Director of Infrastructure and Development
I got into the water industry by accident. I had been living and finished my school in Alberta so I assumed that I would end up working a career in the oilfield, but that never happened. I started working in operations department at a compost facility where we dewatered biosolids and co-composed it with wastewater through a friends parent after a long unsuccessful job search. I worked there for a while and fell in love with the idea of making a positive impact on the world. I eventually got transferred into a design group where I got to work on water reservoirs and upgrades at a WWTP facility.
I fell in love with the water industry, the people I got to work with/for, and found it super rewarding to be able to drive around and see permanent pieces of infrastructure that I worked on which made things better for those communities. It was and still is a huge source of pride for me to see those things that I’ve worked on. I now work in municipal government running public works and water departments and am motivated daily seeing the impacts of the work my team gets done or not, and making strategic moves to improve my communities water and wastewater infrastructure.
If I had any advice for younger staff or intermediate staff wanting to progress in their career it would unquestionably be “get involved as a volunteer”. At one point in my journey was working with an executive coach got talked into getting involved planning networking and light training events for YPs and got to meet all sorts of people in our industry. Getting involved helped to develop leadership skills and understand governance in a new way in addition to giving back to an industry that I love. I can, without any shadow of a doubt, contribute where I am in my career and workplace directly to the decision to start getting involved with volunteering.
I have a long career left, but I can’t imagine working outside of water. Even as my role changes and evolves away from less technical work – I keep coming back and wanting to stay in this amazing community.
Associated Engineering | Process Mechanical Engineer
Water has always clicked with me. One of my earliest memories of becoming fascinated with water was watching The Magic School Bus as a kid and seeing the episode about the class travel through a waterworks system. Something about seeing where our water came from, how it was treated, and how an entire system worked together captured my attention. From there, I was always drawn to water. I loved touring water treatment plants as a kid, and as a teenager I would build little water systems for fun just to see how I could move, treat, or control water. I did not know at the time that there was an entire profession waiting for me, but looking back now, the connection is pretty obvious.
My career did not take a perfectly straight path into municipal water. I started with a background in chemistry, went back to university for chemical engineering, worked in oil and gas, and later moved into applied research at NAIT. In Oil and Gas and NAIT, I became heavily involved in industrial water treatment research, membrane technologies, pilot systems, commissioning, process design, and process safety. That experience reinforced what had interested me about water from the beginning: there is never just one piece of the system. Water brings together chemistry, biology, hydraulics, mechanical systems, instrumentation, controls, operations, maintenance, safety, and ultimately people. You can understand one component extremely well, but you still need to understand how it interacts with everything around it.
That perspective became even more important when I joined EPCOR Water Services and began working directly in municipal drinking water. Working closely with operators and maintenance staff at Edmonton's water treatment plants had a major influence on the engineer I became. I learned that a technically correct design is only part of a successful solution. The people who operate and maintain that system every day need to be involved, understand it, trust it, and ultimately be able to make it work.
I am proud of all the projects I have been fortunate enough to be part of, but one that particularly stays with me was EPCOR's conversion from aqueous ammonia to liquid ammonium sulphate, or LAS. What made that project memorable was not simply changing one chemical for another. We had to consider operational challenges, chemical and process safety, reliability, process optimization, and changing drinking-water requirements while maintaining treatment throughout the transition. Just as importantly, we worked closely with the operators who would ultimately own and operate the system. For me, that project captured what good water engineering should be. It was not engineering happening in isolation; it was operations, maintenance, engineering, safety, and project teams working together to make a treatment process safer and more resilient while continuing to deliver drinking water to the community.
When I eventually made the decision to leave EPCOR, it was a difficult one. I had spent years developing relationships with people I respected and gaining experience from the owner's and operator's side of the industry. At the same time, I realized that I wanted to take that experience and carry it forward. Joining Associated Engineering gave me the opportunity to bring an owner's and operations-focused perspective into consulting and apply those lessons to different municipalities, utilities, First Nations, and communities.
Today, I get to work across water and wastewater treatment plants, pumping and lift stations, reservoirs, chemical systems, disinfection systems, infrastructure assessments, commissioning, and long-term planning. The projects are different, but I find myself coming back to the same questions: How will this actually operate? How will it be maintained? Is it safe? Is it resilient? What happens when something goes wrong? Have we listened to the people who are going to live with this system long after the design team has moved on? Those questions matter to me because they help bridge the gap between a design that works on paper and infrastructure that works in the real world.
Giving back to the industry that has given me so much is also an important part of my water story. My involvement with WCWEA and the Water Environment Federation has given me opportunities to support the water community, share knowledge, and act as a voice for those working across the sector. Through conference and technical committee involvement with WCW (Western Canada Water), serving on the WCWEA Board, and representing Western Canada as a WEF Delegate, I have been able to learn from others while also contributing back to the profession. I see that role as a responsibility because our industry is full of knowledge, and that knowledge becomes much more valuable when we share it.
Operators, engineers, scientists, technologists, vendors, regulators, constructors, researchers, and students all see water through slightly different lenses. Bringing those perspectives together makes our industry better. Some of the best lessons in water do not come from a textbook or a design standard; they come from someone who has commissioned a system, operated it at 2:00 in the morning, repaired it when it failed, or found a better way to solve a problem after years of experience.
If I could offer advice to someone beginning a career in water, it would be to stay curious and get involved. Go into the plant. Talk to the operators. Ask questions. Get your boots dirty. Find out why something is operated the way it is instead of assuming the drawing tells the whole story. Volunteer, attend conferences, talk to people outside your discipline, and learn from the people who have to live with the systems we design. Most importantly, never stop learning.
Ultimately, the reason I care about this industry is very simple: water is life. We are made of it, we depend on it every day, and everything we do with water connects us back to the environment. We take water from the environment, use it, treat it, and ultimately return it to that same system. Water is more than a commodity. It is a lifeline that supports our health, our communities, our environment, our economies, and carries enormous cultural significance. There are very few industries where the work you do can touch virtually every person in a community every single day, usually without them ever having to think about it. I knew I was fascinated by water when I was a kid. I just did not know yet that I would be lucky enough to make a career out of it.
Jacobs | Process Engineer
My water story started in 2008-2009; it was one or two years after finishing my bachelor program in Civil Engineering. I had decided to continue my education at graduate level and had a couple of options to narrow down to a sub-discipline, such as structural, geotechnical, environmental, roads, transportation, to name a few. When I started pondering the topic, I found myself keen on looking “within” instead of “beyond” to find my destined path; my contemplations helped me to understand which sub-discipline resonates with personal aspirations, rather than just paying attention to market trends and the associated career aspirations.
Through high school to bachelor program, I had focused nonstop on many numerical and calculation-based disciplines, with less human touches than I would hope for: physics, mathematics, and then in the university, statics, dynamics, mechanics of materials, fluid mechanics, and others. I was always fascinated by the psychology of sociology. Even though I never pursued this interest academically, one of my hobbies was contemplating how cultural and social norms form an entangled network of behavioral patterns at individual and societal levels.
I found myself in need of working on or with something that resembles more human interactions and social behaviors… and that led me to environmental engineering. Knowing that some parts of wastewater treatment require working with microorganisms, I thought interactions between microorganisms could very much mimic human society at a micro scale… and continuing my education at graduate levels and working on graduate projects that I worked on (biological wastewater treatment projects) proved I was not wrong. The more I worked on biological wastewater treatment, the more I developed a fascination about single cellular microbial communities and their similarities to human societies and interactions. This is how I ended up becoming a process engineer in water / wastewater with a keen focus on biological processes such as secondary treatment and biosolids management.