Most professionals at IAgrE are Chartered Engineers, but there are many members who work across both engineering and environmental disciplines. Being a CEnv within IAgrE helps to identify the very varying work our members are involved in, provide networking and project opportunities, and encourages the integration of other disciplines to ensure a holistic approach.
Alexandra Cooke CEnv
Severn Trent Water, Catchment Management Scientist
Registrant profile: Alexandra Cooke
After working as a soil scientist for a number of years, Alexandra began a PhD developing a product to mitigate the impacts to waterways from soil erosion and phosphates originating as diffuse pollution. This allowed her to work at both a field and catchment scale, involved catchment-scale modelling, and to work towards future-proofing against climate change impacts.
Starting out as a graduate in industry, Alexandra recognised that chartered professionals were able to get the most interesting projects and had more trust from their clients, and so immediately began working towards it. Although working in academia, Alexandra’s PhD was heavily industry based and encouraged her to continue with chartership, to keep her options open once she finished. Alexandra firmly believes this was the right choice, especially now she is working at Severn Trent Water, where she feels chartership is particularly respected.
The work in her PhD directly helps within her role today – although she has had to brush up on her knowledge of other pollutants. As a Catchment Management Scientist, Alexandra works across a range of field to landscape scales, to prevent pollution from reaching our raw water abstractions, as well as improving the wider environment. This involves a lot of work with land managers and farmers, as well as government bodies, academia, trusts and NGOs’. In the future, Alexandra aims to undertake more research and development to provide solutions to our environmental challenges.
Profile correct as of August 2018.
