Professor David Butler wins EPSRC Fellowship

The five-year Fellowship, worth around £1.5 million, will fund a project which aims to develop a new approach to water management in UK cities.

EPSRC Fellowships are awarded to outstanding UK researchers who show a high level of creativity and ambition in their research ideas, and are able to take more established fields in new and innovative directions.

Entitled ‘Safe & SuRe: Towards a New Paradigm for Urban Water Management’, the project will draw from multi-disciplinary collaboration with leading academics inside and outside the field.

Professor Butler said:  “The water sector in the UK has, by many measures, been very successful up to now. However the sector is increasingly under threat as a result of climate change, increasing population, urbanisation, demographic shifts and tighter regulation. The current way of working looks increasingly out of date and out of step with emerging thinking and best practice in some leading nations.”

“The vision of this work is to develop a system which is sustainable and resilient. A comprehensive, quantitative evaluation framework will be developed to test in detail what options or strategies can contribute towards a Safe and SuRe water future, focusing on the challenges of water scarcity, urban flooding and river pollution.”

Professor Ken Evans, Dean of the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, said:  “We are very pleased to announce that David has received the appropriate recognition for his excellent research in the field of water management and the high international esteem in which he is held.”

David Butler is Professor of Water Engineering at the University of Exeter with some 30 years of experience in the water industry. He jointly leads the Centre for Water Systems, which has around 30 researchers working mainly in the areas of urban water, system optimisation and hydroinformatics. Working with David on the Safe & SuRe project are colleagues Dr Raziyeh Farmani, Dr Guangtao Fu and Dr Sarah Ward.