CIWEM Margetts Bursary 2021 awarded to Jake Senior

Following submissions for this prestigious award, Jake Senior, Graduate Modeller at RPS, has been awarded the CIWEM Jamie Margetts Bursary for 2021. The international bursary will invest £3000 to support Jake’s research into research on leaky dams in the Calder Valley.

The Margetts Bursary was set up jointly between CIWEM and RPS in memory of Jamie Margetts and this is its second year of award. Jamie was chairman of CIWEM’s Urban Drainage Group and a director within RPS.

Terry Fuller Chief Executive of CIWEM said “Jamie was a firm supporter of CIWEM for 16 years and he exemplified our core values of supporting professionals to grow and advancing the science and practices for sustainable management of water and the environment. We are proud to have developed this award with RPS as it captures and continues the valuable example that Jamie showed to us. This award provides funding for research and innovative ideas and it builds relationships which deliver legacy beyond the completion of the original work.”

Applications for the bursary are open to young professionals and undergraduates from across the UK. RPS Technical Director James Hale represented both RPS and the CIWEM Urban Drainage Group on the application assessment panel. “There were three strong submissions this year, across a range of subjects topic areas, including areas of hydrogeology and urban planning, but for me Jake’s submission on research into Leaky Dams met the brief as the right blend of industry relevant research and the opportunity to support wider integrated catchment modelling.

“The biggest compliment I can pay Jake is that Jamie would have loved to see the passion and enthusiasm in his submission." 

On winning the bursary Jake added: “Being chosen as the winner of this award is the biggest achievement in my career so far. I am excited to now have the opportunity to expand my research further and improve knowledge of how Natural Flood Management techniques are represented in models. Furthermore, I am very proud to be another small component of Jamie Margetts’ significant legacy at RPS.”

Jake plans to use the bursary to develop his Master’s dissertation research on leaky dams in the Calder Valley. On Boxing Day 2015 over 3,500 homes and businesses in Calderdale were devastated by flooding. Community-led projects like Slow the Flow Calderdale are trying to reduce the likelihood of this happening again, by using natural flood management (NFM) techniques, including leaky dams.

Jake’s master’s dissertation supported the community’s work by investigating the impact of leaky dams in Calderdale, and it is this research that he aims to develop with the bursary. He plans to undertake a project with the following objectives:

• Build a rural-urban integrated baseline drainage model whereby NFM scenarios can be tested in a sample catchment.
• Developing approaches for modelling leaky dams, to better understand their potential for reducing flooding.
• Begin to understand the extent to which NFM could improve the performance of the urban drainage network.

Jake’s strong academic background and enthusiasm shaped his application. He was top of the year in his undergraduate degree in Environment, Economics and Ecology at the University of York, and followed this with a master’s degree in Environmental Engineering and Project Management at the University of Leeds. We’ve no doubt that he’ll use the bursary to do great work that helps to more sustainably manage water.