Roland Price

Roland K Price was awarded a first in Part II of the Mathematics Tripos at the University of Cambridge in 1963, and subsequently completed Part III of the Mathematics Tripos in 1964. He received a PhD in mathematics at the University of Essex in 1969. His PhD focussed on shallow water waves, including breaking.

After a two year appointment as Augustine Courtauld research Fellow at the University of Essex, Dr Price went to the University of Florida, Gainesville in 1969 as Assistant Professor in the Coastal and Oceanographic Engineering Department. There he worked on hurricane surges and recirculation in shallow bays.

He returned to the UK in 1971 and joined HR Wallingford as a Senior Scientific Officer. He developed a new non-linear approach to flood routing in rivers and worked on software for river modelling.

In 1976 Dr Price began the development of software for urban drainage design and analysis within a team of people from the then Hydraulics Research Station, The Institute of Hydrology and the Meteorological Office. This resulted in the Wallingford Storm Sewer Package (WASSP) which was first released in 1981 for mainframe computer use.

A number of developments were made subsequently to this software resulting in the first PC version in 1984, WALLRUS in 1989, SPIDA in 1989 and eventually HydroWorks in 1992. He was also responsible for a number of other PC-based products including RIBAMAN (1984) (based on an earlier package called FLOUT (1979)) and CHAT (1987) (produced originally by Severn-Trent Water).

In 1987 Dr Price was responsible for setting up Wallingford Software as a commercial software house providing professional software products to the water industry world-wide. This eventually became a separate subsidiary of HR Wallingford (which had been privatised from the Hydraulics Research Station in 1982) in 1994. At that stage Wallingford Software had an annual turnover of about £1.8M.

After standing down as Managing Director of Wallingford Software in 1994, Dr Price went on to start up a new company called InKE Ltd, which focussed on information and knowledge management. This new company focussed on tools for translators.

Dr Price left HR Wallingford in 1997 to take up the Chair of Hydroinformatics at IHE Delft. Since then he has been responsible for the Hydroinformatics Core at the Institute, securing a range of EC projects, and becoming Trekker (leader) of the knowledge management theme in the Delft Cluster. This is major project funded by the Dutch government and carrying out research into different topics affecting the infrastructure in densely populated deltaic areas.