Dr. Niebert Blair is a Chartered Engineer (CEng MIMechE) with more than twenty years of experience across the energy, transport, and capacity-development sectors. Her work centers on the design of sustainable electricity and e-mobility systems for communities, with a particular focus on the remote and underserved populations that conventional infrastructure tends to leave behind.
She currently serves as Regional Energy & Transport Coordinator for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) in the Caribbean, supporting five nations — Saint Lucia, Jamaica, Grenada, Belize, and Antigua & Barbuda — in transforming their energy and transport sectors toward a low-carbon, climate-resilient future. Her remit spans policy development, e-mobility adoption, electric-bus and electric-vessel pilots, and the design of bankable projects across the energy–transport nexus.
Niebert earned her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where her dissertation developed a combined top-down and bottom-up approach to designing electricity systems for traditional economies. Applied to the Amazonian village of Kabakaburi, Guyana, her methodology gathers a community’s needs, values, and aspirations and translates them directly into technical system design — placing the people a system serves at the centre of its engineering.
Her earlier career spans power-plant and substation design, utility-systems maintenance, and project management across the Caribbean and South America — including frequency-conversion and new-generation projects with Guyana Power and Light, substation operations at Belize Electricity Limited, and plant engineering at Demerara Distillers Limited. She holds an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in Industrial Systems, Manufacturing and Management, and a first-in-year Bachelor of Engineering from the University of Guyana.
A dedicated educator with roughly 12,000 hours of teaching at secondary, undergraduate, and master’s levels, Niebert has lectured in engineering design, thermodynamics, and sustainable energy at universities in Guyana and New Zealand, and has led transition-engineering workshops for energy professionals. She champions building local capacity through train-the-trainer programmes, apprenticeships, and regional university networks.
She brings to her work a conviction that lasting infrastructure must be designed with communities rather than merely for them — engaging every stakeholder through innovative methods such as gamification and transition engineering. Niebert is the IMechE Country Representative for Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and Venezuela, and a member of IEEE, ASME, and PMI.