For our latest episode, we spoke with Kristy Walson and Sarah Gudeman of BranchPattern. It was a fun moment to catch them, right after Greenbuild, and we talked about their careers and also how partnerships and friends are important in this work. 

Kristy is a mechanical engineer and she is a Principal and Building Science Practice Lead at BranchPattern. Based in Orlando, Florida, Kristy is dedicated to advancing sustainable design and decarbonization and collaborates to deliver building science services that propel the industry. 

Sarah is a Principal and Engineering Practice Lead at BranchPattern; she is based in Omaha, Nebraska. She integrates engineering and building science to create practical, scalable solutions that improve building performance, reduce carbon, and enhance health and comfort.

This was a wide-ranging conversation that included their youth experiences and their thoughts about the power of collaboration, their work at BranchPattern, and the imperatives that the movement and industry are facing in 2025. 

“We have an obligation to do better once we know better,” Sarah says. “As designers and engineers, we have a lot of power to shift the norms -- what is high performance, what is human centered, what is low carbon -- and really help elevate that baseline, instead of treating those things as an upgrade. 

Kristy says she is empowered by the community. “I wouldn't be here doing this work if I didn't have that North Star of feeling like I'm part of a movement,” she says. “Sustainability is, in some ways, a technical craft, but being part of the movement has enabled me to advocate for equity, policy, systemic change, and for breaking and remaking the systems that don't work for all of us.”

Julie Ju-Youn Kim, FAIA, is the William H. Harrison Professor and Chair of the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she founded and directs the Flourishing Communities Collaborative, an interdisciplinary research and design lab. She is also founder and partner of C2 Architecture Studio.

In her early-career years in Detroit, Julie tried to meet as many people as possible and found that opportunities -- for practice and teaching -- presented themselves. 

Julie’s current graduate studio, which is also a Flourishing Communities Collaborative effort, is related to her vision for the school -- melding practice, research, education, and technology into a common conversation rooted in relationships.  

Navigating the moment from where she sits, Julie says that she “thinks about the capacity of architects and designers as agents of change for the better and stays focused on the students and their futures as empathetic, compassionate leaders for the future. They ground me!” 

In addition to her teaching and practice work, Julie is working on a new book (anticipated from Routledge in 2027): Intervening in the Urban Palimpsest: Design, Equity, and Community Agency. “This exploration is about understanding cities as dynamic palimpsests: they are shaped by meaning, memory, history, and by transformation,” she says. “This is our context.”

As VP of Building Resilient Futures at Enterprise Community Partners, Krista Egger stewards the nonprofit’s national environmental programs, including Green Communities, Health Action Plan, Resilience Academies, and Decarbonization Hubs. 

Krista went to Oberlin and and studied physics and architectural history. After college, a stint with AmeriCorps introduced her to a kind of applied building science. “I had the opportunity to identify root causes and then make things better,” she says.  

Sometimes making things better means dismantling long-held beliefs. “For too long,” she says, “there has been a perceived predicament of whether people can build affordable housing or green housing, whether there can be a standard way to operate buildings or green ways of operating buildings. Those are false choices.”

The programs that Egger leads are leveraging capital and policy and resources to solve for barriers that prevent all housing from being affordable, healthy, and resilient. “We are centering the needs of people who live in housing to make decisions about housing.”

related links:
Health Action Plan framework
Green Communities Criteria

Architect Liz York is senior advisor for buildings and facilities strategy and innovation at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. She talks about how buildings impact people -- their lives, health, and mental health. Liz has been a leader in making those connections. She helped create a best practice paper for AIA about lactation rooms that is still circulated widely today. She talks about how triple bottom line thinking has transformed how buildings and real estate are discussed today. Increasingly, she says, we include issues of equity, mobility, and many other “beyond the building” considerations that are relevant to the public health attributes of the built environment. 

Erin Meezan sought a career that would help protect the natural world. That led to an environmental law degree, and today she is VP and Chief of Sustainability at Interface, the global commercial flooring company. She and Interface are focused on defining the next jump toward decarbonization of the built environment. Erin says that depends on driving accountability for delivering on progress, both in the company and in the industry. Interface has a strong commitment to education and to sharing tools, which Erin sees as inherent to “being part of the movement.” 

Gail Brager is a professor of architecture at UC Berkeley and associate director of the Center for the Built Environment, a model for collaborative research dedicated to transformational change in the building industry. She describes her research into thermal adaptive comfort and points to ASHRAE as the first organization where she found her leadership footing -- and how her work changed the standard. Gail reminds us that feminine leadership skills can be a role model for men and women. We get a sneak peek at the book she is working on about how design for experiential delight can support human wellbeing, with an emphasis on enhancing the positive, rather than reducing the negative. 

Stacy Smedley started her career in architecture and has worked with global construction company Skanska for the past seven years. She co-conceived the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) tool last year, and is on loan from Skanska to launch the nonprofit Building Transparency to share and scale EC3. She’s also a songwriter/singer, a parent, and writes children’s books. She talks about aligning personal passions and skill sets with the potential for impact and how we can all be energized by the positive things happening in climate response. 

Master communicator Marge Anderson works at the Wisconsin-based nonprofit Slipstream, Inc., where she shapes education to drive behavior change around energy. She chaired the US Green Building Council in 2015, and was in Paris for the climate talks. She says that her working-class upbringing did not suggest a path to sustainability but it has informed her leadership in the field. She is an optimist (and cites British environmental leader Tony Juniper on this: “it’s too late for pessimism”), but she feels great urgency and is startlingly succinct: “On climate, we’ve got nine and a half years left. On equity, we’re 400 years too late.” 

Architect Carlie Bullock-Jones runs Ecoworks Studio in Atlanta and her firm touches many buildings whose owners seek green building certifications including LEED, WELL, and others. This includes very large-scale projects such as professional sports facilities, and she talks about why sustainability-driven design and planning moves in those venues can become a public teaching tool and a community benefit. (Carlie gives a shout out to the late Gail Lindsey, a force-of-nature pioneer who touched many people in the green building movement.)

Kimberly Lewis is SVP for market transformation and development at the US Green Building Council, where she has centered people and healing in her work. This movement builder is responsible for GBC’s Equity Summit, its Women in Green leadership platform, Sheroes, and more.  Kimberly talks about what it means to live your values in your work, the buzzwords in the sustainable buildings industry, and how we cannot equity-wash what’s next.

In the course of architect Eden Brukman’s career, she has touched and shaped a number of critical aspects of the sustainable building industry. Today, she is the Senior Green Building Coordinator for the City of San Francisco. We talked to her about accountability, working at the city scale, decarbonization, material banks, and about why mentoring is so important. Eden touched on how systems thinking is so crucial to solving the big challenges; she cited the classic Donella Meadows essay, Leverage Points in a System, as an enduring reference point.

Architect Mara Baum leads global health and wellness design practice, which includes a number of large projects for large health organizations. Human health had been an interest of Mara’s for years, though during her education, it was not at all a focus of the architecture community. Our conversation touched on a number of things including what healthcare design can teach other building types, the value of “cheerful persistence,” and how being a part of a movement helps keep her moving forward day by day.

Elaine Hsieh is co-founder and head of Corporate Partnerships/Marketing for
Third Derivative, a new organization focused on success and speed to market for climate innovation efforts. Throughout her career, Elaine has followed her curiosity and instinct and sought out value alignment and growth potential. Today, she is passionate about the need to bend the emissions curve precipitously; that urgency is driving her (and Third Derivative) to bring startups, investors, corporations, and market, regulatory, and energy policy insights into one program as a path to much faster market readiness. 

Dr. Upali Nanda is Partner and Executive Vice President at HKS. As the firm’s Global Sector Director, Innovation, she oversees HKS’s Research, Advisory, Sustainable Design and Cities & Communities services. Based in Ann Arbor, Upali has extensive experience leading research projects in design practice with a focus on the impact of design on human health and perception. 

Upali believes that the big problems will be solved by getting many disciplines together in conversation. One example, the FDA Home as a Health Hub Idea Lab, brought together housing designers, developers, technology developers, investors, healthcare providers, and others. 

All such work is rooted in Upali’s deep commitment to the integration of research into practice. That commitment has prompted to her to ask deep questions about people and place. “How can we design for humans without knowing how humans are designed?” she asks. “That question got me interested in how humans perceive and behave, and then over time, that evolved into this interest in human health itself.” 

Andréa Traber is an architect and managing principal at Integral, an engineering/consulting firm aimed at accelerating positive change. Amid fast-paced change brought on by the pandemic, Integral is looking at new ways of shaping teams and serving clients. Andréa is inspired by the openness and creativity of multi-generational teams. In the green building movement, she suggests that great progress has been made. But there is a long way to go on the Herculean effort to get off fossil fuels -- “let us not forget, climate change is more pressing than the pandemic,” she says -- and also around equity and social issues.

Perhaps it was her summer manufacturing job that seeded her interest in resource cycles. After studying architecture, Amanda Kaminsky worked in real estate at the Durst Organization in New York, then founded Building Products Ecosystems (BPE) with a mission to evolve the systemic health of building material flows. (Her daughter once described Amanda’s job this way: “She takes trash out of the garbage.”) She works with all the stakeholders in the vast (and often recalcitrant) construction industry. BPE focuses on transparent data and industry signaling through research, job site piloting, and then standardization, which, Amanda says, is the key to scaling impact. 

Liz Ogbu is a designer, urbanist, and social innovator. Her multidisciplinary consultancy, Studio O, works with communities in need to leverage the power of design to catalyze sustained social impact. Which is not, strictly speaking, what most people learn in architecture school...but Liz has been redefining things since she decided to study architecture. Liz is finding ways to use design to embrace spatial justice; she sees this as a way to create cities where people can thrive. Instead of building places, she asks, what if we were helping build a capacity to stay?  In tackling inequity, we can look for ingredients that allow us to step forward. 

Gail Vittori, the co-director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, Texas, has been a change agent in the green building movement for many years. She says that she brought a “beginner’s mind” to the industry. She saw a gap, early on, when green building was not addressing health (and the healthcare sector), and took steps to address that; today, the human health dimension is widely understood as a key driver. At a certain point, she says, we have to realize that we are either creating the conditions that are conducive to health -- or we are not.  

Mary Curtiss is the head of sustainability for HP operations, which includes 120 sites around the world. For her, this is a mandate about buildings and people. She explains why storytelling and empathy are as important as the technical side of buildings. She describes how she sees sustainability as something that engages everyone who enters a building, and how she thinks about that experience along with efficiency, renewables, and other specific sustainability factors. She also shares thoughts about the promise of (and challenges around) renewables today in the U.S. and globally, and how cities are helping to advance progress and innovation with regulation. 

Sarah Golden is the Senior Energy Analyst and Conference Chair, VERGE Energy with GreenBiz Group. We talk about the importance of storytelling and how stories can advance the movement. Sarah also shares her perspective on energy markets in the context of the pandemic and economic disruption, including insight about the fight for the shape of what will come next. We discuss feminine leadership traits -- crucial for handling the pandemic and climate change. 

Rosa Sheng is an architect and Principal with SmithGroup and the firm’s Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. We discuss how intersectionality plays out in architecture, pushing us to eliminate conventional silos and explore how sustainability, justice, diversity, equity and inclusion are interrelated. We talk about the diversity and gender pay equity issues behind the American Institute of Architecture’s Equity by Design initiative, founded at AIA San Francisco, and how that group’s research has spotlighted patterns across firms.

Our first guest, Sara Neff, Senior Vice President for Sustainability for Kilroy Realty, has brought that organization to a leadership position in sustainability within the real estate market. She talks about her career journey, advances being made in the real estate sector, why the business case matters (and isn’t everything), and what commitments to carbon neutrality mean in her sector. We discuss what’s ahead, including work in supply chains and efforts to quantify climate risk. She also tells us about the Neffletter (sign up at SaraNeff.com), her email newsletter that talks about her reasons for optimism.  

In our kick-off episode, meet hosts Lindsay Baker  and Kira Gould, who discuss their interest in exploring and sharing the amazing work being done in sustainability by women across the country and beyond.

Lindsay and Kira have worked in a number of capacities in the sustainable design field: Lindsay worked at USGBC, Google, and WeWork, in between which she started and ran Comfy. Kira was an editor at Metropolis magazine, worked at architecture firms, and now runs a communications consultancy; she also co-authored Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design.

Lindsay and Kira believe that there are connections between sustainability and women's leadership strengths, and that women talking about their paths can help other women who are seeking to chart or optimize their own. Starting this podcast in 2020, a year that has long been discussed as a milestone year for climate action and sustainability progress, seems appropriate. Starting it amid the first round of stay-at-home orders amid the COVID-19 pandemic added a layer of awareness to discussions about human health, what we design and build, and the health of our planet. 

Shannon Goodman is the Executive Director of the Lifecycle Building Center in Atlanta, which has redirected nearly 13 million pounds of usable materials away from landfills and generated over $6 million in community savings, including 450 in-kind material grants to nonprofits. Shannon also serves as Board President for the nonprofit Build Reuse, representing reuse-focused organizations across the U.S. 

We talked to her about running a nonprofit and about the changes afoot in the AEC field. “We are in the midst of a massive mind shift,” she says. “It's only going to work if people actually see that there is value. We have to stop thinking about these materials as waste. They are resources.”

Shannon’s vision for the reuse work is that “the entire process of what we do gets really sexy for people,” she says. “I look forward to a time when people are compelled by the stories they are hearing of what has been saved and reused. They will think, ‘I want a piece of that for my work.’ That is only going to happen if we make it really easy to tell those stories.”

Jonsara Ruth is co-founder and Design Director of Healthy Materials Lab (HML) at Parsons School of Design, where she is an Associate Professor and Founding Director of the MFA Interior Design program. Alison Mears is Associate Professor of Architecture, Director and Co-Founder of HML and Director/Co-Founder of HML EU. 

Alison and Jonsara published “Material Health:Design Frontiers” exploring the intersectional and complex nature of material health. They also co-authored a chapter of The Regenerative Materials Movement (Living Future/Ecotone, 2024). 

This year is the Healthy Materials Lab’s tenth in operation. Alison and Jonsara’s close collaboration has been central to the Lab’s development and to its success in engaging people and changing minds and practices.

“Jonsara and I have a lot in common,” Alison says, “including a drive to use our design skills in the service of a higher goal to produce place for people that meet all their needs. We want to raise the bar. And we want to invite people in to do this work.”

Jonsara says their partnership works well because they have complementary skill sets and they’ve always been willing to hear one another out. “We value intuition and we respect each other’s experience. We are both committed to always learning and evolving,” she says. 

Meghan Lewis is the Program Director of the Carbon Leadership Forum (CLF), where she leads strategy, research and resource development to execute CLF’s mission to eliminate embodied carbon in buildings, materials, and infrastructure to create a just and thriving future. 

Meghan joined CLF in 2020 to lead their efforts to inform public policies targeting embodied carbon, from Buy Clean to building codes and beyond. Previous to joining CLF, Meghan was an architect and launched a global supply chain sustainability program at WeWork. 

We talked to her about embodied carbon (of course), changing practice, the realities of research, and translating knowledge to meaningful policy. “It's really important for people to remember that a lot of the progress that has been made was led by states and cities, and will continue to be led by states and cities,” she said. “Progress is not going to stop, but now there's an even bigger opportunity for local action. I recommend that people think about the groups they're a part of as part of how you think about policy in the next four years.” 

We talked about books, too. Meghan shared how reading science fiction fantasy helps her bring optimism to her work. 

Billie Faircloth, FAIA, is a design leader and educator who has transformed practice-integrated research and earned a reputation for demonstrating its value, methods, and outcomes. 

Billie was a partner and research director at the Philadelphia-based practice KieranTimberlake, where she guided the collaborative development of award-winning studies, technology, and architecture. As co-founder and research director of Built Buildings Lab, Faircloth represents the value of existing buildings in the public consciousness, global sustainability practice, and policymaking. She recently joined Cornell University as an associate professor in the Department of Architecture and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. 

We talked to Billie about the value and benefits of shifting platforms and about the richness of working across realms -- practice, policy, and academia. We asked her about the communities of which she is a part. “When I look at the green building industry, I see a whole range of communities engaging in movements,” she said. “They are advocating for decarbonization and energy transition or reducing emissions with embodied carbon, or advocating for supply chain equity or carbon neutral design or regenerative design. I see a movement of movements.” 

Joel Todd has been working in the green building field for more than 30 years, most recently as a USGBC Senior Fellow focused on social equity. Her career focused on green building methods and metrics development; she contributed significantly to LEED’s earliest versions and co-founded the LEED Society Equity Working Group (an effort for which she was recognized with USGBC's prestigious Malcolm Lewis Impact Award). 

She describes how she came to work in this movement and how the people made her stay: “That’s really the key to finding your path, I think: Find people you respect and enjoy working with and then keep learning from them.” 

Joel has a long view on the arc of progress and some pointed opinions about both the progress so far and what may be ahead. She notes, for example, that the deep knowledge in the industry has had some unintended consequences. She urges the community to “get out of our detailed, speciality comfort zones to have those conversations about the whole and how it all fits together. Otherwise, instead of working synergistically, things are going to start clashing.”

Efrie Escott is the Decarbonization Technical Program Leader for Digital Energy at Schneider Electric. As a licensed architect and life cycle assessment practitioner, Efrie’s previous experience in reducing carbon in the built environment was as an environmental researcher within the KieranTimberlake Research Group, where she was a core member of the development team for Tally, an award-winning BIM-integrated life cycle assessment tool.

We had a lively conversation with Efrie about research in the built environment field, Tally, her leap to Schneider Electric, and what kind of impact she is having in that context (including a recently launched internal tool). We also got a little nerdy about ASHRAE standards and others and how they are addressing (and tabulating) whole life carbon. 

She celebrated the immense gains on technology and knowledge, but she also acknowledged her disappointment that we have not yet hit peak emissions. And she voiced a concern that seemed poignant this season, about how we need to bring more people along in the movement and the industry. 

“We are doing a great job accelerating the front end, but we need to work on the middle more," she said. "We need to spend more time talking to other people -- not just each other. This pains me, because I love spending time with people in this community. But if we are serious about really scaling the progress, we need to do a much better job bringing in others. The science tells us that we need to sprint the distance of a marathon. This means we need to carry each other, and we need to be intentional about who we are bringing into the work.”

For our latest podcast, we talked to Myrrh Caplan, who is Senior VP for Sustainability at Skanska and leads the construction company’s national sustainability team. 

Since joining Skanska as a Project Manager in 2005, Myrrh has helped shape Skanska’s national approach to sustainable building. She established the company’s first national Green Construction program and chaired Skanska’s first National Green Council. Myrrh has advised on nearly 300 certified projects and projects seeking LEED, Living Building Challenge, WELL, Envision, and other certifications. She sits on the board of mindfulMaterials, serves on several industry committees, and participates in research with key partners. 

We heard from Myrrh about her passion for weaving a positive legacy through the work, and how she brings that to the projects and to the overall enterprise. She speaks about her team as a family that is “in it together” and she is proud of how shared success, to this group of people, “comes before egos.”  

She told us about a recent accomplishment, her work on the Associated General Contractors Playbook on Decarbonization and Carbon Reporting in construction (https://www.agc.org/climate-change-playbook). And we couldn’t resist asking Myrrh to talk about some notable recent projects, including PDX (the new airport in Portland, Ore., designed by ZGF) and the Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station (in New York City, designed by SOM). 

Dr. Mae-ling Lokko is an Assistant Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture and Yale’s Center for Ecosystems in Architecture (Yale CEA) and the founder of Willow Technologies Ltd., in Accra, Ghana. 

As an architectural scientist, designer, and educator from Ghana and the Philippines, her work focuses on the design and integration of biogenic material practices across the agricultural, architectural and textile sectors. This year, she joined the board of the International Living Future Institute.

She references the importance of breaking boundaries between silos and communities because, she says, “the materials that we work with surely do.” She is proud of her many collaborations across and between academic, industry, and communities: “We are are advancing top-down and bottom-up approaches to getting these biobased materials not just known but normalized” in the AEC community. Throughout her work, Mae-ling is inspired by the stories of how biobased materials were used over long periods of time in different societies, “which offer us clues for how they could be used today and in the future.”

Gladys Ly-Au Young is a founding partner of the Seattle firm, Side x Side Architects. The firm is changing practice by broadening the spectrum of architectural services, to promote community focused design that supports equity and sustainability in the built environment. Gladys was honored this year with the Hero Award from Living Future, which recognizes people who are advancing progress toward a living future for all. 

Gladys described what it’s like to work at the intersection of architecture, sustainability, and social justice. “It is important for build a community of care,” she says. “We have to focus on transformational changes. And I think we have to shift our thinking from ‘what is the impact?’ to ‘who is impacted the most?’” 

She talked about agency: “Building resiliency for me has everything to do with finding belonging and a sense of connection. That helps me make the changes I need to see.” She is also thinking a lot about regeneration, which she says “depends on our collective capacity to improve the ecosystem for a thriving future for all. All means everyone and everything.” 

Lu Salinas has been working in the green building industry since 2006 -- with firms and on projects in the US, Australia, Southeast Asia, and Mexico, where she works today. Her consulting firm, THREE Environmental Consulting, has worked on everything from small affordable housing projects to large infrastructure projects such as the New International Mexico City Airport in Texcoco. 

She grew up in Mexico in a family of civil engineers, and happened upon the James Wines book, Sustainable Architecture, in the early 2000s, which sparked her awareness of and interest in the field. 

She sees the international green building industry from Mexico and has built THREE to help advance the level of the work in that region. “I am especially proud of our company’s rule,” she says. “We always do what’s right. I think we have held to this -- doing what is right for the most people.”

Salins is proud to be a part of the movement, which she sees as “an infinite one -- in which people are passing the baton to others.” Salinas takes issue, however, with the idea that the next generation will be the one to address climate change. “The responsibility is with every generation that is currently living,” she says. “We all need to be doing something.” 

Cristina Gamboa is CEO of the World Green Building Council, an influential local-regional-global network focused on “the transformation to sustainable and decarbonized built environments for everyone, everywhere.” She is an economist with a background in sustainability, policy, and multi-stakeholder partnerships; as such, she is a trusted convener in international settings such as UN Climate Change summits and the World Economic Forum. Cristina is from Colombia and lives in London. Before she came to this work, she was an academic economist with a focus on international affairs and a passion for communicating. 

“Collectively, we’ve had a huge win, getting buildings on the global climate agenda. But with visibility comes responsibility,” Cristina says. “Now we have to make sure that the private sector is empowered to deliver progress.” 

She says that the finance community understands that buildings are the largest global asset class, and this is an opportunity. “If we get this right, they can invest in better assets,” she says. “If we work with the finance community and we find ways to delink emissions from growth and, for example, make sure that the retrofit economy really lifts off, we could unlock the benefits of a carbon-free and circular economy.”

Great strides have been made, she says, but there is work to do: “We still don’t have aggregated data to show change at scale. This is a gap that makes our movement vulnerable. The sooner we can quantify benefits, the better.” 

Stephanie Phillips leads the City of San Antonio's Deconstruction & Circular Economy Program. Housed in the Office of Historic Preservation, the program prioritizes building material reuse as a tool for affordable housing repair, traditional trades revival, economic innovation, equitable access to high-quality resources, and cultural and community resilience. 

Her work contributes to nonprofits and coalitions that focus on embodied carbon and circular economy policy and advocacy, including the Climate Heritage Network and Build Reuse. She is the co-founder of Circular San Antonio and is a 2023 J.M. Kaplan Fund Innovation Prize awardee.

Her work aims to foster collaborative partnerships that get us closer to creating a regenerative built environment. Part of Stephanie’s story is about how she came to think that “design is everything” and how she has translated that to a career that sees repair, reuse, and stewardship as key elements of community benefit. “What we are doing can happen anywhere,” Stephanie says. “It requires a silo-busting, transdisciplinary mindset. Bringing everyone to the table is how you effect change.”

Sandeep Ahuja is co-founder and CEO of cove.tool, an AI-first consulting platform that aims to break down barriers in the design and construction cycle, creating a new network of shared information, interoperability, and accountability across projects and teams.

In addition to running cove.tool, Sandeep has recently co-authored a book with Patrick Chopson. Build Like It’s the End of the World: A Practical Guide to Decarbonize Architecture, Engineering, and Construction is due out from Wiley by the end of 2024.

Sandeep is passionate about transforming the AEC industry with intelligent and innovative solutions to reduce risk and boost transparency. “We are trying to take the best things about software and consulting,” she says, “and put them together with some AI goodness. We think this is the next level of transformational change in the AEC industry.”

Nora Rizzo is Grace Farms Foundation’s Ethical Materials Director. She works to advance the Design for Freedom movement to eliminate forced and child labor from the built environment. For the past two decades, Nora has been dedicated to creating change in the built environment through sustainability, resilience, and social equity work. 

Nora described the traction around the Design for Freedom work, and shared her excitement about a new public exhibit at Grace Farms Foundation in New Canaan, Connecticut. “With Every Fiber" was curated by Chelsea Thatcher and designed by Nina Cooke John. “This exhibit is focused on the idea of ethical decarbonization," Riszzo said. "It  is exploring the link between the climate crisis and the embodied suffering that is happening in our built environment.”

Alyssa-Amor Gibbons designs environmentally conscious, energy-efficient, and resilient architecture that reflects a deep reverence for nature and human interconnectedness with the world. She has degrees in structural engineering and architecture and specializes in Building Information Modelling. She also works as an advisor for the Spinnaker Group, a division of SOCOTEC, focusing on sustainable certification of buildings in hot and humid climates. 

Her affinity for hot and humid stems from her home: Alyssa-Amor is from Barbados, an island nation, and she lives and works there now. She thinks that growing up with an acute understanding of human’s and human settlements’ vulnerability to nature and weather cycles has framed her thinking about design. 

She is exploring how best to leverage her cultural and design knowledge in an age of warming. “People say ‘build back better,’ but I don’t want to do that anymore,” she says. “I want to build better from the beginning.. I want to make a difference right now.” Her passion has also inspired her to found a company called Future Cities. “We are inviting people -- everyone! -- to engage, via VR, AI, and other ways. We are asking, can you code/build a city of the collective imagination?”

Dr. Janice Barnes is founder of Climate Adaptation Partners, a NYC-based partnership that focuses on climate adaptation. With technical training in architecture and organizational behavior, she helps clients to understand risks and evaluate adaptation pathways and link these to design and financing options. She works at the intersection of climate change, design, and public health and uses the question "how might we?" to frame her work. 

We talked with Janice about her advocacy and education work, her current client and project work, and more. She insists that “climate adaptation is part of design. We have a professional obligation to consider climate projections, explore what those mean, and then decide what you are going to do about that.” 

Janice uses a musical metaphor to talk about team collaboration. She says that she plays rhythm guitar -- and takes responsibility for bringing a lot of unconventional bandmates to the session. “In this way, I have found that I can contribute design thinking and bring climate science experts and epidemiologists to the table. What we come up with together is so much better -- a richer, more rooted system of solutions that do multiple things for stakeholders, ecosystem, and community.”

Paula Melton is the Editorial Director at BuildingGreen, which supports the international sustainable building movement with learning resources, community building, and other services. She works with editorial teams to develop and deliver webcasts, long-form analysis, and other guidance on BuildingGreen.com and LEEDuser.com. 

“We have problems that are caused by people being in silos,” Paula says, “and not being able or willing to communicate. We need to be thinking about people skills and processes in new ways.” She adds that progress in the movement really demands a lot of soft skills. “We are all engaged in change management as much as we are engaged in the mechanics of our specific discipline or sector.”  

Besides bringing deep knowledge and humor to the table, Paula is optimistic, despite being rooted firmly in a lot of data about the reality of the climate imperative and the challenges that face the built environment community. “We are asking the right questions and beginning to break down those barriers that have given us 75 different net zero standards,” she says. “We're having the right conversations, and I'm excited about that.”

Laurie Schoeman is the Director of Climate for Enterprise Community Investment and has served as senior advisor at the Council on Environmental Quality in the Executive Office of the President. Her aim is to develop and implement innovative policies and solutions that enhance the climate adaptation and physical resilience of communities across the nation, especially those that are vulnerable and underserved. 

“When we talk about climate adaptation, I want people to point to built systems all over the country that are rooted in nature-based solutions,” she says. “It's time we move out of the textbooks and into our streets and communities and build these systems.” 

Reducing risk, she points out, is a whole slate of activities. “Insurance should not be our first line of defense,” she says. “It should be a complement to a property or a facility or an infrastructure project that has risk reduction baked in.” She adds that communications is critical, and we’re still lagging in that area. “We need to break all these topics down. We need to talk about how to communicate in way that everyone can understand.” 

Noorie Rajvanshi is Director of Sustainability and Climate Strategy at Siemens USA, part of a multinational technology company. 

Noorie talked to us about her family’s sustainability roots, her mechanical engineering background, and how her fascination with quantifying environmental impact led to her role at Siemens. She is proud of her work on performance tools to support cities with ambitious GHG reduction goals and of her current work on carbon pricing.

Noorie calls herself a climate optimist and a climate realist. And she says that she feels part of a movement -- one that is changing for the better. “The movement is not as exclusive as it once was. Some folks might scoff about the notion that ‘everyone is a sustainability professional’ but I think that is the goal we are working towards. Sustainability is not an additional thing, it is part of our everyday work."

Noorie told us that the people who inspire her most right now are the people, such as electricians, who are changing their jobs to do more of what’s ahead because of the sustainability movement. “They are becoming experts on heat pumps and EV chargers and more -- and that’s inspiring to me.”

Barbra is the founder and CEO of BuildingEase and Sustainable Performance Institute -- an industry leader whose innovative vision drives market transformation from public policy to professional practice. Her work focuses on the intersection of systems, processes and culture. 

With a diverse background of fine arts, social psychology and nearly 30 years in architecture and sustainability consulting, she brings a perspective that engages the human dynamics of decision-making and creative collaboration to technical work. Barbra has always been most interested in the how. 

Her advice for those who want to be effective working on sustainability in the built environment is to “develop enabling skills.” Because, she says, “Technical knowledge is necessary but insufficient. Any work in sustainability requires systems thinking, understanding of change dynamics and change management, communication, facilitation skills, and negotiation skills.”

Dr. Veena Singla is Senior Scientist with the People & Communities Program at the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). 

She seeks to address health disparities linked to harmful environmental exposures using an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating environmental health, exposure science, public health, and policy expertise. Her research investigates how toxic chemicals and pollution related to systems of materials use, production, and disposal threaten the health of communities. 

“If you work on buildings, you're actually working on health and justice, even if you didn't think about it that way,” she says. “Green building has influenced health and justice in both positive and negative ways. I've seen the movement expand from a more narrow focus on energy and greenhouse gasses to a more holistic approach. We are now thinking about how buildings fit into our lives, and trying to better integrate health equity and justice.”

Seema Bhangar is a Healthy Buildings & Communities Principal at the US Green Building Council; she focuses on research and innovation. She is also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment. If you are interested in the field of human health and buildings, Seema advises you to “collect data and be curious and discerning and honest. We have evaluate impact and ask what we do not know.” Seema is working with a new team to rebuild a dedicated research function at USGBC. She is fueled, she says, by the magic that happens “when we bring researchers to our communities of practice.” 

Seema is deeply proud of the network of people she has cultivated during her career so far, "people who value having a vision, who ask questions at the right scales, and who voice their opinions," she says. "In buildings and health, it’s not about the individual superstar. The nodes are people. Each one has a set of expertise and knowledge, and we really advance when we connect and share.” 

She is excited for the frontiers that are now being explored in the movement. “Health is different than energy, so we’re using different methods than we did for the other pillars,” she says. “The community today has many tools and  appreciates the need for urgency and scale.”

Materials maven Annie Bevan is a facilitator, consultant, and collaborator focused on creating large-scale change and leveraging sustainability as a strategic business enabler. She’s effecting this through two roles: she is CEO of SMS Collaborative and CEO of mindful MATERIALS.

The mindful MATERIALS organization began as steward of a library tool. (That tool started at HKS, which gifted the idea to the built environment community.) Today it is a nonprofit convener, aggregator, and aligner centered on the Common Materials Framework — a system for thinking about products and holistic impact.

“We want building product manufacturer to hear a consistent language," Annie says, "so they can respond. Sustainable products should be the norm, not the option.”

Her consulting firm provides staffing solutions, mostly to manufacturers who are trying to do this work and talk about it effectively. 

Annie says that she worries that we’re getting carbon tunnel vision. “We need to bear in mind how broad this challenge is,” she says. “We have to attend to social health, equity, circularity, and biodiversity. We have to -- and we can -- solve these problems at the same time.” 

Through her consultancy, AIRLIT studio, Alejandra Menchaca provides expertise in mechanical engineering and building science to owners and design teams. One of her current projects will be the first performing arts facility in the US with full natural ventilation.  Ale holds a PhD in mechanical engineering and has taught at MIT and Harvard GSD, where she has mentored, she says, “several brilliant students who have become inspiring disruptors in the building simulation industry. That’s immensely rewarding.”

We talked to Ale about growing up in Mexico and her shift from aerospace engineering  to environmental stewardship and building science and her time at Payette and Thornton Tomasetti before starting her own firm. Ale co-founded Project StaSIO, a community of building performance simulators (consultants, architects, in-house building scientists) that strives to teach others how to ask the right building analytics questions and convey the results in ways that are beautiful and impactful (not tables!).

When we asked whether she feels like she’s part of a movement, Ale didn’t hesitate: “If speaking up and disagreeing with the status quo is being part of the movement, I'm definitely a member..” 

Victoria Burrows is a manager of portfolio development and industry partnerships at Kompas, an early-stage venture capital firm backing innovations for decarbonizing the built environment and manufacturing. Decarbonization has been the focus of Victoria’s career to date (her prior role was leading Advancing Net Zero at the World Green Building Council), and she lives it, too. She is renovating her own net zero home in France. 

Victoria is  excited to be working in venture capital right now because, she says, "the market needs a suite of solutions for every part of the problem -- solutions that are cost effective and reduce emissions. I’m energized to be on the ‘how’ side of things, helping to bring these solutions to fruition.”

Through Kompas, she is advancing innovations towards decarbonization that include technology such as AI and robotics to increase efficiency throughout the value chain. “I think the private sector has a responsibility to operate well in advance of regulation to prove the possible and show it can be done,” she says. This is part of creating confidence in governments so that they can set policy roadmaps and regulations. Activating the flow of sustainable finance to the solutions is critical. I want to see all finance linked to performance outcomes.”

Ariane Laxo is Sustainability Director at HGA, an architecture and engineering firm of 1,000 people in 12 offices. We talked to Ariane about her work, what she draws on to lead, and how she finds strength in the purpose of sustainability. She advises others to listen to the curiosity that pulls them and cultivate an introspective mindset. 

In addition to stewarding projects at HGA that demonstrate a holistic approach to design and deeply integrated sustainability, Ariane is also working on change management at the firm, which includes cultivating an inclusive culture and a distributed network of intelligence around sustainability, equity, and community action. The company has prioritized transparency and and is engaged in research internally and with outside partners.

Ariane appreciates the progress she is seeing in transdisciplinary thinking and would like to see greater advancement toward a circular economy in the building industry. “I hope that 200 years from now, historians will look at this moment as the fulcrum, the moment everything changed,” she says. “We are shaping a regenerative future.”

Mary Ann Piette is the Interim Associate Lab Director of the Energy Technologies Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She manages a research enterprise comprised of 700 staff and affiliates, including 120 principal investigators working across a broad set of technology R&D programs to accelerate decarbonization ranging from demand-side energy efficiency and grid integration to hydrogen technologies, energy storage, and renewable energy systems. 

We had a terrific time talking to Mary Ann about her mechanical engineering background and how she thinks about buildings, energy, comfort, and grids. She’s focused on four pillars of decarbonization: energy efficiency, electrification, grid integration, and distributed energy resources.

She wrote a chapter for a new book, Women in Renewable Energy (by Katherine T. Wang and Jill S. Tietjen (Springer, 2023) about using building loads dynamically for low-carbon energy systems. “When we change our electricity system to be based on wind and solar, we need to integrate with demand side systems,” she says. “Grid-scale storage is important, but flexible demand can be much more cost effective.” And she points out that this is part of a significant gap in current built environment conditions. “If we are are going to accelerate progress, we need to understand and utilize the feedback between design and operations.”