Dr Alison Parker

Areas of expertise

• Carbon, Climate and Risk
• Environment and Health
• Water Science and Engineering

Background

Dr Parker completed a four year Masters degree at the University of Oxford in Earth Sciences.This was followed by a PhD at the University of Leeds studying the hydrogeology of the chalk aquifer of East Yorkshire. Dr Parker  started as a Research Fellow at Cranfield University in January 2009 and was promoted to Academic Fellow in October 2010 and to Lecturer in May 2013.

Current activities

Dr Parker currently has a large research activity in technologies for urban sanitation. She is leading Cranfield University's response to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's challenge to "Reinvent the Toilet", using novel membrane technology to treat human waste on-site. She is also involved in developing and testing technologies to treat faecal sludge from pit latrines and container toilets including anaerobic digestion and pyrolysis. This involves characterising the waste and optimising its reuse. She is working at both ends of the technology development process - helping to develop a novel technology for EPSRC and in testing "off the shelf" systems for WSUP.

Supporting stakeholders to provide safe water supplies is another research focus through Alison's work in WASHTech project, a European project aiming to help African decision makers decide which water and sanitation technologies to use in their projects and Community Water Plus, an AusAID funded project aiming to understand what support communities in India need to manage their water supplies.

She also has research students working on Water Safety Plans in Malaysia, Nigeria, Jamaica, India and Uganda and on the transition of urban communities between informal supplies and piped systems in Kenya. She is the Course Tutor of the MSc in Community Water and Sanitation.

Clients

• AusAID
• Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• EC
• EPSRC
• Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor
• Unilever

Publications

• Articles in journals
• Conference papers