Consultant Spotlight: Emma McAnaw, Golder

Emma McAnaw is a Senior Hydrogeologist and experienced Project Manager at Golder, a global consulting and engineering firm and one of our valued clients. Emma’s international experience spans the manufacturing, waste, mining, power and infrastructure sectors. Working at Golder has taken her to sites all over the UK, as well as some further afield locations such as Colombia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Gibraltar. She certainly sounds like a ‘tough cookie’ when she relays her experience on a mining remediation project in Colombia, where she could not move without a personal bodyguard.

She wasn’t fazed by the experience, even with the serious potential for kidnap! “It is only when you look back that you realise how much training and safety measures had been put in place to enable us to carry out work safely and be safe whilst out there”. Hazardous environment training formed part of the preparation which included a self-defence module, escaping from a dangerous situation, and first aid for remote environments (all you need is some cling film and a Sam-splint and apparently you can fix most injuries!).

It doesn’t come as a surprise then to hear that her childhood was an active one: “My family is very outdoorsy and I grew up in the countryside with lots of dog walking, camping, and narrow boating. As a family we were also heavily into orienteering – we were basically always out and about and exploring”. This influenced her study choices from an early age. “I became interested in earth sciences and still like looking at a landscape and understand how it became that way”. Emma did her undergraduate degree in Environmental Geology at the University of Leeds. After a summer internship with ARUP, she followed on with a master’s degree in Hydrogeology and joined Golder as a graduate in their Leeds office.

As Project Manager, Emma enjoys having an overview and seeing all the moving parts of a project coming together. At the same time, she also still likes being ‘hands-on’ with the site investigation and remediation work which comes with managing junior members of staff. When asked to give a specific example of a learning experience that stood out in her career to date, she said: “You learn the most when you start teaching others. You need to be certain of what you know, and by transferring your experience and knowledge, like having to talk someone through a process or procedure, for example, that is when you learn the most yourself too”.

When hearing Emma talk, it is clear she enjoys her role as manager and mentor which is something that is actively promoted by Golder. Thinking back to her early days in the job: “I enjoyed being out onsite collecting groundwater samples etc, which tends to be the typical work given to graduate recruits in all environmental consultancies, but Golder made sure that my experience was much more broad than that though, and so I had the opportunity to learn and grow early on in my career.“ This is now the same experience she tries to give new recruits and gets them involved in aspects like site management and report writing, so they can learn the processes and get an idea of the bigger picture. “Recently I received some really positive client feedback on one of our younger members of staff having completed site supervision on one of our sites. It always good to get positive feedback as it strengthens the client relationship of course, but as a manager it is equally as good to able to pass that compliment on to your team member.”

Emma lives in the North Yorkshire countryside with her husband and dog, a Bedlington terrier lurcher. She loves going for long countryside walks to relax after a busy day at work. Before the lockdown, she enjoyed planning her first orienteering event with her local orienteering club. For Emma, working from home has not been too difficult, although she does admit she is looking forward to life returning back to normal: ”Although we have weekly online team meetings, I do miss the social interaction with the team as well as the more informal project information sharing which you tend to only get spontaneously, when you are all physically in the same space.”

Emma McAnaw has been our guest speaker in the webinar: Using in situ bioremediation and liquid activated carbon for a TCE plume. In this presentation, the first UK pilot trial of PlumeStop in fractured bedrock was discussed. An application of PlumeStop was used to address groundwater impacted with chlorinated solvents. Emma was joined by Jack Shore, District Manager UK and Scandinavia at REGENESIS.