“When we think about making decisions on how we shape our cities, that deep connection and stewardship of water is really important,” says Briony Rogers, a civil engineer at the Monash Sustainable Development Institute and director of MSDI Water, the institute’s water research hub in Melbourne, Australia.

Rogers’ work on ‘water-sensitive’ cities brings together her interest in applying civil engineering to shape the environment humans live in, and her love of the beaches and forests that surround her in Melbourne.

That interest began when she worked as a water engineer at a design infrastructure company and realized that, to create truly sustainable infrastructure, principles of sustainability needed to be incorporated from the very start of the design process.