Bob Harris
Bob Harris
Personal Information
- Name
- Bob Harris
- Bio
Bob Harris has spent nearly 40 years working in the UK water and environment sectors, within public organisations at local, regional and national levels and latterly more closely with academia.
His career has been split between: providing expertise to regulatory staff, managing applied research programmes, and using this accumulated knowledge to support and promote policy development, firstly in the subsurface environment and latterly across the breadth of river catchments.
Bob was closely involved with the development of the first groundwater protection policy for England and Wales and its associated tools and guidance, including promoting the first risk-based approaches to managing contaminated land and groundwater pollution.
For its 6-year duration, he headed up the Environment Agency’s National Groundwater & Contaminated Land Centre before becoming Head of Ecosystems Science in the Environment Agency. Latterly this included the building up and management of an Integrated Catchment Science research programme that helped underpin scientifically the development of new approaches and policies relating to the European Water Framework Directive and to ultimately deliver Integrated Catchment Management.
Bob now works part time as a private consultant contracted to Defra as Secretariat of the Demonstration Test Catchments Programme, and in academia supporting the University of Sheffield’s Catchment Science Centre where he acted as its Strategy Director for 4 years.
He is active internationally in collaborative projects and policy/science networks, FP7 projects and with UNESCO’s HELP Programme. He has been involved in various Research Council programme advisory committees over the years and is a member of the NERC peer review college. Between 2000 and 2007 he was chair of the Environmental Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network and its predecessors, using his experience and interest in bridging the gap between science and policy. Bob was awarded the Geological Society’s Whitaker Medal for “outstanding services to hydrogeology” in 2007 and has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield since 2005.
CONTACT
Robert.Harris@defra.gsi.gov.uk
- Position
- Expert