Maurizio Collu is Professor in Offshore Renewable Energy Engineering at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, where he has worked since 2018. His work focuses on making offshore wind power safer, more reliable, and more affordable.
He specialises in floating wind turbines, structures that can be anchored in deeper water, further from shore, where winds are stronger and more consistent, rather than fixed to the seabed. This opens up vast new areas of ocean to clean energy generation, including sites too deep for conventional wind farms, and his research helps industry design platforms that can withstand the harsh conditions found at sea.
He has been leading major research programmes with real-world application, including a UK-funded initiative exploring how offshore wind and other marine energy sources could be used to produce clean hydrogen fuel (EPSRC Ocean REFuel), and international projects developing platforms that combine several renewable technologies on a single structure (EPSRC-NERC Inno MPP, EU Blue Growth Farm). Over his career he has secured several million pounds in public (EPSRC, NERC, Innovate UK, Scottish Government, European Research Council, among others) and industry funding for this work.
He is recognised as a leader at international level in his field. He has chaired a global scientific committee on offshore renewable energy (ITTC specialist committee on Ocean Renewable Energy) and sits on the editorial boards of leading engineering journals, helping to guide the direction of research worldwide.
He trained as an aerospace engineer in Italy before completing a PhD in marine engineering at Cranfield University, where early work on vehicle design earned him a national engineering prize (The Royal Institution of Naval Architects’ Calder Prize). He now teaches offshore wind engineering at Strathclyde and supervises the next generation of researchers in the field.
Professor Collu joined the SSAC on 1 October 2026.
