I had the privilege of becoming a committee member for Stormwater NSW in late 2019  after having been awarded a full scholarship that I received from the association to undertake a nine-month Water Leadership Program with the International Water Center.  This was a truly transformative course for me and am grateful hat Stormwater NSW are offering such awesome opportunities for their members.

My primary contribution to SNSW is management of our social media presence.   I’ve grown to really enjoy promoting and celebrating the advocacy, policy and events work that the committee do, as well as being creative about how we can acknowledge the good work of our industry colleagues and members.

I was drawn to work in the stormwater industry through my B.Sci honours thesis which looked at the stormwater flows and contaminant concentrations entering the harbour via Hawthorne Canal. I was really affected by learning of the impacts that stormwater was having on ecosystem health and recreational opportunities of our waterways.  Through my research, I was introduced to the good folk at Equatica (later Alluvium), who mentored me through the trauma that was my thesis year (I wrote my first Stormwater NSW Conference Paper on common issues faced in water quality and flow monitoring in the field and how autosamplers can degrade your sanity) and later gave me my first industry job.

This where I spent my formative ‘stormie’ years working under the dedicated support of David Knights, Alexa McAuley, former SNSW president Richard McManus and fellow committee member, Andrew McMillan.  Despite many hours designing and drafting WSUD systems and creek rehabilitations, I am technically a ‘non-geneer’ variety of stormie (env. science and geography majors) and my passion has always been in broader picture of the role stormwater could play in the urban landscape.

In 2016, I changed course and joined a multi-disciplinary design studio, McGregor Coxall.  Here I’ve had the pleasure to broaden my work across other environmental design facets including urban ecology, active transport design, urban heat mitigation, and blue-green grid planning.  Surrounded by talented landscape architects, urban designers and environmental engineers and geo-spatial scientists who all care about environmental outcomes, I’m having a ball sharing expertise in my niche field with my colleagues and clients.