Profile

I live in Warrington with my partner James, seven year old son Ethan and one year old daughter Clara. We also share our home with a lazy cat called Tigger. When time allows between work and school drop-offs and pick-ups I enjoy spending time doing yoga or dance, reading pretty much anything on my Kindle or binge watching a box sets with James, we’ve just finished The Mandalorian. Weekends are best spent as a four, either enjoying our garden or visiting somewhere old and familiar or new and exciting.

I am an Air Quality Specialist with over 15 years’ experience in the air quality profession, including within both consultancy and local authority. My current role is as a Senior Air Quality Consultant which involves of the completion of Air Quality Assessments in support of planning applications for a wide range of UK and international clients and sectors.  I also complete work as part of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process and complete dispersion modelling studies for odour as well as air quality.  Air Quality is the focus of my career, however, I have also been involved in contaminated land, closed landfill site aftercare, environmental permitting and environmental information regulations whilst working at Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council.

A typical day working as an air quality consultant within consultancy starts with reviewing and replying to emails received since I last logged on. These emails may include information or data required for the scheme I’m currently working on (this may be a new road scheme, a new housing development, a new car park or something else entirely), it may be a request to provide a fee proposal to complete an air quality assessment for a new project, it may be a request for information  or some general admin information. Unfortunately emails can take up a surprisingly long time of your day but ideally once these have been dealt with I will normally be involved in some aspect of the completion of an air quality assessment. If the project has just commenced I’ll need to gather baseline air quality data. This can be done through contacting the relevant local authority to request their most recent monitoring data and also obtaining Defra’s (Department for the environment, food and rural affairs) air pollution background maps from their website. This provides the background pollution levels for an area. The next stage of an air quality assessment is to undertake dispersion modelling which I complete using computer software to predict air quality concentrations usually from road vehicle exhaust emissions. I use these predictions to produce contour plots of air quality concentrations across an area to see whether the scheme is likely to cause any areas of poor air quality. I use a number of computer programmes for this purpose including Mapinfo and Surfer, along with the dispersion model ADMS-Roads. Finally, the baseline data and results need to be written up in a report to provide to the client. I don’t complete all these processes in just one day (although it has been known for very small projects with extremely tight deadlines), but any one of these activities can be part of my regular working day.