Paul J Murphy
Paul J Murphy
Associate Professor of the Practice of Engineering
Overview
Paul Murphy is an Associate Professor of the Practice in the School of Engineering and Academic Director of Brown's interdisciplinary Sc.M. program in Sustainable Energy.
Murphy brings 16 years of industry experience delivering first-of-a-kind (FOAK) offshore wind projects and helping scale the U.S. offshore wind industry. With Deepwater Wind and Ørsted, he helped lead the development and construction of three landmark projects:
- Block Island Wind Farm (30 MW, 2016), the nation's first offshore wind farm
- South Fork Wind (132 MW, 2024), the nation's first utility-scale offshore wind project
- Revolution Wind (704 MW), 65 turbines expected to power more than 350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut
Delivering three projects of increasing scale gave Murphy a firsthand view of the technical, economic, and political risks an industry faces as it moves from proving a concept to repeating it at scale.
At Brown, Murphy directs a master's program that prepares technically trained students for leadership in the energy transition by combining engineering depth, economic and policy fluency, and practitioner insight.
His professional interests center on two connected goals: helping teams deliver complex FOAK and at-scale energy and infrastructure projects by anticipating and preventing predictable failure modes, and developing the next generation of interdisciplinary leaders who will accelerate decarbonization.
Murphy holds an M.S. in Technology and Policy from MIT, an M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.S. in Bioengineering from Syracuse University.
