineers) and Business Leader (Medical and Security Consultancy), Environmental Economist, Academic (Imperial College London) and Strategist by training.

He has undertaken military tours (gaining two awards for leadership), led extreme and high risk expeditions all over the world (see video below), and run multi-million dollar business units. His experience can be found on his LinkedIn profile.

‘In an era where leaders can struggle to deal with hard truths, Mark is the first person you need in the room because he is the last person that you want in the room.’
(Client testimonial)

Mark Workman, Director
Prof Niall Mac Dowell

Co-Founder

Prof Niall Mac Dowell, co-founder of Foresight Transitions, is also a Professor in Energy Systems Engineering at Imperial College London. He is a Chartered Engineer, and a Fellow of both the IChemE and the Royal Society of Chemistry. His research is focused on understanding the transition to a low carbon economy.

Niall has more than a decade’s experience as a consultant to the public and private sectors. He has worked with a range of private sector energy companies and has provided evidence to members of UK and International Select Committees and Working Groups. Niall was awarded the Qatar Petroleum medal for his research in 2010 and the IChemE’s Nicklin and Junior Moulton medals for his work on low carbon energy in 2015 and 2021, respectively.

He leads all whole systems modelling, consolidative, techno-centric activities within Foresight. He is responsible for technical quality assurance across all aspects of the company’s technical output.

Prof Solomon Brown

Director

Prof Solomon Brown is a director at Foresight Transitions and a Professor of Process and Energy Systems at the University of Sheffield and the Director of EPSRC’s Centre for Doctoral Training in Energy Storage and its Applications. He is a Fellow of the Energy Institute and leads the University of Sheffield’s Strategic Partnership with Drax as well as the Energy Systems Research Pillar in the Sheffield Energy Institute. He has considerable expertise in analysis and design of clean energy processes and the study of energy systems, and has published over 100 papers in top international journals and peer reviewed conferences on across energy technology and system levels. A full list of publications can be found here.

Solomon has worked extensively with Industry partners, including EDF, Drax, EPRI and National Grid, to assess new clean energy generation and storage technologies, and their role and value within the wider market and system. Around this work he has received funding through BEIS, MOD, EPSRC, H2020, RAEng, NERC and the Faraday Institution.

Image of Team—Prof Solomon Brown
Dr Anthony Ku

Director

Dr Anthony Ku has been involved in technology development and commercialization for over 20 years. He began his career at GE, where he developed advanced technology in support of the aviation, energy, water, and healthcare industries. He then took on leadership roles at NICE, where he developed a carbon management roadmap for China Energy and led a clean technology incubator. He holds over 50 patents and has brought 6 technologies from lab to market, which have generated over $20B in revenues. He holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University, and MS and BS degrees from MIT.

Richard Heap

Consultant

Richard Heap, Project Leader, is an experienced analyst managing projects across a range of technical and cross-cutting aspects. He has degrees from Imperial College, Environmental Technology (MSc) and Biology (BSc). After selling his recycling business, which he set up and ran for 10 years, he moved into science policy, leading the Climate Change, Energy & Environment team at the Royal Society, producing influential reports on Biofuels, Ocean Acidification, Radioactive Waste Management and initiating the work on Geoengineering. At the Energy Research Partnership he focussed on energy issues including a highly regarded report on Hydrogen, CO2-EOR, the Heat Transition and Public Engagement, which explored the need for strategic narratives. His current focus is on the application of futures techniques combined with the use of public and stakeholder engagement to help inform decision-making and policy and regulatory development both at a system level and bottom-up from a local and regional level.
Fran Battersby

Consultant

Francesca Battersby holds a degree in Natural Sciences from Durham University, and is a recent graduate of the MSc Environmental Technology at Imperial College London. She has conducted extensive research into greenhouse gas removal, from both a natural and social science discipline. Her MSc thesis investigated the salient governance aspects surrounding GGR in relation to the UK’s net-zero target, and involved networking with a number of subject experts and stakeholders.

Francesca leads work on corporate capacity building around carbon removal technologies, net zero and has published research investigating procedural justice in relation to GGR. During her time at the Carbon Trust, she helped to enhance the company’s GGR knowledge base, and developed material on the net-zero target and on direct air capture.

Fran Battersby
Victoria Harvey

Consultant

Victoria Harvey is a recent graduate of the MSc in Sustainable Energy Futures from the Energy Futures Lab at Imperial College London. Her MSc thesis investigated the fragmentation of the GGR sector in governance and the misalignment between technical maturity and regional deployment, specifically within the UK and US. Networking with sector stakeholders and facilitating discursive workshops to develop an anticipatory approach into the uncertainty space, she explored the role of international collaboration versus national specialisation to achieve a state of critical mass. Having previously completed a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Victoria fuses her technical background with communication skills in her approach to apply a holistic, interdisciplinary perspective to problem-solving.

Andrew Buglass

Associate Consultant

Andrew Buglass works with the Foresight team to provide a financial and investment perspective to the service provision portfolio. He has been focused exclusively on the energy sector since 1992, delivering over £11bn of energy investment across 30 countries. He has headed award-winning project finance teams at several international banks and project developers, most recently running the Energy & Infrastructure financing team at Royal Bank of Scotland.

He founded consultancy practice Buglass Energy Advisory in 2014 www.buglassenergyadvisory.com to support investors, government bodies, and other consultancies with strategic and commercial advice. Recent client assignments have advised on: investment in Smart Local Energy Systems; developing investable low carbon hydrogen business models; managing stranded asset risk for multilateral financial institutions; structuring options for utility clients on next generation offshore wind projects; and commercialisation of innovative technology to optimise combined battery storage and electric vehicle charging.

He also serves as Non-Executive Director to a number of electricity sector companies in the UK and internationally.

Andrew Buglass, Associate
Dr Piera Patrizio

Associate Consultant

Dr Piera Patrizio is an associate consultant at Foresight Transitions, a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London and guest researcher at IIASA.

Her work focuses on implementing analytic insights from energy modelling in fields of social science, climate policy and macroeconomics and vice versa, including the assessment of socio-economic impacts of energy systems decarbonization and low-carbon technologies deployment. She is currently part of the UKRI funded CO2RE Hub, where she is integrating a range of CO2 removal pathways within the MONET-UK model.

She has 5 years’ experience with energy systems and climate models, which she adopted at different geographic scales—urban to global level, and in a variety of case studies.

Before joining Imperial College, Piera held a Research Scholar position at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA, Austria).

She is also member of the advisor board for iScience journal and part of the Youth Advisory Council (YAC) for the Clean Growth Leadership Network (CGLN).

Picture of Team Dr Piera Patrizio
Dr Mai Bui

Associate Consultant

Dr Mai Bui is an associate consultant at Foresight Transitions and has over 10 years of research experience on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, where she explores the techno-economic and deployment potential of CCS in a range of different applications, including power, industry and for CO2 removal from the atmosphere, including bioenergy with CCS, and direct air capture. She has first-hand experience in designing experimental test campaigns at both pilot-scale and demonstration-scale CCS plants, as well as expertise in developing engineering process models.

In 2021, she and her co-authors were awarded the Junior Moulton Medal by the Institute of Chemical Engineers (IChemE). Since completing her PhD in early 2016, Mai has published 21 journal papers, several technical reports, book chapters, and two edited books on Carbon Capture and Storage and Greenhouse Gas Removal Technologies. She is also an Advisory Board member for Puro.earth and is helping them develop a voluntary carbon removal market.

Image of Team Dr Mai Bui
Mr Nixon Sunny

Associate Consultant

Mr Nixon Sunny is an associate consultant at Foresight Transitions with successful projects spanning disciplines such as engineering, policy and energy economics. He holds a PhD and an M.Eng. in Chemical Engineering from Imperial College London, where he also works as a researcher. During his PhD, he developed modelling tools to analyse investments in hydrogen and carbon capture infrastructure. He is a frequent speaker at prestigious academic conferences and have given dozens of technical presentations on multinational Horizon-2020 projects.

His areas of expertise include carbon-neutral gas and electricity infrastructure design, heating and industrial sectors, sustainability assessments, along with environmental policy and regulation. In particular, Nixon has first-hand experience of working in the civil service on policy and regulation issues around hydrogen. He has provided analytical evidence to private organisations, NGOs, Ministerial departments, local community groups, and the Climate Change Committee. Presently, he is focused on whole-systems assessments of zero-carbon fuels and GGR technology.

Image of Team Mr Nixon Sunny
Mr Yoga Wienda Pratama

Associate Consultant

Mr Yoga Wienda Pratama is an associate consultant at Foresight Transitions. Yoga earned his B.Eng. and M.Eng. in Chemical Engineering from Universitas Indonesia and an M.Eng. degree in Energy Systems Engineering from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, USA. He has an extensive track record in research and consulting projects in collaboration with numerous institutions, such Kyoto University, the IEA CIAB, the IEA CCC, and the IEA GHG R&D Programme, etc., and various energy companies in Indonesia and the UK. In those projects, he was appointed as an expert in energy systems modelling and optimisation for various uses, including the electricity system net zero transitions, LNG networks design, and integration of energy supply with electricity system planning.

His experience in energy systems modelling is ranging from corporate/assets level optimisation to nationwide planning. Yoga is currently finishing his PhD in energy systems transitions at Imperial College London.

Image of Team Yoga Wienda Pratama
Ms Solène Chiquier

Associate Consultant

Ms Solène Chiquier is an associate consultant at Foresight Transitions and a research assistant in the CleanFaB Research Group at Imperial College London’s Centre for Environmental Policy and the Centre for Process Systems Engineering. She investigates how a portfolio of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) solutions—afforestation/reforestation (AR), bioenergy with CCS (BECCS), direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS), biochar and enhanced weathering—might be deployed to limit global warming to “well-below” 2°C and possibly to 1.5°C. Her research focuses on techno-economic assessment, as well as CDR permanence.

Prior to Imperial College, Solène worked at Total in the CCUS Research Program. She holds a MSc in Energy, Electrical Systems and Renewable Energy, and a BSs in Electronics, Electrical Energy, and Automation from CentraleSupélec, one of the top-tier French engineering school.

Image of Team Ms Solene Chiquier
Ms Matthias Mersch

Associate Consultant

Mr Matthias Mersch is an associate consultant at Foresight Transitions.  He holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering and an MSc in Energy Engineering from RWTH Aachen University, Germany. He is currently doing a PhD in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London, researching efficient and effective energy system transitions from a technological and whole-system perspective. With his background in engineering and having worked as a student research assistant for over 3 years as well as in the R&D department of a large engineering company for half a year, Matthias has extensive technological knowledge and experience.

Over the last two years, Matthias has focussed on modelling and optimising complex energy systems, exploring the influence of various uncertainties, decisions, and policies to identify robust and efficient energy system transitions. The aim is to extract and condense useful information for various stakeholders and decision makers.

Image of Team Mr Matthias Mersch
Dr Dawid Hanak

Associate Consultant

Dr Dawid Hanak is an associate senior consultant at Foresight Transitions. He holds a PhD in Carbon Capture and an MBA from Cranfield University. He leads transformational research aiming to develop breakthrough technologies such as direct air capture, carbon capture, hydrogen production, and high-value chemicals and fuels synthesis. He has extensive expertise in process design and development, third-party validation, techno-economic feasibility assessment, environmental impact assessment, and business model development.

Dawid’s expertise supports businesses and entrepreneurs in verifying the feasibility of their innovative processes for energy and industrial decarbonisation. He collaborated with multiple organisations in the UK, Ireland and internationally to verify the techno-economic viability of the innovative DAC and CO2 capture and utilisation processes. He has also performed numerous environmental life-cycle assessments and carbon footprint assessments of alternative fuels supply chains.

He also actively raises awareness and advocates for the deployment of net-zero technologies via his LinkedIn outreach activities and founded Motivated Academic to support early career researchers.

Image of Team—Dr Dawid Hanak

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