Prof Rae Mackay - Researcher Profile

Professor Mackay has more than thirty years experience as a practising engineer, hydrogeologist and academic.  He graduated from Imperial College of Science and Technology, London University in 1978 with a degree in Civil Engineering and worked for seven years as a water resources engineer and latterly as a groundwater engineer for Sir Murdoch Macdonald and Partners in Cambridge, UK.   He worked extensively in Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan.  In 1985, he joined the Water Resources Systems Research Unit in the Civil Engineering Department at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, initially as a Research Associate working on the development and application of groundwater flow and transport modelling systems and latterly as a Lecturer in Hydrology.  In 1995 he became the Director of Newcastle University’s Centre for Land Use and Water Resources Research.   While at Newcastle University he gained his PhD in Civil Engineering through a study of synthetic hydrogeological modelling to explore data worth in radioactive waste disposal assessments.   Throughout this period, he was extensively involved with the radioactive waste disposal research programme of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution,  as well as undertaking a range of research into regional land use impacts and arid zone hydrology.

In 1997 he moved to the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Birmingham as Professor of Hydrogeology and Head of the Hydrogeology Research Group.  He was Head of Birmingham University’s School of Earth Sciences from 1998 to 2002.  His research interests expanded following his move to cover diverse aspects of urban hydrogeology, groundwater recharge through glacial tills, integrated urban water management as well as hydrogeomechanical modelling for nuclear waste disposal assessments.  He was the course director for the nationally and internationally renowned MSc in Hydrogeology at Birmingham from 1998 to 2011 before moving to Monash University.