Brown and Caldwell, a leading environmental engineering and construction firm, today announced the expansion of the firm’s water reuse practice with key hires, including Dr. Allegra da Silva.
Dr. da Silva makes the move from water reuse practice leader for the Rocky Mountain region in Denver, Colorado.
In her new role, she will serve Brown and Caldwell clients as a leader in water reuse, advanced treatment technology, policy development, feasibility studies, and research design and execution.
Dr. da Silva served as a technical author for the 2012 U.S. EPA Guidelines for Water Reuse, the 2017 EPA Potable Reuse Compendium, and the 2017 Water Environment Federation Water Reuse Roadmap.
According to her S&T Policy Fellowships: Testimonial, Allegra da Silva’s career aim is to work at closing the gap to foster productive collaboration for global water resources.
She was a godparent to a Belizean baby who died of disease due to contaminated water. This unnecessary death launched her on a career aimed at ensuring clean, sustainable water sources around the world.
Allegra pursued a Ph.D. in environmental engineering, assessing wastewater treatment technologies. As a postdoc, she focused on methods to disinfect drinking water in developing countries.
A desire to explore challenges affecting access to clean drinking water and sanitation and to learn how the U.S. government sets policy for development objectives led her to pursue an S&T Policy Fellowship.
As an AAAS Fellow at USAID, first, in the Bureau of Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade, and in the Bureau for Food Security, Allegra helped coordinate an interagency project to support research, maintaining communications between a large network of federal agencies, including the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The fellowship also allowed the flexibility and opportunity to contribute her experience when the Haiti earthquake struck in January 2010.
Allegra participated as a water and sanitation expert on a Haiti Earthquake Rapid Environmental Assessment (REA) Team.
She noted that as an S&T Policy Fellow, she was free to creatively engage in agency programs and interagency roles, creating a task portfolio to match her interests.
“This opportunity brought my understanding of water full circle. For my Ph.D. I looked at wastewater, during my postdoc I examined drinking water, and at USAID I was able to look at water from the perspective of food production and security with an ecological standpoint,” she explained.
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