Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts, Society and Business
Professor Coffman joins the University as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Society and Business, bringing a wealth of international leadership experience and expertise across interdisciplinary education, research and innovation. She was previously Vice-Dean (Innovation and Enterprise) in the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London (UCL).
From August 2023 through July 2026, Professor Coffman served as Vice Dean Innovation & Enterprise and briefly from April 2026 through July 2026 as interim Vice Dean Research. From February 2017 to August 2023, Professor Coffman served as the Director (Head of Department) of Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction. From 2016 to 2025, Professor Coffman was Editor-in-Chief and Coordinating Editor of Elsevier's Structural Change and Economic Dynamics Journal and on the honorary editorial boards of The Journal of Cleaner Production, Economia Politica, and the editorial boards of Frontiers of Engineering Management and the Chinese Journal of Population, Resources and Environment. From 2026, she has also agreed to serve as a Managing Editor of Economia Politica.
In December 2021, Professor Coffman was elected Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Department of Earth System Science at Tsinghua University. She is also a Visiting Professor at the University of Milan (Statale), a Guest Professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, and a Visiting Professor of Renmin University of China.
Professor Coffman is a fellow of a number of learned societies, including the Royal Historical Society (2013), Society of Antiquaries of London (2015), Royal Geographical Society (2022), and most recently the Academy of Social Sciences (2023). She is also a long-standing foreign member of the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere (2015). In November 2023, she was admitted as a Foreign Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei to which she had been elected in July 2023. In August 2025, she was made an inaugural fellow of the Chinese Economic Association (UK).
Before coming to UCL in 2014, she spent six years as a fellow of Newnham College where she variously held a junior research fellowship (Mary Bateson Research Fellowship), a post as a college lecturer and teaching fellow, and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. In July 2009, she started the Centre for Financial History, which she directed through December 2014.
Professor Coffman did her undergraduate training at the Wharton School in managerial and financial economics and her PhD in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, her doctoral research in the UK was funded in part by the Mellon Foundation under the guise of an Institute of Historical Research pre-doctoral fellowship and a Social Science Research Council international dissertation fellowship.