A Wimbledon Village professor and former King’s College School student has received a top environmental award from the president of Russia.

President Dmitry Medvedev awarded Professor Brian Spalding the 2009 Global Energy Award and made him a Global Energy Laureate on June 5, at the International Economic Forum in St Petersburg, Russia.

The ceremony saw Professors Spalding, Laverov and Kontorovich honoured for contributions to energy conservation.

His citation stated he received the award for “original concepts in fundamental thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and computational hydrodynamics, which formed the basis for practical calculations concerning energy”.

After the awards Prof Spalding, a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said: “It shows what a good education I received at King’s College School, Wimbledon.”

Prof Spalding became one of 20 Laureates to receive the award, chosen from more than 1,500 nominated in 2009.

He expressed pleasure in receiving the award and gave a talk on his work in computational fluid dynamics, of which he is a founder.

Prof Spalding is managing director of Concentration Heat and Momentum, located in Wimbledon Village.

He created the Phoenics computer - software code, which uses computational fluid dynamics to model heat transfer, fluid flow and stresses in solids.

Until retirement he was professor of heat transfer and head of the computational fluid dynamics unit at Imperial College.