Lauren is a Research Fellow currently working on the Climate Services for a Net-Zero World (CS-N0W) project funded by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. She is interested in how climate and the built environment may affect population health and the implications for health inequalities. Lauren’s expertise lie in incorporating qualitative measures of population characteristics into quantitative building-physics and statistical models.

Her PhD examined how population exposure to indoor and outdoor air pollution varies across socio-economic status, by developing a mass-balance, population exposure model using large housing stock and population time-activity datasets as input to estimate exposure for different age and social groups. The project was funded by the UK Health Security Agency (formerly Public Health England) and the tool can be used to assess how building/environmental policies may modify population exposure to air pollution.

Lauren’s work on the CS-N0W project is to develop an indoor building physics model able to project future temperature changes across UK housing, with a focus on vulnerable subgroups of the population. The work will assess how high indoor temperatures and heating energy demand vary across regions of the UK and for different social groups; identifying the most effective combination of energy retrofit and overheating mitigation strategies which minimise summertime overheating risk and reduce fuel poverty.

She has published conceptual frameworks to help better understand the systemic factors leading to unequal exposures to air pollution in London, and is interested in applying this approach to other environmental hazards, such as population exposure to heat and the determinants of fuel poverty.