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It was during his teenage years that the seeds for Associate Professor Andrew Dansie’s future career were first sown.

“I went on exchange to Indonesia in high school where I lived with a family. It was an incredible and eye-opening experience as a 14, 15-year-old,” says Dansie, the UNSW Engineering’s Academic Lead in Humanitarian Engineering and Senior Lecturer in the Water Research Centre.  

“I got the travel bug and later did the whole backpacking thing and just saw how other people lived. I loved building relationships and working with people, and I really enjoy sharing new experiences and sharing culture. That’s where it all began.”

A few science degrees and a couple of environmental science jobs later, Dansie found himself at the UN, first as project officer and then a Project Director and research fellow at the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. He became both an expert in transboundary water projects and a highly connected researcher with international development networks that stretched across the globe. 

He loved seeing the world and meeting people who shared his passion for sustainable development, but as his career progressed, he found himself missing the hands-on science that first lured him into the role.

That’s when the idea of doing a PhD started to take shape.

“I’d been at the UN for almost eight years, and as you get higher and higher, you find yourself managing contracts for interesting projects but paying other people to do the problem-solving work,” he says.

At the outset of his DPhil, in recognition of his academic excellence and impact at the UN, Dansie received Oxford’s prestigious Clarendon scholarship, which provided full fees for his PhD and stipend to complete his research into the role of dust emissions from arid river valleys in fertilising vital marine environments.  

And, as part of the DPhil process, he was reminded that he really — really — loved academic research.

Today, Dansie conducts a broad program of work at the Water Research Centre, working as scientist within the centre’s humanitarian engineering team and as the Academic Lead for Humanitarian Engineering at the Faculty level. His research has an emphasis on water resources, large ecosystem management and nature-based solutions, safe water access, air pollution, and the biogeochemistry of dust.

He is part of the centre’s Odour and Air Quality Lab where he heads up a years-long air pollution monitoring program that’s delivering vital insights into airborne pollution in Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and the Solomon Islands with partners in each country.

Dansie also continues to work closely with the UN where he has been named a world-class expert in water resources; he is actively engaged with UN FAO, UNESCO, UNDP, as well as other agencies. He has written a series of policy briefs for the Global Environment Facility on topics as varied as fisheries management, coastal hazards and gender mainstreaming.

As in the early days of his career, he remains focused on establishing partnerships, often in the Global South, that enable the bilateral sharing of knowledge between Australia and other countries.

And he’s teaching the next generation of engineering leaders to do the same: as the academic supervisor for the student-led Drought Resistant Uganda program, and as a champion of overseas industrial training as part of degrees, he’s supporting students to gain hands-on humanitarian engineering experience, thereby preparing them the to solve the challenges that really matter.

“Sending students overseas is a big part of teaching them to listen and be effective partners. Student mobility is a big part of the humanitarian work of Water Research Centre and the university more broadly,” Dansie says.

“The end goal in general has always been: if we can leave the world in a slightly better place than when we stepped into, that would be great.”