Career
He has an interest in environmental interventions for disease control, including both technical issues and policy. He is a public health engineer by profession and an epidemiologist by vocation. Most of his career has been spent in research and teaching, and about a third in developing countries implementing water, sanitation and public health programmes.
His experience includes building water supplies in Lesotho, and seven years as a water and sanitation engineer for the Government of Mozambique, shortly after that country"s independence.
He is also Deputy Director of the African SNOWS Consortium to build research capacity of six African universities in water, sanitation & environmental health. Cairncross has a Doctor of Philosophy in soil mechanics from the University of Cambridge and has been at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine on and off since 1977.
Cairncross was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to environmental health overseas. Until 2015, he served as chair of trustees to Teaching-aids at Low Cost (TALC), an international non government organization with charitable status based in Hertfordshire.
He has worked on or contributed to a number of books, including a textbook on environmental health engineering in the tropics.
