About
Professor Zhibin Yu currently holds the Chair of Energy Engineering in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Liverpool. He leads the Energy Research Cluster within the School of Engineering and holds a prestigious Royal Society Industrial Fellowship (2023–2027).
Prior to this, he held academic positions at the James Watt School of Engineering, University of Glasgow: Lecturer (2012–2017), Senior Lecturer (2017–2019), and Professor of Thermal Energy (2019–2023). Before joining the University of Glasgow, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Leicester (2011–2012) and the University of Manchester (2006–2011).
He earned his BEng in Cryogenic and Refrigeration Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China) and his PhD in Thermal Engineering from the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Part of his PhD research was conducted at the Laboratoire d’Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l’Ingénieur, CNRS, France. Professor Yu is a Chartered Engineer (CEng), a Member of the Institute of Refrigeration (IOR), a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers in Scotland (IES), and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
His research focuses on developing innovative solutions for sustainable heating, cooling, and power generation, with expertise spanning heat pumps, refrigeration, energy storage, district heating and cooling networks, organic Rankine cycle systems, and thermoacoustics. Professor Yu has led or contributed to more than 35 research projects with a combined value exceeding £30 million, funded by EPSRC, Innovate UK, and the European Commission. He has published over 180 research papers and is the inventor of the Flexible Heat Pump Cycle (PCT reference: WO2022069581A1), a technology enabling the next generation of high-efficiency, flexible heat pumps.
He currently serves as Associate Editor for Applied Energy (Elsevier) and npj Thermal Science and Engineering (Springer Nature), Subject Editor for Applied Thermal Engineering (Elsevier), and Section Editor-in-Chief for Frontiers in Thermal Engineering. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Energy Reports (Elsevier) and the International Journal of Green Energy (Taylor & Francis). Professor Yu is a Board Director of the International Association for Green Energy and served as Chair of the 15th International Green Energy Conference, hosted at the University of Glasgow.