Marco Aurisicchio

PhD position available in Sustainable Material Selection, Packaging and the Circular Economy. Contact me if you want to apply or simply learn more about this opportunity.

Dr Marco Aurisicchio is Reader - Associate Professor - in Engineering Design in the Dyson School at Imperial College London. His current roles include:

• Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Industrial Fellowship with Procter & Gamble.
• Research Excellence Framework (REF) lead for the Dyson School of Design Engineering.
• Academic lead in the London Interdisciplinary Social Science (LISS) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP).
• Co-lead Ocean Plastic Network.
• External associate at the Human Centered Systems Lab at NASA's Ames Research Center.
• Course leader for the 2nd year Design and Sustainability module taught in the MEng in Design Engineering.
• Tutor in the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) programme between Imperial College and the Royal College of Art.
• Academic champion for the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Visiting Professor in the School.

He leads a team of PhD students and Research Associates working on projects funded by industry and the Research Councils UK. As part of his research Marco has collaborated with various businesses and agencies including the Ragn-Sells Group, Procter & Gamble (Gillette), Nestle, Weir Minerals, Laing O'Rourke, CERN, Nacco Materials Handling Group, NASA, Solar Turbines, Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems and Smiths Medical International.

Marco has had the roles of Director of Research and Director of Postgraduate Studies in the Dyson School. Prior to joining the School, he was a Senior Lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Imperial. He joined Imperial from the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge where he studied his Ph.D. in Engineering Design and then progressed to a Research Associate post. During his doctoral and postdoctoral research, he worked within the BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce University Technology Partnership for Design. Marco received a Laurea in Mechanical Engineering from the Universita’ degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza" in 2000.

His research interests are in the following areas.

Sustainable consumption and manufacturing. To support the transition towards a circular economy he is investigating access-based business models (e.g. material-service systems and product-service systems) and the role of services to produce closed resource loops. He is also conducting studies to research reuse behaviour and to model consumer journeys in reuse systems. Further, he has led the research and development of a tool to model systems that produce closed-loop resource flows known as the Flow Mapper.

Construction as manufacturing. His work in this area has focused on the design and optimisation of supply chains for modular construction projects and understanding the root causes of schedule deviation in construction.

User experience and human-product interaction. To support designers in industry, he has conducted research to model user experience and understand affective experiences with durable products including consumer electronics.

Engineering safety-critical systems. In this area, he has conducted studies of engineers’ information seeking behaviour, and investigated methods for design rationale capture and functional modelling. He started this research in collaboration with Rolls-Royce and then took it to NASA's Ames Research Centre where he collaborates with the Human-Centered Systems Lab. As part of this work he has been involved in the research and development of two visual knowledge capture tools: 1) Decision Rationale editor (DRed); and 2) design Visual Understanding Environment (designVUE).

His research has been published in a variety of journals including Journal of Cleaner Production, Journal of Industrial Ecology, Automation in Construction, Research in Engineering Design and Journal of Engineering Design. He has also published articles for the World Economic Forum.

Research projects

Vinnova and Ragn-Sells Group project titled 'Water Treatment Plants as Resource Hubs'.

RAEng and P&G project titled 'Design for Circular Consumption in the Home Environment'.

EPSRC and P&G project titled 'Circular Behaviour and Product Service Systems'.

EPSRC and P&G project titled 'Closing the Loops of Fast Moving Consumer Goods'.

EPSRC project titled 'Holistic integration of technology, design and policy for a greener plastic future'.

Enquiries from potential research students interested in working in any of the above research areas are welcome. Further I have a PhD position open in the fields of Sustainable Material Selection, Packaging and the Circular Economy. Contact me if your want to apply or simply learn more about this opportunity.