EM/ProfCynthia Mitchell AO

Cynthia Mitchell is respected globally as a leading advisor and thinker around how we transform ourselves, our systems, and our institutions towards regenerative futures, especially in the water sector in high, middle, and low income countries.

Cynthia’s story is about transformation: her own and that of the people and organisations who work with her. Once upon a time, Cynthia was an engineer and a scientist. She loved maths and chemistry at school, so she studied chemical engineering at University. Back then, biotechnology was exciting and new, so she joined that industry when she graduated. When she noticed that the people with the most interesting jobs also had PhDs, she enrolled in one, but became increasingly disillusioned. She did complete her PhD but she left that industry. Instead, Cynthia camped her way around Australia for a year.

By the time she was looking for a job in the early 1990s, environmental engineering had emerged, and for the next decade, Cynthia led environmental engineering programs at QUT, the University of Queensland, and the University of Sydney. Meanwhile, her research fell in the poo. That is, she combined her passion for the environment with her depth of knowledge in biotechnology to develop a research career in sustainable sewage and water management. But she wanted to do more. So, in 2001, she joined the fledgling Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) at UTS.

For the next two decades, Cynthia worked alongside industry and governments across Australia, Asia, and the Pacific, at the cutting edge of improving ecological, economic, and social outcomes of urban infrastructure, weaving her engineering and science with insights from learning, systems, social science, futures, and new economics, like Kate Raworth’s groundbreaking Doughnut model. When she was leading the development of Australia’s first infrastructure rating tool in 2006, she was pretty much the first person in the world talking about how infrastructure could and should be designed to do more good, rather than do less bad. That is, for it be regenerative.

Along the way, not only did Cynthia help grow ISF into a world class research institute, but also her work received many accolades. In 2015 she was honoured as one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence; and in 2018, was recognized by the industry as a Legend of Water. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, a Fellow of Engineers Australia, and a Fellow of the Institute of Community Directors. She is proud to serve on the national Community Directors Council, providing governance oversight to the not-for-profit sector.

Globally, Cynthia was honoured in 1998 with BP’s Global Award for Health, Safety and Environment for her treatment wetland at the Brisbane refinery. In 2008 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Sweden’s Chalmers University for her interdisciplinary work for the environment. In 2018, she was invited to be inaugural Chair of the Advisory Board for UKCRIC, a GBP400M investment in infrastructure research capacity in the UK. In the same year, the Swiss National Water Research Institute invited Cynthia to visit for six months to help deepen their capacity to do transdisciplinary research that makes a practical impact. Her keynote, opening the 2019 International Transdisciplinary Conference in Sweden, had participants laughing, crying, and questioning their worldviews.

But still, she wanted to do more. So, in 2021, she stepped away from her role as Distinguished Professor of Sustainability at UTS, and after a period of reflection, started a business for the first time in her life. Cynthia called her new business ‘the good ancestor’ after Daverick Leggett’s heartwrenching poem (see below), and through it, she is looking forward to helping all of us, herself included, learn how to love each other and our amazing planet fiercely enough to be proud of the legacy we will leave our children, and our children’s children.

In 2024, she was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for her services to water and sustainability.





The Good Ancestor
by Daverick Leggett

Every day I walk a hundred years
to the hill where my great great granddaughter sits.
I carry words of blessing
and reach to touch her back

But feeling me near she turns
sad eyed and heavy with grief
“What was it like?” she asks
“when the great whales swam
when the birds sang you awake
when the rains came soft
and the soil smelled sweet underfoot?”
And the blessings catch in my throat

On darker days she turns,
her famished face charred and eyes,
sunk in their bony orbits,
burn with curses.
And the blessings froth at my mouth
with the poisonous spume of betrayal

On the darkest of all days
I walk the hundred years
and find no one there

Let today be the bright day.
Let today be the bright day
I lay my hand upon her back
And, feeling me there, she turns
and blesses me, saying
“Your love was fierce enough,
sweet ancestor, your love was fierce enough”