Saskia Nowicki

Health Risk in Complex Adaptive Rural Water Systems

Saskia completed her degree in 2022. Saskia works on understanding, measuring, and communicating water risks and trade-offs, especially as they relate to environmental health. She is a proponent of interdisciplinary systems thinking and has a background in environmental science with specialisation in water science, policy and management. Her current research focuses on drinking-water safety in rural Kenya, using mixed-methods to seek insight at multiple levels from the molecular to the institutional.

Saskia is working with the REACH water security programme and the Water Programme of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment and is part of the Oxford Water Network leadership team. She is invested in learning about and applying feminist and anti-racist approaches to research and participates in the Community of Women in Water (CWiW) and a post-graduate anti-racism collective within SoGE. Through a knowledge-exchange funded Water Learning Partnership, Saskia has also been working on developing teaching resources and activities with schools in Kenya and Cameroon, supporting them to make the most of water as an interdisciplinary and universally relevant learning topic.

• REACH: Improving water security for the poor. Funded by the FCDO; 2015-2022.
• Gro for GooD: Groundwater Risk Management for Growth and Development. Funded by DFID/ESRC/NERC; 2015-2019.

Journal Articles

• Nowicki, S., deLaurent, Z.R., de Villiers, E.P., Githinji, G. and Charles, K.J. (2021) The utility of Escherichia coli as a contamination indicator for rural drinking water: Evidence from whole genome sequencing. Plos one, 16(1). e0245910.
• Charles, K.J., Nowicki, S. and Bartram, J.K. (2020) A framework for monitoring the safety of water services: from measurements to security. Npj Clean Water, 3. 36.
• Nowicki, S., Koehler, J. and Charles, K.J. (2020) Including water quality monitoring in rural water services: why safe water requires challenging the quantity versus quality dichotomy. npj Clean Water, 3. 14.
• Nowicki, S., Lapworth, D.J., Ward, J.S.T., Thomson, P. and Charles, K. (2019) Tryptophan-like fluorescence as a measure of microbial contamination risk in groundwater. Science of The Total Environment, 646: 782-791.

Book Chapters

• Charles, K.J., Nowicki, S., Thomson, P. and Bradley, D. (2019) Water and Health: A Dynamic, Enduring Challenge. Chapter 6 in, Dadson, S.J., Garrick, D.E., Penning-Rowsell, E.C., Hall, J.W., Hope, R. and Hughes, J. (eds.) Water Science, Policy, and Management: A Global Challenge. John Wiley and Sons Ltd. pp. 97-116. ISBN: 9781119520603.
• Johnstone, D.W.M., Nowicki, S., Narayan, A.S. and Sinha, R. (2019) Wastewater: From a Toxin to a Valuable Resource. Chapter 16 in, Dadson, S.J., Garrick, D.E., Penning-Rowsell, E.C., Hall, J.W., Hope, R. and Hughes, J. (eds.) Water Science, Policy, and Management: A Global Challenge. John Wiley and Sons Ltd. pp. 291-307. ISBN: 9781119520603.