Career 

I am a hydrogeologist with over 20 years’ experience in consultancy and international development.  I am the founder and former director of Nuevas Esperanzas, a UK registered charity established in 2005 to implement integrated development programmes in Nicaragua. I have directed development projects across a wide range of sectors and have been a consultant for government and NGO clients on rural water supply projects. After carrying out a multi-disciplinary study of geothermal arsenic contamination in 2011 funded by the WHO, government, NGOs and the private sector, I led a long-term arsenic mitigation programme in the region. I have worked with consultants in the private sector in areas including water security and climate change, and in 2014 I undertook the hydrogeological component of a pre-feasibility study for a large geothermal project.  Since returning to the UK in 2018, I worked for AECOM as a consultant hydrogeologist on water resources and major infrastructure projects.   

I graduated from Oxford University in 1991 with a degree in Geology and subsequently completed my PhD at the University of East Anglia in Carbonate Sedimentology.  I then completed an MSc in Groundwater Engineering at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.  I worked for Thames Region of the Environment Agency in Water Resources, including abstraction licensing, strategic water resources management and groundwater modelling. I left the public sector to join Atkins as a consultant hydrogeologist, working on regional groundwater modelling projects and Environmental Impact Assessments, before moving to Nicaragua in 2003 to apply my experience in the context of international development.

Professional affiliations

• Fellow of the Geological Society
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce

• Rodriguez, B.G., Rietveld, L.C., Longley, A.J. and van Halem, D. (2019) ‘Arsenic contamination of rural community wells in Nicaragua: A review of two decades of experience’, Science of the Total Environment657, pp. 1441-1449 

Undergraduate

• Civil Engineering for Developing Countries

Postgraduate

• Water Resources
• Water Quality
• Groundwater Assessment
• Integrated Water Resources Management
• Management of Village Water Services
• Environmental Health
• Drinking Water Quality
• Rural Supply Engineering
• Participatory Approaches
• Urban Water Supply
• Humanitarian Water, Sanitation and Hygiene

Short courses 

• I contribute to short courses on water management and engineering in the humanitarian sector for MSF (Doctors Without Borders).