Dragan Savić is the first Professor of Hydroinformatics in the UK having held this post in the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences since 2001. He is also Head of Engineering in the College.
Dragan is a founder and co-director of the Centre for Water Systems and Аcademic Lead for Engineering subjects. He is a Chartered Civil and Water Engineer with over twenty-five years experience in research, teaching and consulting.
As a civil engineer, with water specialisation background, Prof. Savić worked for construction and engineering holding Energoprojekt (Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, now Serbia) in the 1980s as a junior and then senior design engineer on hydropower and water supply projects, before moving to Canada, where he obtained a PhD degree at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.He then worked as a hydraulic/hydrologic engineer for KGS Group, one of Western Canada's leading consulting firms, before leaving Canada in 1991 and taking up employment in the environmental protection sector.
In 1994 he returned to academia and was appointed Lecturer at the University of Exeter in 1995, where he was promoted to a Chair in 2001. At Exeter he co-founded the Centre for Water Systems, which has been recognised as one of the leading research groups in the UK by the award of the two consequtive EPSRC Platform grants (2001-2005, 2005-2010). This prestigious grant that, in the words of the EPSRC itself, are awarded to ‘world-leading academic groups’. Current research projects have total value of over £3M.
Prof. Savić has played a major role in developing and delivering UK technology overseas. His pioneering work on the development and use of novel optimization methods for design and rehabilitation of urban water and wastewater infrastructure has been used by the industry to provide better technical design at least cost. He holds two patents on real-time technology for water system management (fault detection and fault management).
Professor Savić has lectured extensively abroad and has given research presentations at many institutions on all continents. He currently holds Visiting Professor positions at Harbin Institute of Technology (China), University of Belgrade (Serbia), UNESCO-IHE Delft (The Netherlands) and the Technical University of Bari (Italy).
