Rate My Professor Tom Curtis

Professor Thomas Curtis is Professor of Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering at Newcastle University, a position he has held since joining the institution in 1994. He obtained his BSc in Microbiology from the University of Leeds in 1983, followed by an MEng in Public Health Engineering in 1986 and a PhD in Public Health Engineering in 1991, also from Leeds, under the supervision of Duncan Mara. Before his academic career, Curtis worked in construction in the Middle East, contributed to public health policy at the UK Department of Health, and briefly served as a refuse collector. His professional focus has consistently centered on the interplay between water, waste, the environment, and health, evolving from applications in developing countries to leveraging microbial ecology and new biology for advanced engineered biological systems. He teaches undergraduate civil engineering modules on environmental systems and postgraduate courses on hydraulic design, and maintains strong ties with the UK water industry through research collaborations and consultancies. Curtis serves on high-level technical advisory committees, including those with Keppel Corporation in Singapore and INRA in France, and was an EPSRC Dream Fellow from 2011 to 2012, funded for the project 'Towards the E sewage works'.

Curtis's research specializations encompass biological treatment systems, experimental and theoretical microbial ecology, wastewater treatment in developing countries, waste stabilisation ponds, microbial fuel cells, and pathogen removal. He leads the Ecology and Evolution Team within the Frontiers in Engineering Biology (NUFEB) initiative at Newcastle University, advancing predictive models for microbial communities to optimize wastewater treatment processes, reduce energy consumption, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and minimize resource losses. His work has significantly influenced the field, with highly cited publications including 'Quantifying the roles of immigration and chance in shaping prokaryote community structure' (Sloan et al., 2006), 'Estimating prokaryotic diversity and its limits' (Curtis et al., 2002), 'The role of ecological theory in microbial ecology' (Prosser et al., 2007), 'Accurate determination of microbial diversity from 454 pyrosequencing data' (Quince et al., 2009), and 'Challenges in microbial ecology: building predictive understanding of community function and dynamics' (Widder et al., 2016). These contributions underscore his impact on microbial ecology applied to engineering biology.