Rajat Gupta is Director of the multi-disciplinary Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development and Low Carbon Building Research Group at Oxford Brookes University, where he also holds professorial chair in sustainable architecture and climate change. He developed the RIBA award-winning DECoRuM model for carbon mapping communities. Rajat’s research interests lie in evaluating building performance from a socio-technical perspective, local energy mapping, smart energy systems and scaling up energy retrofits.

Rajat has been academic lead of major interdisciplinary research projects on evaluating the impacts of low carbon communities using action research (ESRC/EPSRC energy and communities EVALOC project, £1.37 million), smart storage of solar electricity (Innovate UK ERIC project, £1.2 million) and integration of renewables in communities (Innovate UK LEMUR project). He is currently Principal Investigator of a £1.3 million UK-India EPSRC-DST project on residential energy reduction in India (RESIDE) and Co-Investigator of the £8 million EPSRC EnergyReV initiative on smart local energy systems. Rajat is also leading an EnergyREV Plus project on user influence tools for enabling two-way engagement with smart local energy systems. He is Co-I on the £13.8 million Project LEO (Local Energy Oxfordshire) – one of the smart local energy system demonstrators that seeks to demonstrate a competitive local energy marketplace to enable balancing of supply and demand across power, heat and transport. Rajat has published widely, including strategic journal papers on future direction of energy demand research and evaluation of an innovative retrofit programme.