Conference Speakers – 2023

Viv Dent, Environment Agency
Vivien is a Technical Specialist at the Environment Agency and currently the AGS Chair. She is a hydrogeologist based in the Herts & North London Area, working in Green Growth and Delivery, a multidisciplinary team externally funded through Service Level Agreements (SLA). Vivien provides technical support on a number of major projects throughout planning and construction stages, from early engagement to long term remediation monitoring.

Rebekah Norbury, Cheshire East Council/ NCLOG
Rebekah Norbury is a Local Authority contaminated land officer working for Cheshire East Council and has been for around twelve years. Prior to that, she worked for around six years as an environmental consultant specialising in contaminated land.
She is on the NCLOG Steering Committee and is also a Chartered Chemist. As well as land contamination, she also has an interest in air quality and has been assisting Cheshire East Council’s air quality team with their education objectives. When she is able to, she enjoys doing outreach activities in schools relating to her job as she is a STEM Ambassador.

Matthew Pannett, Ramboll
Matthew has just celebrated his 25th work anniversary at Ramboll! His work is rooted in contaminated land and remediation which has provided the opportunity to be involved in a wide variety of projects for clients in many different sectors including financial, legal, regulatory, property and investment. Some particularly enjoyable projects have included working with the Romanian and Israeli Governments on new contaminated land laws and guidance, collaborating with international colleagues on assessments of emerging contaminants, and regeneration of substantial former gasworks. Sustainability is at the forefront of Matthew’s work and can include robust and defensible risk assessments to prevent unnecessary remediation, developing justifiable sustainable remediation options and incorporating net environmental benefits into projects such as biodiversity, material management and improved air quality.

Darren Beriro, British Geological Survey
Dr. Darren Beriro is a Principal Geoscientist at British Geological Survey, specialising in research on brownfield land redevelopment. Darren has 18 years of work experience on a wide range of projects, which most recently include the development of new laboratory methods to measure the dermal bioavailability of organic contaminants in soils and the award-winning GIS-based Brownfield Ground Risk Calculator.
Darren has most recently been working with the Environment Agency researching background concentrations of PFAS in soil as well as tools to estimate the sustainability benefits of remediating and redeveloping brownfield land.

Ian Ross, CDM Smith
Ian Ross, Ph.D., FRSC is the Global PFAS Practice Lead at CDM Smith and is a visiting Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Ian is a biochemist by training and works as a technical expert for assessment of contaminated land sites and PFAS decontamination. He has >30 years’ experience in the environmental impact of xenobiotics and has focused solely on PFAS management for the last 10 years in a global role, after first evaluating solutions to manage PFOS in 2005 after the Buncefield fire near London, then started developing PFOS destruction technologies whilst working on a PFAS project for Guernsey airport. He has written over 100 articles, academic publications, and book chapters on PFAS, including the 204 page chapter on PFAS in the Emerging Contaminants Handbook.

Simon Firth, Firth Consultants
Simon is an independent consultant with over 25 years’ experience in land contamination. Starting out as a hydrogeologist Simon is also an expert in human health and environmental risk assessment both in the UK and internationally, particularly in the use and development of risk assessment models. Simon routinely conducts and peer reviews risk assessments and is an experienced trainer on this subject. Simon was instrumental in the development of UK generic soil and groundwater screening values for protection of human health (including the C4SLs) and contributes to many UK guidance documents on risk assessment. Simon was one of the founders of the UK’s Society of Brownfield Risk Assessment and is now a scrutineer for SoBRA’s risk assessors accreditation scheme.

Simon Burr (Campbell Reith)
Simon is a Partner at Campbell Reith and responsible for the Land Quality department in London. He has been working in the environmental consultancy field since 1993, with specialisation in contaminated land risk assessment, investigation
and remediation. He is a registered Specialist in Land Condition (SiLC) and a Suitably Qualified Person. He is a member of CL:AIRE’s Technical Research Group, providing scientific reviews of industry guidance on issues relating to the sustainable reuse of
contaminated land. He is a Qualified Person as defined in the industry’s Definition of Waste Code of Practice (DoWCoP) and was recently involved in the stakeholder discussions for Version 3 which is due for issue pending Environment Agency approval. He is currently a member of SoBRA’s ground gas sub-committees and was a member of their sub-committee which developed the accreditation scheme for contaminated land risk assessors.

James Rayner, Geosyntec
James has over 20 years’ experience in the assessment, management and remediation of contaminated land. He is a contaminant hydrogeologist specializing in the evaluation of contaminant fate and transport and development of advanced conceptual site models for complex environmental liabilities involving non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) in porous media and fractured bedrock. He has expertise in integrating pioneering data collection, analysis and modelling techniques for site characterization, risk assessment and remediation performance, including natural source zone depletion (NSZD), monitored natural attenuation (MNA) and sustainable remedial alternatives. James has contributed to applied research with the US Department of Defense Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP), Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and has published technical guidance regarding NAPLs and natural attenuation with regulatory bodies.

Valerie Hanley, California EPA
Dr. Valerie Hanley is a Senior Toxicologist in the Human and Ecological Risk Office at the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) where she has worked since 2008. Valerie evaluates human health risk assessments for complex sites and supports DTSC’s Safer Consumer Products program. Valerie has served as the co-leader of the Interstate Technology and Regulatory Council (ITRC) Microplastics Team since 2020. Valerie earned a bachelor’s degree in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology from The University of California (UC) Santa Cruz in 2001 and her PhD in Comparative Pathology from UC Davis in 2007. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Davis in Respiratory Toxicology in 2008.