Meet the team 

Claire Ackerman: Executive Director, Concrete

Claire joined The Concrete Centre's marketing team in 2003 and became Head of Marketing in 2007 and Director in 2018.

Claire is responsible for The Concrete Centre including all aspects of marketing, communications and stakeholder engagement. With experience gained in marketing and business management in a variety of industries, Claire brings business strategy, project management and a passion for projects that inspire behavioural change, particularly in response to sustainability.

Beyond MPA and The Concrete Centre, Claire is also a member of The Concrete Society Council and the Communications and Outreach Working Group of the Global Cement and Concrete Association. 

Jenny Burridge: Director, Structural Design

Jenny has been Head of Structural Engineering at MPA The Concrete Centre since 2009, recently changing to Director, Structural Design. As Director of Structural Design she is responsible for the team of structural engineers providing technical guidance to designers and contractors. She is a chartered civil and structural engineer. Prior to joining the Concrete Centre she worked for several consulting engineers including Aecom and Arup, where she designed several award winning buildings.

Jenny chairs the BSI strategic committee on Engineering Design and Construction and sits on the Construction and Built Environment Sector Policy and Strategy Committee. These committees are advisory committees looking at the built environment.

Jenny is on the council of Construct, the trade association of concrete frame contractors and also chairs the Post-tensioning Association, the trade association for the designers and installers of post-tensioning systems. She is on the council of the Institution of Structural Engineers

Elaine Toogood: Director, Architecture and Sustainable Design

Elaine is Director of Architecture & Sustainable Design  at The Concrete Centre where she provides architectural advice and technical guidance primarily related to the specification, design and use of concrete for sustainable construction. She is joint chair for the UK concrete industry’s circular economy task group, and special advisor to UK Concrete.

Elaine has over 25 years experience as a qualified architect, mostly within private practice. Technical guidance she has authored includes Concrete and BREEAM and Material Efficiency publications as well as numerous technical articles in Concrete Quarterly, of which she is joint editor. 

Elaine regularly contributes to working groups related to environmental sustainability, including the DEFRA Property Level Flood Resilience round table; BSI committee revising BS 85500 – Flood resistant and resilient construction – Guide to improving the flood performance of buildings; The London Climate Change Partnership; LETI Circular Economy and Embodied carbon work streams; RIBA Sustainable Futures group and the UKGBC Net Zero route map. She is also the current Chair of RIBA SE London.

Dr Noushin Khosravi: Sustainable Construction Manager, UK Concrete, MPA

Noushin Khosravi is the Sustainable Construction Manager for MPA where she is the concrete sector’s key representative in demonstrating how concrete can be used as part of net zero and circular economy. She is responsible for providing technical and sustainability advice and support to designers, constructors, and clients of concrete construction.

She uses her technical knowledge and experience to advise concrete industry and supply chain on how to respond to market sustainability requirements. Noushin is a civil engineer and has MSc and PhD in concrete technology field.  She is a Chartered Engineer with ICT and was previously at Mott MacDonald working on Metro and Civils projects.

She is an expert in concrete durability design, concrete assessment and repair, concrete construction systems, and concrete sustainable use. She is experienced in delivery of multidisciplinary design packages and complex research programs. 
She is active in various committees including the UK concrete industry’s low carbon concrete task group, Green Construction Board Low Carbon Concrete Group (LCCG), and GCBIWG Pas 2080. 

 

Tom De Saulles: Special Advisor, Building Physics

Tom De Saulles has a degree in environmental engineering and is the building physics advisor at the Concrete Centre; specialising in numerous aspects of building energy and carbon performance, including passive design, thermal mass and concrete carbonation.  Tom was elected a member of The Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1995 and The Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers in the following year. 

Prior to joining The Concrete Centre, he worked in an M&E design consultancy and at the Building Services Research and Information Association (BSRIA). During his 11 years at BSRIA, he researched and compiled a number of publications, including guidance on the design of free cooling systems, handover information and illustrated guides to mechanical and electrical services. 

More recently, with the Concrete Centre, Tom has produced various guidance documents, covering topics such as the use of thermal mass in building design, Part L1A of the Building Regulations, and the whole-life CO2 performance of concrete buildings. Tom has also been responsible for commissioning and overseeing research examining the life cycle carbon performance of concrete buildings.

Dr Rachel Capon: Sustainability Programme Coordinator, UK Concrete

Dr Rachel Capon has a MMath degree from the University of Cambridge, a PhD in theoretical physics from Cardiff University and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, Potsdam, Germany, and is a Chartered Meteorologist. She has over 15 years’ experience in the construction sector, prior to which she was a Met Office research scientist. 

As Built Environment Sector Champion for the first UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2012, she completed a fully documented ground-breaking analysis to develop and quantify climate risk metrics for the built environment sector, setting out the main priorities for climate adaptation in the UK.

At MPA, Rachel advocates for sustainable construction across the supply chain, promoting the benefits of using concrete and mineral based products in designing sustainable and resilient buildings. She is responsible for collecting and analysing environmental data from cement and concrete manufacturers and reporting GHG emissions to the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory.

She calculated and produced new sector EPDs for UK cement production, published in 2022. She is leading a BEIS funded project to develop a robust scientific model of the UK carbon emissions sink from recarbonation of concrete in buildings and infrastructure, which will inform the UK’s national Greenhouse Gas Inventory reporting to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). She is a member of the BSI committee, B/558, developing European sustainability standards for construction materials. 

Dr Hafiz Elhag: Sustainability Manager, Concrete products

Dr Hafiz Elhag has a Construction Management from the University of Reading and a PhD in Built Environment from the University of Loughborough. Hafiz has over 20 years’ experience in the construction industry. Hafiz’s PhD explored the environmental impacts of a number of precast concrete products and oversaw the development of the first carbon footprints for the precast sector and the current sector Environmental Product Declarations (EPD).

Hafiz has been a member of the BSI committee on the Sustainability of Construction Works, B/558, since 2013. He has contributed to a number of standards on carbon and environmental assessments of construction works , including EN 16757, the Product Category Rules standard on concrete products’ EPDs. Hafiz also manages the MPA Precast & Masonry Sustainability Charter scheme, an independently audited sector scheme first introduced in 2007 which covers 70% of precast manufacturers in Great Britain & NI.

Dr Diana Casey: Director, Energy & Climate Change and Director, Cement

Diana joined MPA in 2010 as Technical Advisor, Energy and Climate Change, and now has a dual role of Director, MPA Cement and Director, Energy and Climate Change. As Director, MPA Cement, Diana has overall responsibility for the cement product group including environmental regulation, products and standards, energy and climate change and ensuring delivery of a range of innovation projects worth in excess of £6m.

As Director of Energy and Climate Change, Diana’s responsibilities include data analysis from UK cement plants, modelling the impact of EU and UK climate change and environmental policy on the UK cement industry including the UK Emissions Trading Scheme and Renewable Energy policies and managing industry projects such as the MPA decarbonisation roadmap modelling and production and updating of the MPA factsheet on embodied CO2e of UK cement, additions and cementitious material.

Diana sits on the BSi SES 1/7 mirror committee (greenhouse gas management) and the PSE 265 mirror committee (carbon capture, transportation and storage) where she contributes to the formation and update of greenhouse gas and carbon capture related standards respectively. Diana is vice-chair of the Emissions Trading Group, a group that supports, represents and informs UK businesses and installations covered by emissions trading, and represents MPA on various Government led initiatives such as the work that is ongoing on business models to support the deployment of carbon capture use or storage. Diana is also responsible for administering Climate Change Agreements for various mineral product sectors.