Dr Richard O’Shea is a Lecturer in Sustainability in Enterprise with the School of Engineering in University College Cork (UCC). Richard worked as a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher, and a Postdoctoral Researcher with the Bioenergy and Biofuels research Group in MaREI. His area of research focused on assessing methods to decarbonise a large facility in the food and beverage sector in Ireland. Dr O'Shea also worked as a design engineer with RPS primarily in the area of HVAC. He obtained his PhD in Energy Engineering from UCC in 2018. His research has focused on biomethane production via anaerobic digestion, resource assessments, technoeconomic analysis, optimisation, GIS, and multi criteria decision analysis. This has led to over 50 peer-reviewed journal publications with journals such as Applied Energy, Bioresource Technology, and Renewable Energy.

I have a substantial interest in sustainability and how technologies, processes, products, and companies can be compared whilst considering the three pillars of sustainability. As a result of work completed during my; PhD studies, my time as a design engineer, my time as a post-doctoral and senior post-doctoral researcher, as well as during my time as a Lecturer, I have developed deep competencies in several research areas relevant to sustainability and sustainable energy innovation. I possess deep technical expertise in the field of anaerobic digestion (AD) covering all elements from; reactor design, experimental design, and analysis of data. I have expertise in assessing the economic performance of technologies through the use of techno-economic analysis (economic pillar). I have completed lifecycle assessments to determine the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission savings from several technologies (environmental pillar). I possess knowledge of the likely impacts which communities in the vicinity of decarbonisation projects are likely to consider (social pillar). I am skilled in the development of GIS models for renewable energy resource assessments and the identification of the cost optimal way of managing biological nutrients produced during the AD process. My first research interest is the use of Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) to combine multiple metrics from the different pillars of sustainability so as to inform decision making processes in a transparent and data driven manner. I applied 5 MCDM methods throughout the course of research completed during my time as a member of research and teaching staff at UCC and developed a novel method of conducting sensitivity analysis for three of these methods. I believe that the use of MCDM as a tool to measure sustainability is a key area of research which can result in immediately applicable actions when used to assess te

Dr O'Shea delivers research informed modules (CE4024, and NE6215) which are delivered to a combination of undergraduate, masters, and higher diploma students. Dr O'Shea has supervised and mentored undergraduate research projects (CE4002), masters research projects (CE6009, CE6051, PE6050, ME6020, NE6009 and NE6017) and supervises multiple PhD candidates.