Karen leads Arup's UKIMEA smart buildings business, helping building owners and occupiers to navigate their way through the myriad of emerging tech and jargon to identify and realise their smart building ambitions, while making provision for future change.

She is an HVAC controls engineer by background with more than 30 years' experience in the design of control and instrumentation systems, utilised on a variety of project sectors. She has a wide knowledge of all types of control systems; from proprietary systems used to control heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) plant, open protocols, programmable logic controllers (PLCs) used for increased resilience in life safety, business critical and manufacturing systems and data acquisition systems for structural health monitoring.

She is passionate about leveraging domain expertise, coupled with real-time data insights to improve building performance, for enhanced user experience and to maximise energy efficiency in operation.