Victoria Pleavin
B.Sc, P.Eng.
Victoria is an Engineer at WaterSMART, focused primarily on resource industry projects.
Since starting at WaterSMART, Victoria has been involved with the development and management of the Oil Sands Leadership Initiative (OSLI) and Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) projects, including both the water and tailings Environmental Priority Areas of COSIA.
Victoria also works on planning and implementation of systems projects at WaterSMART. Highlights include creating and upgrading an online simulator to communicate to the public the importance of sector trade-offs regarding water decisions, and upgrading an online water research library, including database migration and updating the user interface for searchability.
Victoria has facilitated workshops on issues associated with end pit lakes and treatment of wetlands with stakeholders from industry, first nations, government, and the regulator. She also project managed multi-stakeholder collaborative research projects based on the findings of the workshops to advance environmental reclamation knowledge in the industry.
Other career highlights include assisting in justifying the economics of a regional water pipeline by calculating costs related to the path travelled and the volumes of water transported and stored, as well as researching and preparing a summary of tailings volumes to inform the basis of future supply and demand of an oil sands remediation project.
Victoria received her Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Queen’s University in 2011. During her time at Queen’s, she was the Director of Internal Affairs and Chief Returning Officer for the Engineering Society, and she sat on the Campus Bookstore board of directors. In her final year, she was the Engineering Society President and fourth woman president of the organization.
During the 2013 flood in Calgary, Victoria was evacuated from her home and live tweeted her experience between short bouts of sleep. Since this time, she has been involved with many flood related projects with the aim that no one should have the same flood experience she had that summer.