John Briscoe

John Briscoe is Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Environment Engineering and Environmental Health at Harvard University where he directs the Harvard Water Security Initiative. His career has focused on the issues of water, other natural resources and economic development. He has worked: as an engineer in the government water agencies of South Africa and Mozambique; as an epidemiologist at the Cholera Research Center in Bangladesh; as a professor of water resources at the University of North Carolina. In his 20-year career at the World Bank he held high-level technical positions (as the Bank’s Senior Water Advisor) and managerial positions (Country Director for Brazil, the World Bank’s biggest borrower). Mr. Briscoe’s role in shaping the World Bank’s engagement with infrastructure is the subject of a chapter in the definitive recent history of the Bank, Sebastian Mallaby’s The World’s Banker (Penguin, 2006). He received his Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering at Harvard University in 1976 and his B.Sc. in Civil Engineering at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 1969.