Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Tilley

As an engineer and economist, Elizabeth researches the technological, social, and financial drivers of sustainable urban services that affect human health. She and her group primarily focus on urban service systems in countries that, for centuries, have suffered over-exploitation at the hands of richer economies, resulting in informal and temporary service solutions with undue health burdens. These challenges call for dedicated basic and translational research efforts that are responsive to the unique engineering and implementation constraints posed by resource limitations. To fill this gap, Elizabeth joined the Mechanical and Process Engineering Department at ETH Zurich as the Chair of Global Health Engineering in 2021, where she maintains active projects on the impacts of solid waste management on sanitation systems, air quality, and human health and wellbeing in the growing cities of the emerging economies.

Elizabeth was first trained as an environmental civil engineer at the University of British Columbia in Canada. She then moved to Switzerland and worked for five years at the Department Sanitation, Water and Solid Waste for Development (external page Sandec) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (external page Eawag), where she developed and piloted context-appropriate sanitation and nutrient recovery technologies in East Africa, Nepal, and Central America. After Sandec, she joined ETH Zurich’s Development Economics Group as a doctoral researcher and investigated the feasibility and community impacts of conditional cash transfers to increase sanitation coverage in eThekwini, South Africa.

Following her doctorate, Elizabeth worked as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Environmental Health at the University of Malawi, the Polytechnic in Blantyre, Malawi, from 2015 to 2020. She and her students investigated the myriad ways that service delivery sectors, especially water, sanitation, and solid waste, fail to meet population demands and simultaneously inflict damage on environmental systems.

Beyond her post as the Chair of Global Health Engineering, Elizabeth is an Honorary Research Fellow at the SARCHI Chair in Waste and Climate Change at the University of KwaZulu-​Natal, Durban, South Africa; an Adjunct Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Victoria, Canada; and Associated Faculty Member in the ETH’s Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (D-GESS). She also serves as an Associate Editor at the Journal Water SA and the Journal of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene for Development.