Our visiting academics play an active role in our teaching and research. They come from a wide range of backgrounds and they reflect the highly-multidisciplinary nature of work undertaken within the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering.
Current visiting professors
Alasdair Henderson MEng CEng MICE FIQ
Alongside his technical and leadership roles, Alasdair is a passionate advocate for purpose-led business
Alasdair Henderson’s career spans a range of operational and executive roles in the UK and European infrastructure contracting industry. Currently Global Director for HR BuRic Eales was the founder and Managing Director of Collingwood Environmental Planning (CEP), an independent multidisciplinary environmental and sustainability consultancy, for 26 years. CEP was acquired by Eunomia Research and Consulting in 2021 and he is now a freelance environmental and sustainability consultant supporting more sustainable decision-making through robust evidence, evaluation and engagement. He is based in London (UK) and the Haute-Savoie (France).siness Partnering at Royal BAM Group, he is part of the 3-person Business Line Leadership Team overseeing the group’s Civil Engineering activities comprising EUR 3Bn annual revenues and 10,000 direct employees, and is responsible for putting people and operating culture at the heart of business and operational performance.
Prior to this he was a board member of BAM Nuttall Ltd, and for many years was Managing Director of the specialist ground engineering business BAM Ritchies. He is a Visiting Professor at the University of Strathclyde, Chartered Engineer, Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and Fellow of the Institute of Quarrying. He is a past-chair of the Federation of Piling Specialists, the trade association representing more than 80% of the UK’s specialist ground engineering contractors. He is an International Advisory Group member for the TRANSCEND research consortium for nuclear decommissioning and is an Advisory Panel member for the TWI Geo-Drill Project investigating novel deep-drilling techniques for geothermal energy.
Alongside his technical and leadership roles, Alasdair is a passionate advocate for purpose-led business and a promoter of business as a force for good in society. He champions equality and inclusion, with a particular focus on gender representation and LGBT+ alliances in STEM industries, in recognition of which he was named ‘WISE Man 2018’ by the campaign for Women in Science and Engineering.
Ana Maria Esteves BComm MBA PhD GAICD
Ana Maria’s passion is in sharing of knowledge and improvement in standards of practice
Ana Maria established social impact management consultancy Community Insights Group in 2002 and is based in Groningen, The Netherlands.
Ana Maria has two primary areas of expertise - social impact assessment and local content - with a speciality in the extractives and energy sectors. Her particular interests lie in research and development of more effective approaches for resource affected regions and communities to benefit from the presence of megaprojects. She has supported global resources companies such as Shell, BG, Tullow Oil, Anglo American, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Vale.
Ana Maria’s passion is in sharing of knowledge and improvement in standards of practice. She has published in academic journals, chaired conferences, managed research partnerships, led study tours for government officials, developed courses in local content, SIA and strategic social investment, established SIAhub (an online platform for the SIA community of practice), and serves on the board of the International Association for Impact Assessment.
Ana Maria holds an MBA from Melbourne Business School and PhD (on the topic of extractives and social development) from the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Andrew Sloan MSc BSc CEng FICE MIM3
His expertise is in tunnelling and geotechnical engineering and he is a recognised leader in this field
Professor Andy Sloan has over 35 years of major project experience and leads a business known for technical excellence. He is Managing Director of COWI UK Ltd and on the global management team of COWI International, one of the leading designers of complex infrastructure and energy projects globally.
His expertise is in tunnelling and geotechnical engineering and he is a recognised leader in this field. Throughout his career he has worked on many challenging and interesting projects around the world. These include high speed rail and metro projects in SE Asia and Hong Kong, deep gold mining in Africa, road and rail tunnels in Europe, North America, central and south Asia. He was involved in the design of the caverns that house the LHC at CERN and is currently involved there in the underground HiLumi Project and the design of a new physics laboratory 1000m below Yorkshire. He is often appointed as an Expert on hard rock tunnels in particular related to hydro-electric projects, including the collapse of the headrace tunnel on the Glendoe HEP in Scotland. Recent and contemporary UK projects he has been or is involved in include Crossrail, Lower Thames Crossing, Silvertown Tunnels Project and Highspeed 2.
Ric Eales MSc BSc
Ric Eales was the founder and Managing Director of Collingwood Environmental Planning (CEP), an independent multidisciplinary environmental and sustainability consultancy, for 26 years. CEP was acquired by Eunomia Research and Consulting in 2021 and he is now a freelance environmental and sustainability consultant supporting more sustainable decision-making through robust evidence, evaluation and engagement. He is based in London (UK) and the Haute-Savoie (France).
An environmental scientist by training, Ric has more than 30 years' experience of interdisciplinary environmental, sustainability and planning consultancy working throughout the UK and EU. Particular areas of interest include: environmental and sustainability impact assessment, evaluation and other decision support tools; environmental and spatial planning policy and legislation; urban sustainability transitions; climate change adaptation; water and catchment management; ecosystem services and natural capital; green infrastructure; and the broader consideration of sustainability issues within UK and EU legislation, policy and practice.
Ric is an acknowledge expert in impact assessment and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) and has had a key role in developing practice through capacity building, preparation of guidance and the implementation of legislation both in the UK and the EU for several decades. He has a track record of developing creative and bespoke methodological approaches and has published widely on environmental assessment and evaluation good practice. He has also experience of designing and undertaking evaluations of policy and programmes including working with the UK government’s Magenta book approach to evaluation.
He has a long track-record in project management, in many cases these have been complex, multi-institutional, projects. He has managed numerous studies in the UK for the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Scottish Government and the Environment Agency, and in Europe for the European Commission (DG Environment) and the European Environment Agency (EEA), for example.
He is an experienced trainer and have for example worked with Imperial College London to deliver several of their short course programmes over many years, as well as providing in-house training to various organisations in the UK and overseas.
Eric Tenthorey PhD MSc BSc
Eric Tenthorey is a Senior Researcher at Geoscience Australia, with expertise in geomechanics, carbon capture and other low carbon geoscience disciplines. He is a PhD graduate of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, where he conducted rock mechanics experiments to understand the effect of diagenetic reactions on permeability in granular media. Following his PhD, he accepted postdoctoral and research fellowships in the field of rock mechanics at the Australian National University, where he developed new experimental techniques to understand strength evolution in the Earth’s crust and also the factors that control earthquake recurrence times.
In 2007, Eric was engaged by the Australian Government to help progress carbon capture and storage research in Australia, via its involvement with the CO2CRC; a cooperative research centre focused on performing novel CO2 injection experiments in the subsurface. His role in these projects was to assess the injection related risks associated with faults, which can cause unwanted leakage of CO2 or induced seismicity. More recently, he has been involved with a controlled release CO2 experiment being planned at the Otway International Test Centre, in which a small volume of CO2 will be injected into a shallow fault, and monitored using various technologies. His research work has led to significant research collaborations with academic groups in Germany, UK, China and Japan. Eric’s expertise in CO2 storage science has also led to his appointment as Australia’s representative to the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum; an international ministerial-level organization that meets every 6 months to discuss the path forward for CCS.
Recently, his work has also centred on other low carbon geoscience sectors, such as the hydrogen energy future (hydrogen storage), geothermal energy, and CO2-enhanced oil recovery for accelerating CCS technologies.
We welcome visiting researchers and visiting students from other institutions.
If you're interested in visiting the department to collaborate on research, please email contact-civeng@strath.ac.uk