Hector Padilla is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Urban Research in the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). He completed a Masters in Environmental Management and Sustainability at Monash University and holds an undergraduate bachelor in business and Sustainability from the Universidad de Guadalajara. Hector’s research is part of the Housing Energy Efficiency Transitions project which is an interdisciplinary team that aims to create evidence to facilitate the uptake of low carbon retrofits. Professionally, Hector has worked as a research assistant in the housing sector and the potential of retrofit in improving quality of the existing housing stock.
His research aims to particularly look at socio-technical barriers of delivering insulation retrofit in the UK and Australia.
Title of his PhD project:
The pink elephant in the room: delivering insulation retrofit in the existing housing stock.
Brief description of the project:
Besides reducing moisture, Insulation retrofit has the potential to deliver a range of social, environmental, and economic benefits, including lower energy consumption and improving health of the occupants. However, the uptake of insulation retrofit in Australia and the UK remains lower than expected by policy makers.
This project explores the socio-material barriers of delivering insulation retrofit. By applying Actor-Network-Theory the project enquiries how the industry, and key actors face, and solve challenges. From semi-structured interviews held with professionals, academics, NGOs from the insulation retrofit sector, the project aims to create qualitative evidence on how existing challenges might be solved. The case studies in this project are based in Melbourne and London.
Supervisors: Dr Trivess Moore, Dr Nicola Willand and Dr Ralph Horne.