Eftychia Koursari

Effie is an internationally recognised expert in scour, the main cause of bridge collapse worldwide and the main impact of climate change on infrastructure. She is a Chartered Engineer, member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Institution of Engineering and Technology; she possesses two Bachelor’s degrees in Engineering and is currently undertaking PhD Research at the University of Glasgow on the topic of scour.

Effie has been working in Engineering since 2006 and she has varied international experience, having worked on buildings and on the Aegean motorway part of European Route E75, until she moved to Scotland where she conducted research on river restoration at the University of Glasgow. In 2015 she joined Amey Consulting’s Bridges Team, where she has been leading a team of Engineers specialising in scour. She is leading scour related projects UK-wide and is developing innovative scour monitoring and prediction tools and methods that help safeguard infrastructure at risk, the travelling public and the environment.

Her work on scour has been published internationally, and she has also been a member of Construction Industry Research and Information Association’s steering committee for the new manual on scour (CIRIA SP171).

In December 2021, she was named as one of the young women Engineers of the year, being awarded the WES Prize at the IET’s Young Woman Engineer of the Year Awards. In 2021 Effie was also presented with Amey’s Centenary Excel Award and in 2020, she was awarded the Women Leaders Association’s Rising Star in STEM. In 2020 the Women’s Engineering Society named Effie as one of the Top 50 Women in Engineering for her input on Sustainability and she is a member of the WES Climate Emergency Group.