Professor Bill Nuttall
Professor Bill Nuttall
Bill Nuttall is Professor of Energy Policy and Transformation at the University of Bristol. It is a part-time role. He is an honorary Fellow of Cambridge Judge Business School, and a Fellow of Hughes Hall - a college of the University of Cambridge. From 2012 to 2024 he was Professor of Energy at The Open University. In 1987 he won a Fulbright Post-Graduate Student Award to MIT, where he first became interested in science and technology public policy, receiving his MIT PhD in Physics in 1993. He is an author, or editor, of numerous books including Nuclear Renaissance - Second Edition (2022) and Britain and the Bomb (2019).
Specialisms
Professor Nuttall is a specialist in matters of energy technology and policy with major interests in nuclear energy (fission and fusion) and hydrogen energy.
Following a First-Class degree in Physics from the University of East Anglia in 1987, Professor Nuttall won a Fulbright Post-Graduate Student Award to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study for a PhD in physics. His PhD was supervised by Professor R J Birgeneau.
On returning to the UK in 1993, he worked as a scientist at Keele and Birmingham universities and then for the Institute of Physics in science policy. He joined the teaching faculty of Cambridge University in 2002.
At Cambridge, he held a shared post between Judge Business School, where he was based, and Cambridge University Engineering Department. In 2002, he launched the MPhil in Technology Policy for the Cambridge-MIT Institute.
He is an author, or editor, of more than a dozen books including Fusion on the Moon (2026), Nuclear Renaissance - Second Edition (2022) and Britain and the Bomb (2019) and author of more than 200 academic papers.
Professor Nuttall continues to have strong links with Cambridge where he is a Fellow of Hughes Hall, a college of the university. Looking internationally, he is a Non-Resident Fellow of the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines, USA and a Visiting Professor at SRM Institute of Science and Technology in Tamil Nadu, India.
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