CIWEM Installs New President

CIWEM (UK) Fellow and Trustee, Mike Summersgill, has been installed as the Institution’s new President. An active champion of environmental education, his term will focus on inspiring the next generation of water and environmental engineers.

The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) is pleased to announce that Mike Summersgill has been inducted as the 27th President of the Institution.

Mike has taken over the presidential role from outgoing CIWEM President, Paul Hillman. Mike is a Chartered Civil/Soils Engineer and a Chartered Environmentalist with almost 40 years of experience in the planning, design and construction of civil engineering and property development projects.

From Maidstone, Kent, though hailing from Yorkshire, Mike has been a School Governor for 20 years, and an Eco-Schools assessor for the past 4 years. During a Presidential Forum on environmental education following his induction, Mike made his presidential ambitions clear.   

“When reflecting on my own career development, it became obvious that there were many people assisting me on the path to the culmination of my working life – the honour of being President of this Institution. Now, building upon the work of CIWEM’s Environmental Education Network, it is my goal to engage young CIWEM members to ‘take the message back’ to their schools and talk to teenagers about the scope and experience of environmental career paths.”

“The choices of environmental courses post-school are much wider now than in previous years, but teenagers still need to have studied the right subjects to be heading down the right career path. It is that aspect of providing sufficient choice in the school curriculum, and generating sufficient interest, that will be a challenge with the proposed recent changes to the UK’s National Curriculum. Rather than narrowing their options, we should be growing the next generation’s understanding of global processes.”

A Fellow and Trustee of CIWEM, Mike works part-time with SEnSe Associates LLP, advising on feasibility studies, site investigation, risk assessment, remedial strategies, soil remediation, waste management, and ground engineering of brownfield development.

Mike has also been a chartered member of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) since 1979. He is a Specialist in Land Condition (SiLC); a Qualified Person (QP) for waste spoil definition; and a Trustee of the CL:AIRE (Contaminated Land Applications in Real Environments) brownfield charity.