The ‘Mid-Career Achievement’ is awarded to someone who is part-way through their career and showing important leadership. The key criterion is that the candidate’s contribution in the urban drainage field is internationally recognized, which includes important and influential research findings, training of graduate students, innovative and formative practice in the field as well as general outstanding contribution to the urban drainage field.

Jörg Rieckermann, group leader within the Urban Water Management Department, was nominated for his influential research findings in the fields of sewer epidemiology, monitoring and modelling in urban drainage which he published in high-quality peer-reviewed publications. Furthermore, the committee honours his activities in bridging the gap between the international and German speaking urban drainage community, as well as science and policy integration. On receiving the award, Jörg Rieckermann says: ”I am very honoured by this recognition of the joint committee, because I see a couple of leaders in our field that do excellent work. In the future, we should have more evidence on how our urban drainage systems actually function – using both targeted experiments and operational data – because I perceive that we think too little about the uncertainty of the predictions we make with our models. Also I still hear Willi Gujer saying that science literally means “creating knowledge” (Wissenschaft heisst “Wissen schaffen”) and I am happy that open science principles are slowly taking root.” For Jörg, awards are also vehicles to communicate the importance of scientific work to the public.  He adds: “Of course, such awards are based on teamwork! I am really grateful for the support and enthusiasm of our colleagues, especially my excellent students, at SWW and Eawag,  the urban drainage community, and, probably most important, the support of my family.“