Reuben College
Professor Katrina Charles
Professor of Environmental Health Risk, School of Geography and the Environment
About
Professor Katrina Charles’ research focuses on how to advance drinking water safety and addressing the additional challenges faced by climate change. She designed the water safety programmes for SafePani and for results-based contracts, operationalising water safety planning, and continues to develop these approaches based on collaborative learning with service providers, governments and users during implementation.
Professor Charles collaborates with the World Health Organization and UNICEF on advancing water safety for small water systems and climate resilient water supplies, including contributing to guideline development.
Expertise
- Drinking water quality: Improving monitoring of drinking water quality in low and middle-income countries and use of data to create improvements in drinking water quality
- The impact of weather and climate change on water and sanitation systems
- Water security in Africa and South Asia
- Working with scientists and policy makers, as well as practitioners to build climate resilience
Selected publications
- The utility of Escherichia coli as a contamination indicator for rural drinking water: Evidence from whole genome sequencing. PLoS ONE, 16(1). 23pp. e0245910. Nowicki, S., deLaurent, Z.R., de Villiers, E.P., Githinji, G. and Charles, K.J. (2021)
- A framework for monitoring the safety of water services: from measurements to security. Npj Clean Water, 3(1), 36, 6pp. Charles, K. J., Nowicki, S., & Bartram, J. K. (2020)
- Including water quality monitoring in rural water services: why safe water requires challenging the quantity versus quality dichotomy. Npj Clean Water, 3(14), 9pp. Nowicki, S., Koehler, J., & Charles, K. J. (2020)
- Water insecurity compounds the global coronavirus crisis. Water International, 45:5, 416-422. Staddon, C., Everard, M., Mytton, J., Octavianti, T., Powell, W., Quinn, N., Budds, J., J Geere, K Meehan, K Charles, EGJ Stevenson, J Vonk, J Mizniak (2020)
- Tryptophan-like fluorescence as a measure of microbial contamination risk in groundwater. Science of the Total Environment, 646, 782-791. Nowicki, S., Lapworth, D. J., Ward, J. S. T., Thomson, P., & Charles, K. (2019)
- "Commentary on community-led total sanitation and human rights: should the right to community-wide health be won at the cost of individual rights?" Journal of Water and Health 10(4): 499. Bartram, J., K. Charles, B. Evans, L. O'Hanlon and S. Pedley (2012)
- “Securing 2020 vision for 2030: climate change and ensuring resilience in water and sanitation services”. Journal of Water and Climate Change Vol 1 No 1 pp 2-16. Howard, G., K. Charles, K. Pond, A. Brookshaw, R. Hossain and J. Bartram (2010)
- "Assessment of the stability of human viruses and coliphage in groundwater by PCR and infectivity methods." Journal of Applied Microbiology 106(6): 1827-37. Charles, K. J., Shore, J., Sellwood, J., Laverick, M., Hart, A. and Pedley, S. (2009)