Our Vision

Anglian Water and Imperial College have been working together to tackle today’s water challenges for the last 20 years. Anglian Waters goal is to encourage everyone to appreciate waters real value; to understand its place in the environment, its contribution to health and wellbeing, its use and disposal. Imperial Colleges’ experts in water and wastewater have been carrying out research in collaboration with Anglian Water to try and help achieve this goal.

The aim of the partnership is to inform and enhance investment decisions and derive future competitive advantage through higher income, lower capital costs, longer lifetimes, lower operating costs, and reduced risk. There are three driving factors for Anglian Water to enter into the research partnership:

1. to reduce cost and risk;
2. for new ideas and horizon scanning; and
3. to develop skills, capability and profile.

Imperial College also greatly benefits from the engagement with business-relevant research challenges driving our research. The access to company knowledge and resources the partnership allows for has been vital to our work. The MSc programme in Environmental Technology profits from new ideas and contributions to teaching by Anglian Water staff while creating many new opportunities for the institution, its staff and students.

Background to the Partnership

The Innovation team at Anglian Water and the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial have been in a  successful research partnership since 2000. Prof Steve Kaye (Head of Innovation, Anglian Water, till 2018)  from Anglian and Professor  Nick Voulvoulis  (Professor of Environmental Technology) at Imperial have been leading the collaboration.  Professor Nigel Graham (till 2017) and now Professor Stephen Smith, head of the Environmental and Water Resource Engineering (EWRE) group at Civil & Environmental Engineering have also been members of the partnership's steering group.

The partnersip is suported by the Anglian Water Research Coordinator responsible for the day-to-day coordination of activities between AW and Imperial. Dr Adam Brookes, Innovation Programme Manager at Anglian Water has been leading the partnership since 2018, when Prof Steve Kaye was apointed as the new chief executive of UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR).