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Staff Profile

Dr Caspar Hewett

Lecturer

  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 5950
  • Personal Website: http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk
  • Address: School of Engineering
    Room 3.09, Cassie Building
    Newcastle University
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

Caspar Hewett is a lecturer in Computational Hydraulics, Degree Programme Director for the EuroAquae+ International MSc. programme in Hydroinformatics and Water Management in School of Engineering and Newcastle University lead for NERC Flood Centre for Doctoral Training. He has over thirty years of research, management and consultancy experience in academia, industry and the private sector and has taught and lectured a variety of subjects including mathematics, numerical methods, hydraulics, catchment management, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), market research techniques, engineering ethics, philosophy of science, environmental issues and English as a Foreign language. 

Caspar has a You Tube Channel with videos of teaching materials covering Fluid Mechanics, Computational Hydraulics and related mathematics.

Caspar is Director and Chair of The Great Debate, a community organisation that has maintained a space for public debate in the North East since 1998 and provides adult education, documentary-making training for young people and debate workshops for schools. He was a founder member of the North East of England's United Nations Regional Centre of Expertise in Education for Sustainable Development (RCE North East), and was Director of NECTER (North East Centre for Transformative Education and Research), the co-ordinating body for RCE North East, 2011-2013.

Caspar is a member of the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) Associate Peer Review College. He was a member of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Peer Review College July 2005 - 2008 and was a NESTA Crucible Awardee 2006. He has held a series of visiting fellowships at Newcastle University, at the Institute for Research on Environment and Sustainability (2006 - 2008) and Sir Joseph Swan Institute for Energy Research (2008-2010).

In the past few years he has received a number of invitations both nationally and internationally to speak and teach on interdisciplinary approaches to water resources research including: keynote speaker at Teesside University Engineering Away Day (2022), keynote speaker at International Workshop on Hydroinformatics and Water Management, Islamabad (2018); keynote speaker at Flood Disaster Management Conference: Building Resilience, Manchester (2018); invited speaker on the panel of discussions at the Battle of Ideas Festival, London (2005, 2008, 2012, 2013, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023); invited speaker at European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Congress (2017); keynote speaker at Consilium, Queensland, Australia, 2012; invited speaker at Cheltenham Science Festival (2009, 2010); one-month fellowship at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, Iowa University advising on the creation of a hydrological observatory for the Upper Mississippi River Basin (2007); invited representative of the Eden catchment at UNESCO HELP (Hydrology for the Environment, Life and Policy) conference in South Africa (2007); Catchment Management workshop, Turkey (2005); keynote speaker at OECD workshop "Improving the Balance Between Economic Agricultural Production and Environmental Quality through Enhanced Decision Making," Honolulu (2004).

He has presented his research at international conferences such as EGU General Congress, American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting and Hydroinformatics and has convened five Great Debates at EGU General Congress (2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018), which has resulted in invitations to attend and chair at EGU’s expense. He is a member of EGU and AGU.

Google scholar: Click here.

Research

Research Interests

Water Resources; Decision support, Computational Hydraulics; Numerical methods; Sediment transport; Sustainability; The notion of progress

Current Research

Interventions in the landscape to reduce flood risk, soil erosion, nutrient and pesticide export from farming.

Development of physically-based models of shallow water flow, in-stream leaky barriers, hillslope soil erosion.

Decision support tools such as the CAVERTI [Communicating and Visualizing Erosion-Associated Risks to Infrastructure] tool and FARM [Floods and Agriculture Risk Matrix] tool (http://research.ncl.ac.uk/proactive/thefarm/).

Teaching

CEG8517: Computational Hydraulics (2015/16 - present) (Module Leader)

CEG8525: Hydrosystems Processes and Data Analysis (2020/21 - present) (Module Leader)

ENG1005: Thermofluid Mechanics (2020/21 - present)

CEG3503: Hydrosystems Engineering (2020-2022)

CEG1501: Fluid Mechanics (2015-2020) (Module Leader)

CEG8501: Quantitative Methods for Engineering (2015-2018) (Module Leader)

CEG3305: Computational Engineering Analysis (2015-2017)

CEG3001: Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems 1 (2015/16)

CEG3004: Design of Sustainable Engineering Systems 3 (2015/16)

CEG8506: Hydrosystems Modelling (2015/16)

CEG8523: Modelling and Forecasting of Floods (2015/16)

Geo3117: Sustainable Water Resource Management (2012-2017)

Geo3120: Putting a Social Science Degree into Practice (2012)

Publications