Rate My Professor John Littlewood

Professor John Littlewood is Professor of Sustainable and Resilient Buildings in the field of Engineering at Cardiff Metropolitan University, within the Cardiff School of Art and Design. He holds a BSc (Hons) in Building Surveying and a PhD in Building Performance Assessment of Nearly-Zero Operational Energy Dwellings, undertaken in collaboration with Gwalia Housing Association (now Pobl) and co-funded by the Ecology Building Society. A Chartered Building Engineer (C Build E), Chartered Architectural Technologist (MCIAT), Fellow of the Chartered Association of Building Engineers (FCABE), Higher Education Academy (FHEA), Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), and Member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (MIET), Littlewood has been a multi-disciplinary engineering practitioner focused on change management, research, and innovation projects in architecture, the built environment, and engineering since the mid-1990s. He joined Cardiff Metropolitan University part-time in 2007 and full-time in 2008, founding and leading the Sustainable and Resilient Built Environment (SuRBe) Research Group in 2009, which draws membership from four of the university's five schools and forms part of the Human Centred Design Global Academy.

As Principal Investigator, he has led over 55 successful external research and innovation initiatives, securing approximately £4.6 million in funding. Littlewood has supervised 20 doctorates to completion across DBA, DEng, DSBE, DProf, EdE, and PhD programs, chaired 13 examination panels, and externally examined 29 doctorates in the UK, Australia, France, and Italy. He coordinates professional doctorate pathways in Art & Design Practice, Engineering (DEng), and Sustainable Built Environment (DSBE), and serves on various university research committees. His research specializes in developing interventions to qualitatively and quantitatively assess and optimize the performance of new and existing buildings during design, manufacture, adaptation, retrofit, construction, commissioning, and operation, aiming to maximize user comfort, indoor air quality, quality of life, and minimize embodied and operational carbon emissions. Key publications include his editorship of the Springer volume Sustainability in Energy and Buildings 2024; "Low-Cost CO2 Sensors: On-Site Performance Evaluation and Co-Location Correction Procedure for Reliable Ventilation Assessments in Schools" (Sensors, 2026); "When Are Decentralised Non-Potable Water Systems Environmentally and Financially Viable?" (Sustainability, 2026); and "Analysis of a Best-Fit Web Based LCA Tool for UK SMEs to Evaluate Residential Operational and Embodied Carbon" (2025). Awards include the Outstanding Contribution to KES Award (2020) and Innovate UK Outstanding KTP for Seven Oaks Modular (2023). He chairs the Wales Region of the Chartered Association of Building Engineers and serves as General Conference Chair for KES International.