Dr Xiaocheng (Sam) Hu joined the ECEHH in January 2019. At ECEHH, in collaboration with a local SME, Sam works on the Innovate UK project and applies his analytical skills to understand the contribution of volatile anaesthetics to global warming.

Sam holds a PhD in Economics from University of Southampton, United Kingdom. His primary research interests lie in personnel economics and industrial organisation, with a particular focus on teamwork, incentive schemes, and their economic and social effects.

Sam also has a deep interest in inequality. In 2018, he was involved in a project at the Southern Policy Centre (part-time) on whether different patterns of material inequality at the household level mirror in individual outcomes across the life course such as health and education.

Sustainable Inhalational Anaesthetic Gases

The NHS spends about 50 to 60 million pounds on inhalational anaesthetic gases per year. However, approximately 98% of these gases are vented to the atmosphere. The global warming potential, for example desflurane is 2,500 times more likely to cause global warming than carbon dioxide. Fortunately, a leading tech start-up SageTech Medical has recently innovated a technology to recycle these wasted unmetabolised gases.

As part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) project, Dr Sam Hu and Dr Karyn Morrissey were collaborating with SageTech Medical to estimate the economic and environmental impacts of this new technology.

Videos below provide an overview of this technology.