Dr Douglas Booker

Profile

I am a geographer and entrepreneur, with a focus on indoor air quality and environmental justice. I have an interdisciplinary background, with a BSc in Politics and History from Brunel University London, an MSc in Public Policy from University College London, and a PhD in Geography from Lancaster University “(Re)assembling air quality science: exploring air quality knowledge production.” I completed my PhD under the supervison of Professor Gordon Walker and Dr Paul Young, where I drew on the natural and social sciences to combine the doing of air quality science (including a UK nationwide schools indoor air quality monitoring campaign, and a citizen science project), with a critical reflection on how air quality knowledge is produced, and its implications for claims of environmental justice. I remain an Honorary Researcher at Lancaster University 

Alongside my Lectureship in Indoor Air, I run NAQTS, a Lancaster Environment Centre collocated business that develops tools and technologies to provide holistic indoor air quality information. In this role I have collaborated on and led multiple industry-academic research projects and partnerships, with universities, other businesses, trade associations, public health professionals, and the general public. I am also a UKRI Regional Clean Air Champion as part of the SPF Clean Air Programme, a £42.5m investment supporting research and innovation. In this role I help to bring together research across engineering, atmospheric, medical, and social science to develop practical and fair solutions for air quality challenges. As part of my Regional Clean Air Champion position I hold Visiting Academic status at the University of Southampton in the Faculty of Medicine.

Research interests

My research interests lie in diverse aspects of indoor air quality (IAQ), usually involving a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. These can be broadly categorised into two themes: IAQ and environmental justice, and IAQ and energy.

1. Indoor air quality and environmental justice: Considerable evidence has been generated showing unequal patterns of outdoor air quality for different social groups. However, much less evidence exists for IAQ. I am interested in a variety of environmental justice (EJ) focused approaches to improving IAQ, including uncovering unequal distributions of IAQ, but also looking at the social, political, and economic mechanisms through which unequal distributions of poor IAQ are created and sustained. The latter point relates to broader conceptions of EJ that considers notions of justice such as procedure, recognition, capabilities, and epistemics. Recent research in this space includes 1) a citizen science project working with a community group in Liverpool to measure indoor and outdoor ultrafine particles; and 2) a project developing an equity-focused approach to improve IAQ, which has included working with a social housing provider to improve respiratory child health outcomes through combining IAQ measurements with a focus on tenant rights and empowerment, structural and behavioural causes of poor IAQ, and locating initiatives within a community approach.
2. Indoor air quality and energy: Managing IAQ and energy efficiency in the built environment is critical to both safeguard people’s health and wellbeing and meet our net zero targets. IAQ and energy are often portrayed as a dichotomy: effective ventilation provision, which involves bringing in outdoor air, is a key strategy to improve IAQ. However, energy efficiency often requires higher levels of air tightness to prevent heat loss which can result in air pollution getting trapped indoors. I am interested in understanding how this dichotomy manifests in a range of different indoor settings and how different people and organisations are attempting to manage it, and how approaches to mitigate injustices in the energy and air quality spheres can coalesce. Recent research in this space includes 1) combining widespread indoor and outdoor air quality monitoring in schools, with interviews with school staff to understand how trade-offs between IAQ and energy efficiency are managed; and 2) simulating cooking scenarios in a specialised test facility to examine trade-offs between using ventilation to improve IAQ, and subsequent energy penalties from heat-loss.

Current projects:

CHILI Hub – Child and adolescent Health Impacts of Learning Indoor environments under net zero (Co-I, 2025-2030)

The CHILI Hub aims to ensure that we support and improve children’s and education as school and nursery buildings are being made environmentally sustainable. We will:

• Map: We will measure indoor air pollution in classrooms and schools across England and Wales and combine these measurements with measured and estimated outdoor air pollution data. This will help us develop indicators of indoor environments in schools that can be compared between areas.
• Understand: We will combine these school indoor environment indicators with national data on children’s health and education, collected by hospitals, pharmacies and schools in England and Wales. We will research the link between indoor air pollution or heat in schools and children’s health and school non-attendance.
• Model: We will develop combined building and health impact assessment models, which describe the impact of climate change and energy efficient building alterations, on indoor environments in schools. We will use these models to work out how these changes will affect children’s health in the future.
• Test and evaluate: We will evaluate (weigh-up) if existing technology and behaviours to improve the indoor environment support children’s health. This will include examining if installation of air cleaning filters affects children’s use of health services, and if window opening impact children’s comfort in classrooms.
• Involve: We will work with children, young people and teachers to develop data collection methods to measure the impact of the indoor environment on children’s health and education.
• Engage: We will set up a network of individuals and organisations who work with, or will be affected by making school buildings meet the net zero target. We will work with them to identify and describe any barriers to making school buildings energy efficient.  We will work closely with policy makers, schools, parents and carers, and children and young people to ensure our findings improve health and education for all children.

Organisations working on the CHILI Hub include University College London, Imperial College London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Swansea University, UK Health Security Agency, University of Leeds, and the Stockholm Environment Institute University of York.

Born in Bradford Healthy Homes (Co-I, 2025-2029)

The Born in Bradford Healthy Homes project will evaluate the impact of retrofitting social housing in Bradford on indoor conditions and air quality, resident health, and economic outcomes. We will monitor the indoor environments of over 400 social homes in Bradford for over 18 months, use routine health and housing data from the Connected Bradford dataset to explore the impact of these improvements on resident health, carry out building modelling and health economic analyses, and engage in qualitative and participatory research activities. My involvement includes using participatory systems mapping to take a complex systems perspective on how residents and stakeholders experience the retrofit process, and how different contextual factors (e.g. social, cultural, physical, organisational, political, economical etc.) impact retrofit implementation and outcomes.

Qualifications

• PhD in Geography, Lancaster University (2023)
• MSc in Public Policy, University College London (2016)
• BSc (Hons) in Politics & History, Brunel University London (2014)

Professional memberships

• Institute of Environmental Sciences
• Institute of Air Quality Management
• UK Indoor Environments Group
• Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (CIBSE) Air Quality Working Group

Student education

I teach on several modules across our undergraduate and masters degree programmes related to indoor and urban air quality, building physics, and sustainable engineering.

Research groups and institutes

• Water, Public Health and Environmental Engineering
• Energy Leeds
• Healthy buildings: air quality and airborne infection