Professor Huw Taylor

It is with very great sadness that we learned of the death of our colleague Huw Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Microbial Ecology in the School of Environment and Technology on Saturday 14 October 2017.

Our thoughts are with Huw’s family, friends and colleagues. Huw was a hugely talented academic whose research is transforming the lives of people across the globe. He was hugely popular with both his postgraduate and undergraduate students and will be sorely missed by us all.

Huw Taylor is Professor of Microbial Ecology in the School of Environment and Technology. He teaches across a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in which he uses his international humanitarian research experiences to enhance student learning. He has supervised fourteen PhD students to successful completion and is very receptive to developing new PhD project ideas with enthusiastic and suitably qualified applicants.

Professor Taylor’s research focuses on creating practical barriers to prevent the spread of waterborne diseases. With his colleagues Dr Sarah Purnell and Dr James Ebdon of the university’s Environment and Public Health Research Group and the Centre for Aquatic Environments, he has successfully developed Brighton’s reputation as a centre of expertise in the field of ‘microbial source tracking’.

In recent years, Professor Taylor has applied his knowledge to the issue of providing safe and affordable water and access to adequate and equitable sanitation for all in response to UN Sustainable Development Goal 6 and his work now contributes to the application of water and sanitation safety plans in Brazil, Malawi and Nepal. He worked closely with the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières in Haïti following the 2010 earthquake and subsequent cholera outbreak to design a safe treatment system for cholera hospital wastewaters and this led him to be invited by the WHO to coordinate an international team of experts to advise the organisation on an improved sanitation response to the subsequent West Africa Ebola outbreak. Since then, his team has received funding from USAID to develop novel-low cost approaches to disinfecting human waste in emergency settings and from the Bill and Melinda Gates to work with Emory University in the USA, using Brighton’s microbial source tracking methods to map and manage disease transmission in Indian cities as part of the international SaniPath collaboration.

Professor Huw Taylor

Professor Huw Taylor
Professor of Microbial Ecology

How I like to teach

My teaching approach is guided by my career experiences in the UK and abroad and by the influence of inspiring mentors who fostered my enthusiasm for philanthropic research and teaching.

In recent years students have been able to access information far more readily and the role of the university teaching is evolving rapidly as a result. I try to keep abreast of new initiatives in educational practice but what I hope evidently underlies all my teaching is my enthusiasm for the potential role of science in improving human wellbeing. There is no single way in which students learn so I try to use a variety of approaches in my lectures but my own experience has been that guided research and practice help students to understand how disparate aspects of problem solving come together to provide solutions. Much of student learning takes place outside of the lecture theatre and I encourage students to think of themselves as a learning community that can work together to help everyone achieve their learning objectives but if Woody Allen was right, and 80 per cent of life is just showing up, I hope that turning up for my lectures is beneficial.

I teach a wide range of undergraduates studying for degrees in Geography, Environmental Science and Civil and Environmental Engineering. I have taken a key role in the development of our MSc in Water and Environmental Management and I am an enthusiastic and experienced supervisor of postgraduate research students.

My research interests

As a young graduate, my laudable desire to use science for philanthropic ends was only matched by my shallow desire to travel widely. Thirty years later, with the support of my excellent colleagues at the University of Brighton, I have developed a group that is dedicated to teaching and researching new ways to prevent waterborne diseases, especially in low-income countries, where the need is greatest. It has recently been estimated that 900 children still die every day as a result of unsafe drinking water and inadequate sanitation. The causes are complex and science alone cannot resolve the problem but natural scientists working alongside social scientists, engineers and the communities at risk are finding better ways to understand how infectious diseases spread through the water cycle and developing new ways to respond to the issue. At the University of Brighton we feel we are making a significant contribution to this international effort.

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Watch my professorial inaugural lecture on People, places and pathogens.

Research activity

Current research projects:

  • Sanipath Typhoid
  • ARDHEES
  • OneHealthWater: Drinking Water Under a ‘One Health’ Lens

Previous research projects:

  • Safe drinking water for rural Malawi
  • Thames Water project
  • Low-cost-on-site-disinfection-options-to-reduce-Ebola-transmission
  • RiskManche
  • AquaManche

Research Centres and Groups

Social media

Academia.edu

ResearchGate

Google Scholar

My professorial inaugural lecture

A short film on my work in Africa

Biography

I was born in Swansea and studied microbiology as an undergraduate student at Cardiff University. The lure of international travel and the heady world of wastewater re-use then guided me to the University of Liverpool where I studied for a PhD, undertaking fieldwork in Portugal into the risks to human health of recycling wastewater in agriculture. My research career continued at the University of Leeds, this time based in Northeast Brazil, where I worked to develop novel low-cost wastewater treatment technologies. Following a period as Assistant Director of the Northern School of Public Health at the University of Manchester I moved south to the University of Brighton and here over the years I have built up a successful research group that now encompasses aspects of water and sanitation in low-income countries, as well as water and wastewater treatment and river catchment management in Europe.

Research output

Consultancy

I have undertaken consultancy work for international NGOs, UNICEF and the WHO on aspects of safe drinking water and sanitation in low-resource settings.

PhD students

Students
NameThesis
Mario Rodrigues Peres (2014 -) Risk-based tools to prevent excreta-borne disease transmission in semi-arid rural communities
Athina Papatheodoulou (2011-) Novel environmental tools to support the prediction and management of river water pollution problems in Cyprus
Sílvia Monteiro (March 2017) Novel approaches to water quality: predicting and managing faecal pollution 
Austen Buck (September 2016) Human-specific bacteriophages in sediments: A novel approach to waterborne hazard identification 
Emanuele Sozzi (December 2015) Low-cost physico-chemical disinfection of human excreta in emergency settings
Edgard Dias (December 2015) Bacteriophages as surrogates of viral pathogens in wastewater treatment systems
Adewale Olalemi (September 2015) Bacteriophages as surrogates of viral pathogens: A novel tool for the shellfisheries industry
Lakshmi Yaliwal  (January 2014) Ecological characteristics of the Enterococcal Surface Protein (esp) gene with reference to microbial source tracking
Diogo Trajano da Silva (October 2013) Bacteriophages as indicators of human enteric viruses in mussels (Mytilus edulis). 
Sarah Purnell (July 2012) Bacteriophage lysis of Enterococcus species for microbial source tracking
David Diston (December 2010) UV radiation response of bacteriophages of human-specific Bacteroides
Daniel Nnane (January 2010) The use of microbial Source tracking to assess and predict water pollution in river catchments
Jessica Wallis (September 2006) A phenotypic approach to faecal source tracking
James Ebdon (May 2006) Identification of sources of faecal pollution in surface waters using a novel antibiotic resistance profiling technique 
Jonathan Caplin (September 2005) Characterisation of vancomycin resistant enterococci from human, animal and environmental sources 
Ian Cooper (December 2004) The role of aquatic biofilms as reservoirs for Escherichia coli O157 

Roles

University roles

  • Mentor – University of Brighton Research Leadership Programme (RLP) 2014 -
  • Elected member of SET Research Strategy Committee (2007–)
  • Elected member of the University of Brighton Doctoral Board (2012-)
  • Invited member of the University of Brighton Peer Review College (2010-)

External roles

  • Expert advisor to the WHO Water, Sanitation and Health Group (2014 –)
  • Expert advisor on drinking water safety to the Malagiri School, Nepal (2017-)
  • Vice-chair of the International Water Association Water Safety Planning Specialist Group (2011-)
  • Member of the Brighton and Sussex Global Health Group (2010 - )
  • Member of core group of WHO Rapid Water Quality Testing Committee. 2012 –
  • Expert Advisor to WaterAid (2013 - )
  • Member of the editorial board of International Health (Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene)
  • External Examiner – MSc, Water, Sanitation and Health Engineering, University of Leeds (2016 – 2020)
  • External Examiner – MSc, Environmental Engineering and Project Management, University of Leeds (2016 – 2020)
  • External Examiner –BSc Biology, University of Portsmouth (2016 – 2020)
  • Committee member - Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management for the South East England Branch (2006-)
  • Reviewer for Water Research, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, Journal of Applied Microbiology, Letters in Applied Microbiology, Journal of Water and Health, Area, and Science of the Total Environment.
  • Member of the European Union Frameworks 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020 Panels of Reviewers (2006-)

Awards

  • Our collaboration with the University of Malawi ‘Safe Water for Africa’ was ‘Highly Commended’  in the 2015 Times Higher Education Awards (International Collaboration of the Year)
  • Our Interreg IVA project – RiskManche: Risk Management of Catchments and Coasts for Health and Environment was selected in July 2015 by the France (Channel) Interreg Joint Technical Secretariat as their best project under Priority 4: ‘Ensure sustainable environmental development of the common space’.
  • University of Brighton Economic and Community Engagement Award (2014).
  • University of Brighton Research and Innovations Award (2010). Runner up in the ‘Staff Research with Impact’ category for ‘Implementation of low-cost water quality detection methods in Brazil’ (£2000 with Dr J.E. Ebdon).
  • Nominated for the University of Brighton 2010 Teaching Excellence Awards.
  • Nominated for the University of Brighton 2004 Teaching Excellence Awards (student nominations).