My name is Claire Freeman. My job title is Aero-acoustic CFD Engineer in product development and I work at Gaydon. I joined Jaguar Land Rover in March of 2007.

The thing that attracted me to Jaguar Land Rover was the size of the company and therefore the opportunities that I’d have in a PD environment. My old company was a fairly small company so there was only 2 or 3 hundred employees, whereas here there are thousands of people in PD.

There are so many different things I could do, so many different things I could see. Even in the current role now, I get to go out in cars, I get to model cars, I get to go to the wind tunnel. I’ve been all over the place and seen so many different things already, and that was definitely what made me want to work for Jaguar Land Rover.

I think my major achievements have been really the introduction of aero-acoustic CFD and really getting it going and getting it used on the programmes and getting the methodology working. Now we can really start to get some confidence and really start rolling it out on Jaguar Land Rover programmes much more, next year.

At Jaguar Land Rover, my career aspiration is to stay in the role I’m actually doing and to grow it and expand it because there’s so much more we could do with aero-acoustic CFD. So, really I’d like to carry on and introduce the technique into more programmes, develop it further.

I guess at Jaguar Land Rover I’d say I don’t really have a typical week as such. I could do lots of different things. Some weeks, I’ll spend a lot of time in my office, doing CFD, setting up my levels, post-processing results, and other weeks I could be going to the aero-acoustic wind tunnel in Germany, taking measurements and making sure the experimental tests are as I would want them to be in order to do my correlation work.