Associate Professor David McCarthy

David’s research area is the movement of pollutants within urban water systems and the subsequent treatment of storm- and waste-waters for the protection of downstream ecosystems and, most importantly, human health. His PhD involved the collection and uncertainty analysis of urban stormwater microorganism datasets, and the development of a new model to predict microbes in urban stormwater.

He is a project leader in the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, with a focus on how to effectively remove pathogens from various water sources using passive (or natural) treatment technologies. More recently, he studies the sources, sinks and processes of pathogens in the Yarra River estuary.

He is a member and the treasurer of the Joint Committee on Urban Drainage, and the Chair of the International Data and Models Working Group, both of which fall under the International Water Association (IWA) and the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research (IAHR). He was the deputy-chair and scientific chair of the 7th International Conference on Water Sensitive Urban Design (2012) and is the Chair of the upcoming International Conference on Urban Drainage (2020). He is a Churchill Fellow (2009), FASIC Fellow (2012) and a Victoria Fellow (2014), and also won a 2014 Young Tall Poppy Science Award.