Professor Duncan Mara Valedictory Symposium and Dinner

Overview

Professor Duncan Mara, Valedictory Symposium and Dinner

On 13th January the School of Civil Engineering played host to over 100 guests from five continents, including academic and industry colleagues and current and former students, who gathered to celebrate the work and achievements of Professor Duncan Mara who retired from the School in September. The events included a day-long Symposium followed by a celebratory dinner at Weetwood Hall.

The topic of the symposium was the global public health crisis; with 2.6 billion people worldwide still lacking access to basic sanitation the work of Professor Mara and his colleagues remains critically important. The keynote address was delivered by Professor Sir Richard Feacham of the University of California at San Francisco and Berkley. Sir Richard spoke compellingly about the need for a radical redesign of the architecture of international aid to ensure that the most needy are served through capable local institutions. Other speakers covered topics ranging from international economic policy via institutional reform and practice through to specific research that is contributing to new thinking on how to safely and effectively treat wastewater in an era of rising fuel prices and increasing water scarcity.

Speaking afterwards, Barbara Evans, lecturer in the School, principal organiser of the event, former student and longstanding colleague of Professor Mara said ‘It was a real tribute to Duncan’s career and was an excellent showcase for how what we teach covers not only the technical aspects of public health engineering but also institutions, finance and politics.’

 

Symposium - The Global Public Health Crisis

Symposium - The Global Public Health Crisis

School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds

We were delighted to be able to host this Valedictory Symposium in honour of Professor Duncan Mara. Speakers, represented different strands of his career and legacy, came from international health, water, sanitation and engineering biology.

An programme for the day is detailed below along with presentations which are available to download.

09:30	Arrival and registration (refreshments will be available)
Morning Sessions
10:00	Welcome and Introduction Professor Nigel Smith, Head of School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds
10:15	"Putim As Stret Long Hul Na Pek" Keynote Speaker - Professor Sir Richard Feachem, FREng
11:00	Discussion
11:15	Refreshments
11:45	'Designing effective water and sanitation projects to serve the urban poor', Dr Graham Alabaster, Section Chief responsible for Africa and Latin America, Human Settlements Financing Division, UNHABITAT
12:15	'Bacteriology for sanitary engineers in the 21st Century', Professor Tom Curtis, Professor of Environmental Engineering, University of Newcastle
12:45	Discussion
Lunchtime
13:00	Networking lunch and PhD poster display
Afternoon Sessions
14:00	'Why appropriate technology won't solve the World's water supply and sanitation challenges', Dr Martin Gambrill, Senior Water and Sanitation Specialist, World Bank South Asia Division
14:30	'Public perceptions of public health engineering - heroes, villians and the unfashionable voice of reason', Ms Barbara Evans, Senior Lecturer, School of Civil Engineering, University of Leeds
15:00	Discussion
15:15	Refreshments
15:45	'A life in low-cost sanitation and ponds' Professor Duncan Mara
16:30	Close Tom Curtis, Professor of Environmental Engineering, University of Newcastle

 

Visit our courses web page for more information on our MSc Water, Sanitation and Health Engineering.

Speaker Profiles

Speaker Profiles

Professor Sir Richard Feachem

KBE, CBE, BSc, PhD, DSc(Med), FREng, HonFFPHM, HonDEng

Richard G A Feachem is Executive Director of Global Health Sciences, Director of the Global Health Group at UCSF, and Professor of Global Health at both the University of California, San Francisco and the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a Visiting Professor at London University and an Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland.

From 2002 to 2007, Sir Richard served as founding Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and Under Secretary General of the United Nations. During this time, the Global Fund grew from scratch to become the world’s largest health financing institution for developing countries, with assets of US $11 billion, supporting 450 programmes in 136 countries.

From 1999 to 2002, Professor Feachem was the founding Director of the Institute for Global Health at UCSF and UC Berkeley. From 1995 until 1999 Dr. Feachem was Director for Health, Nutrition and Population at the World Bank. Previously (1989-1995), he was Dean of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Professor Feachem served as Chairman of the Foundation Council of the Global Forum for Health Research; Treasurer of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative; Council Member of Voluntary Service Overseas; and on numerous other boards and committees. He was a member of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, and the Commission on HIV and Governance in Africa. He has worked in international health and development for 40 years and has published extensively on public health, health policy and development finance.

Professor Feachem holds a Doctor of Science degree in Medicine from the University of London, and a PhD in Environmental Health from the University of New South Wales. In 2007 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Engineering by the University of Birmingham. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and an Honorary Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians and of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. In 2002 he was elected to membership of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences. Sir Richard was knighted by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2007.

Dr Graham Alabaster

Dr Graham Alabaster is Section Chief responsible for Africa and Latin America in Human Settlements Financing Division of UNHABITAT.

Graham is an Engineer by profession, with first degree in Chemical Engineering and a PhD in Civil Engineering.

Starting his professional life as a Research Fellow, he travelled extensively in Africa, Asia and Latin America, providing technical assistance on sustainable wastewater management and sanitation, thereafter as an International consultant. He joined UNHABITAT in 1992 and has played a key role in building the Water, Sanitation and Infrastructure Branch.

Graham is a Charted Engineer and Fellow of the Royal Society of Health and represents UNHABITAT on many inter agency bodies. He has over 25 years experience in the water sanitation and solid waste management working in over 30 countries. Within UNHABITAT he has responsibility for all UN-HABITAT’s operation projects on water, sanitation and waste management in Africa & Latin America in addition to global responsibility for policy issues relating to sanitation, pro-poor water and sanitation governance, solid and hazardous waste management, and monitoring water and sanitation MDGs.

Professor Tom Curtis

Tom Curtis graduated in Microbiology in Leeds and migrated to Environmental Engineering taking an MEng and PhD in Public Health Engineering at Leeds University under the supervision of Duncan Mara, initially as his technician and then as his PhD student. Both roles entailed substantial fieldwork in Paraiba in north east Brazil studying pathogen removal in waste stabilization ponds.

Tom won the Shell Prize for Microbial Ecology for his PhD work showing a new and unsuspected disinfection mechanism operated in the simple “natural” treatment systems of northeast Brazil. Showing that visible light, not ultraviolet light, was killing the microbes.

After a brief period in construction in the Middle East and two years in Public Health Policy with the UK government Tom joined Newcastle University (in 1994) as a lecturer, then Senior Lecturer in and now Professor of Environmental Engineering.

Tom's core interest is the engineering of real open microbial systems and his abiding belief is that: i) these systems obey a suite of fundamental rules, and ii) that engineers will only unlock the power of such systems when they grasp those rules. Working with colleagues in Glasgow and Newcastle he has developed tools, concepts and theories that support this end. Tom has become particularly well known for his work on the engineering of the diversity and community assembly of microbial communities. This work is central to all open biological systems, engineered or otherwise.

Dr Martin Gambrill

Martin Gambrill is a Civil Engineer specialising in project management and institutional and technical aspects of multi-faceted development programs with a view to sustainable interventions, especially for urban and rural water supply and sanitation, integrated water resources management, water pollution control, urban upgrading, and urban and municipal development.

Martin graduated from Leeds in 1986 with a BEng in Civil Engineering and went on to study for his PhD with Professor Mara, successfully completing his studies in 1990. He has twenty years of experience with multi-lateral development agencies, non-governmental organizations, engineering consultants and in academic research.

Martin is currently a senior water and sanitation specialist with the World Bank’s South Asia Division. Martin says “My current work offers me opportunities to influence sector policy, reform and investment decision-making, both at the World Bank and with client governments, for the promotion of improved governance and sustainable delivery of basic services in urban, peri-urban and rural settings, often in the context of urban and municipal development, service delivery reform and integrated water resources management. To achieve this I have developed productive working relationships with different levels of government, civil society, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, multi- and bi-lateral development agencies and key consulting entities.”

One of the major challenges which Martin has consistently addressed throughout his career is to chart a path through the different policy, institutional, social, environmental and technical priorities of the respective stakeholders in order to design and implement projects that ultimately deliver sustainable sector services to underprivileged communities.

Barbara Evans

Barbara Evans is a Senior Lecturer in the Institute of Pathogen Control Engineering. With twenty five years experience working in the field of water and sanitation service delivery in low-income urban and rural areas of South Asia, Africa and Latin America, she is a member of the Technical Advisory group of the Global Sanitation Fund, an advisor to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation water programme, and a member of the Global Development Solutions Advisory Group of the International Water Association. She also chairs the review Panel for DFID’s flagship sanitation research programme RiPPLE and is one of the four-person Strategic Advisory Group for the United Nations’ global Joint Monitoring Program on Water and Sanitation.

Having previously worked for the World Bank, Barbara now leads research which will inform the design of output-based funding instruments to expand sanitation access and coverage to improve public health outcomes in a range of rural and urban environments; this will contribute to the definition of post-2015 targets and monitoring systems for global water and sanitation development.

Professor Mara

Professor Duncan Mara - Profile

Duncan Mara was born in 1945 and was educated at Downside where he excelled in the classics; Latin and Greek epithets still punctuate his writing to this day. However, at the age of 16 he resolved upon a career in Civil Engineering and he retrained, taking A levels at Bath Technical College and then accepting a place in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Queen's College Dundee. Though Duncan excelled in structural engineering he went on to do a PhD on the ecology of sulphate reducing bacteria, then as now a key organism for Public Health Engineers.

On graduation in 1970 Duncan went to work for the University of Nairobi as a lecturer in Public Health Engineering with his wife Margaret. It was in Kenya where he embarked on a lifelong research programme in water and sanitation. Building on his background in sanitary microbiology Duncan expanded into sanitation, health and tropical wastewater treatment. It was here he saw his first waste stabilization pond and immediately appreciated the strategic significance.

Returning to Dundee in 1974 Duncan took up a position as a lecturer in Public Health Engineering and began fieldwork in northeast Brazil and formed formative collaborations with inter alios, John Kalbermatten, Richard Feachem, Howard Pearson, Salomao Silva and Augusto Sergio Guimaraes. Working with the World Banks Advisory Group formed by John Kalbermatten, he published prodigious number of technical monographs that showed many for the first time, simple reliable sustainable technologies for the provision of sanitation for the un-served urban and rural communities.

In 1979 he was recruited to Leeds University by Professor Tony Cusens, a structural engineer who nevertheless recognised the vital importance of Civil Engineers in the societal challenge of public health engineering.

Through his student, Gehan Sinnatamby, Dunacn learnt of, and then witnessed, the Brazilian innovations in condominial (he would say simplified) sewerage implemented by Jose Carlos de Melo and his colleagues in CAERN. Duncan has promoted simplified sewerage to the English speaking (and reading) world ever since.

In the 1980s and 1990s Duncan strengthened his grasp on simple low-cost low- energy wastewater treatment systems, and with colleagues in the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine, put the subject of wastewater reuse on a rational and risk-based footing. By providing a rigorous synthesis of epidemiological evidence and engineering advice he demonstrated that safe and effective wastewater reuse was possible without recourse to the wasteful and over-engineered solutions sometime promoted by others.

A tireless writer of papers, books and opinion pieces, students from around the world have sought to work with him. He has been able to strengthen and deepen his knowledge of sanitation and tropical wastewater treatment through seeking new and productive collaborations in many countries such as Portugal, France, the United States, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, India, Egypt, Morocco and Jordan.

His writing (and speaking) is rarely, if ever, constrained by the prevailing orthodoxy or authority. Clear principles govern his work that technology should be as simple as possible, that we must meet the water and sanitation needs of all of the people and simple justice encompassed in Mara’s Dictum: “the poor should not be asked to pay for things we give to the rich for free”. This symposium will celebrate his work and these values.