Claire Brown is a Senior Sustainability Consultant at Turner & Townsend and a PhD Researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate change at the University of Manchester. Her PhD research work focuses on addressing issues around heating and cooling demand in social housing in the UK. She has over 18 years of experience in industry, third, public and private sectors. She is looking at how new-build social housing could be a potential way to reduce demand on the power grid through better design and exploring further opportunities for self-generation. Exploring how commercially viable solutions might exist to allow social housing to be built with high energy performance built-in. She has previously worked in the construction industry as a Sustainability Manager, in the public sector as an Energy manager and as a Senior Consultant. She also has an interest in management systems and how these can play a part in improving environmental performance across businesses, particularly around the integration of ISO14001.