Claire Furlong holds the position of Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Non-Sewered Sanitation at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. She is originally from the United Kingdom where she has undertaken research in five academic institutes and also worked in the private sector.
She is an environmental engineer with over 15 years’ experience in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene in low- and middle-income countries. Her research focuses on the interface between technology and people and the sanitation service chain. This includes development and trialling disruptive technologies (Tiger (Worm) Toilet), bio-conversion of faecal sludge, the nexus between water-sanitation-food, and women and technology (feminist engineering approaches). Claire has worked in over 13 low- and middle-income countries, both humanitarian (protracted crisis) and development contexts.
Her initial research focused on “Drinking Water practices in Amazonian Peru: exploring the link between actual and perceived drinking water quality”. This is where she developed as a transdisciplinarian and gained expertise in mixed methods approaches. She is chartered through the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management and is an active member of the International Water Association.
Before coming to IHE Claire was a Research Associate in Urban Sanitation at the Water Engineering and Development Centre (WEDC), Loughborough University. There her research focused on developing and testing tools to explore the flow of excreta across cities (http://sfd.susana.org/), while continuing her research on worm based sanitation.
Her paper titled “Technical and user evaluation of a novel worm-based, on-site sanitation system in rural India” in Waterlines, was the runner up for the 2016 Jeroen Ensink Memorial Prize.
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found in Google Scholar.
Other information
Claire is chartered through the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Managers (CIWEM) and is an active member of the International Water Association (IWA).