Associate Course Director, Humanitarian Water Engineering; Technical Advisor, Safe Water Optimization Tool
Research Team
![](https://www.yorku.ca/dighr/wp-content/uploads/sites/181/2022/08/James-Brown-resized.jpg)
James is a water, sanitation, and public health engineering specialist with over ten years of experience in programme delivery, cluster coordination, research, policy development, and capacity building, supporting countries across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
His work has involved the set-up of community health centres in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak, coordinating contingency planning ahead of the Mosul offensive in Iraq and designing water supply and sanitation programs in South Sudan, Myanmar, Liberia, Iraq, Ukraine, Nigeria and Lebanon.
Over the past few years, he has developed a professional focus on appropriate market-based approaches, quality assurance and accountability, and data science applications in the field of WASH. He has contributed to several projects in these focus areas and co-authored technical guidance on Market Based Approaches for WASH and Quality Assurance and Accountability.
Prior to his work in the humanitarian sector, James co-founded a social enterprise in the UK focused on developing products to address barriers to safe drinking water access for households in rural communities, using designs that can be manufactured locally.
He completed a Masters in Product Design Engineering, a program jointly delivered by the University of Glasgow and the Glasgow School of Art, in 2009, combining mechanical engineering with human-centred design.
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