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Institute of Advanced Study
External shot of Institute of Advanced study at Cosin's Hall

Professor Julia Stegemann

IAS Fellow at St Aidan's College, January-March 2027

Headshot of Professor Julia Stegemann IAS Fellow 2026/27Contact Details

Julia Stegemann is Professor of Environmental Engineering at University College London. Her expertise is in waste characterisation and management, and she has been doing research to support resource efficiency and rational decision-making about environmental technologies for more than thirty years, including for management of hazardous waste, contaminated land, mining wastes, and building materials.  Professor Stegemann’s research and consultancy  experience include technology and systems development, implementation and evaluation; data mining; computer modelling; and support for waste regulation. She is a founding Director of the UN-recognised International Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Resource Management in a Circular Economy, with responsibility for Built Environment. Since 2025, she has also been a founding Director of CircEL, a UCL-wide hub for research and education in the Circular Economy, and leads INCBE, the UCL Innovation Network on Circular BioEconomy. She is an author of more than 200 academic publications, with co-authors from excellent institutions around the world (h-index =41), including an open access text book “Introduction to Waste Management and the Circular Economy”

Professor Stegemann is a Co-Investigator of the £13M ELEMENTAL BBSRC Engineering Biology Mission Hub for biorecovery of metals from wastes and environmental media. She was PI and Director of the  £8M UKRI Interdisciplinary Circular Economy Centre for Mineral-based Construction Materials from 2021-2025, leading a diverse team of 25 co-investigators and more than 50 industrial collaborators to develop the scientific and socio-economic understanding and the technological basis for design and implementation of systems, processes and policy that will support the transition to a resource efficient built environment.  Other recent projects include the 13M Euro Horizon Europe FutuRaM project, which investigated the future availability of critical minerals from six key waste streams in Europe, in which she was the co-lead for construction and demolition waste.

Professor Stegemann has a BEng in Chemical Engineering and an MEng in Environmental Engineering from McMaster University, a PhD in Environmental Engineering from Imperial College London, and a DipLTHE from Oxford University.  She started her career developing and validating an evaluation protocol for stabilised/solidified products for Environment Canada, in collaboration with other Canadian regulators and the US Environmental Protection Agency, as well as 17 industrial collaborators. This approach to waste characterisation and leaching has gained international recognition and forms the basis of current ASTM and EN standards, and is also used in European regulation of waste management. Past projects a European project (NNAPICS) to develop a database and neural network models to predict the properties of stabilised/solidified products at Imperial College London, as well as a 22-partner Innovate UK project (ProCeSS)  to optimise generic stabilisation/solidification processes for increased technology transparency and support standards for good practice. She has also participated widely in other national and international collaborations, e.g., in development of a self-sealing/self-healing mineral-based liner/cover for landfills and mining waste impoundments with the Netherlands Energy Research Foundation (ECN), as a core member of the EPSRC Network for S/S Treatment and Remediation (STARNET) and also the Work Package on Sediment Quality and Impact Assessment of Pollutants of the European Sediment Research Network (SEDNET).

Professor Stegemann’s IAS Fellowship will be undertaken in connection with an IAS major project in her specialism of Circular Economy.  It will draw on her experience in relation to a wide variety of the “bulk wastes” that are the focus of the IAS major project, including construction and demolition waste (aggregate, concrete and cement, iron and steel, aluminium, and soil) and mining and mineral processing wastes.  Professor Stegemann is particularly interested to continue exploration of the concept of Use Potential, which she has been working on with UCL colleagues for several years.  Use Potential is a proposed technically evidenced policy tool to help waste generators and potential users of waste as raw materials understand the incentives and barriers to recovery of particular material streams, to promote systems change. This interest aligns with her involvement in development of the UNFC and the United Nations Resource Management System.  She looks forward to exploring these and other ideas together with IAS Fellows Myra Hird and Yuyun Ismawati, and Durham colleagues.

Events

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