Kate Baker is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Water Systems. Since the beginning of 2019, she been working with engineers and social scientists on a range of EU funded research projects including Fiware4Water, NEXTGEN, and ARSINOE. Kate leads the community engagement for a £4.4 million project called Blue Heart, under DEFRA’s £150m Flood and Coastal Resilience Innovation Programme.

Kate is passionate about community engagement and enjoys facilitating knowledge exchange and relationship brokering. She is a core team member of the Social Engagement Platform of the UN World Water Quality Alliance and a 2019 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Community Engagement Fellow. Kate is co-founder of Agile Rabbit, an organisation that helps academics engage their work with the public through events and podcasts, often in unusual venues and in original formats.

Prior to working on EU funded projects, Kate was the engagement lead on the Safe & SuRe project, a £1.5m Engineering Physical Sciences Research Council research project, which aimed to develop a new paradigm for urban water management in response to emerging challenges and uncertainties. Kate was responsible for the knowledge exchange strategy working with academics and industry practitioners to ensure the project outputs are of importance to both the academic community and industry.

Kate joined Exeter in January 2017 from the Department of Geography at King’s College London, where her PhD research focused on investigating patterns of habitat use by benthic macroinvertebrates (such as dragonflies, stoneflies, and mayflies) in the tropical streams of Ulu Temburong National Park in northern Borneo. Understanding the spatial structure of habitats within rivers is important to inform management and restoration decisions. Before starting her PhD, Kate was awarded a European Commission’s Leonardo Mobility Award to fund a post with the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research undertaking applied ecological research. Prior to this Kate lived in Siberia for six months funded by the European Voluntary Service to work with The Great Baikal Trail, a youth-led environmental organisation helping to conserve the deepest lake in the world, Lake Baikal.