Emma Houiellebecq has started a new role in the UN Office for Project Services after completing her PhD.
I’m really excited about this opportunity, as it allows me to continue contributing to strategic efforts that support resilient and sustainable infrastructure systems across development and humanitarian contexts.
Emma Houiellebecq
Impact Prize winner Emma Houiellebecq has taken up a new role as a Senior Analyst with the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) at its headquarters in Copenhagen where she is part of the Strategic Advice and Support team.
Emma [2016/2021] was one of eight Impact Prize winners awarded in the Trust’s 25th anniversary year. Her PhD explored a new systems-based approach to building resilience in conflict regions which takes into account the whole chain of political, economic, social and technical issues that affect vital infrastructure. Through fieldwork in some of the world’s most vulnerable regions – Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon and Venezuela – it built on her previous work for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) on ensuring the resilience of vital infrastructure.
Emma got a Gates Cambridge Scholarship for both her master’s and PhD. She says her master’s in Engineering for Sustainable Development programme was a pivotal moment for her. “It took me from a normal career in engineering and changed my trajectory,” she says. “It gave me confidence to go for what I wanted and opened up doors,” she states.
Her master’s dissertation focused on recovery from the 2015 Nepal earthquake. She travelled to Nepal to study how resilience strategies were being incorporated into infrastructure recovery efforts such as water, electricity, transport and telecommunications and how that could be improved.
After her master’s, Emma applied to the International Committee of the Red Cross and was posted to South Sudan in 2017 for a year to implement projects to improve water supply and infrastructure for hospitals and prisons in the southern region. After South Sudan, Emma was posted to Gaza, a post she herself had requested. There she switched from a focus on rural water supply in South Sudan to building urban resilience through ensuring water and electricity supplies to households and critical infrastructure, such as hospitals, and prisons. She worked in Gaza for two years from 2019 to 2021. She then returned to Cambridge to do her PhD to continue building on the idea of using a systems thinking approach to strengthen resilience, getting the Red Cross on board with her research.
Of her new UN role Emma says: “I’m really excited about this opportunity, as it allows me to continue contributing to strategic efforts that support resilient and sustainable infrastructure systems across development and humanitarian contexts.”
