Sara Louise Walker

Professor Sara Walker is a leading expert in whole energy systems and the energy transition at the University of Birmingham, where she is Director of Birmingham Energy Institute. She has been working in the energy sector since 1996, with a career spanning industry and academia. Her research focus is on renewable energy and energy efficiency in buildings, energy policy, energy resilience, and more recently she has focused on hydrogen, energy demand, and whole energy systems.

Professor Walker leads on a number of large research initiatives. She is Director of the EPSRC Hub on Hydrogen Integration for Accelerated Energy Transitions (HI-ACT), which looks at the key role of hydrogen in the energy transition as part of a whole energy systems approach. As Co-Director of the EPSRC Energy Demand Research Centre, she has been looking at ways in which industry decarbonisation can go hand-in-hand with energy demand reduction, as well as the potential for heat networks to offer flexibility as part of a whole energy system approach. She is also involved in the Supergen Network Plus on Renewable Energy and AI, where she is looking at the University campus as a demonstrator of multiple assets for which AI could forecast demand, output, and make co-ordinated control decision with human-in-the-loop. This portfolio of research has a value of over £20m.

Her expertise and experience enables her to engage in advisory and consultancy roles, including as Advisory Committee Member for the UK Energy Research Centre and the UK CCS Research Centre, and as Member of the EPSRC Scientific Advisory Committee for Energy and Decarbonisation. In 2025, she was appointed as a Member of the Science and Technology Advisory Committee to the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).