Design the Future

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 Nation...

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,...

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...

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 Chang...

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 nonp...

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 P...

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 wor...

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 ce...

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 qu...

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...

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 u...

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 GH...

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 r...

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...

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 t...

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...

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...

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...

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 hydrog...

Sarah Ichioka is an urbanist, strategist, curator, and writer currently based in Singapore. She leads Desire Lines , a strategic consultancy. Her latest book, Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency , co-authored with Michael Pawlyn, proposes a bold set of regenerative design principles for addressing environmental and social challenges. We talked to her about the book and related p...

Renée Cheng is an architect and dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. She pioneered research surrounding the intersection of design and emerging technologies and is a leader in the American Institute of Architects around equity in the profession and practice. She led the research effort for AIA guides for equitable practice. She  sees students as partners, and...

Fiona Cousins, a mechanical engineer by training, is the Americas Chair for Arup, guiding a 1,900-person engineering, design, consulting, and planning firm with a focus on collaborating and innovating to shape a better world. Fiona and her teams take a broad view as they pursue value for clients, considering climate change, social equity, and biodiversity.  As a longtime leader in the field, Fiona...

Marnese Jackson is an environmental and climate justice activist, advocate, trainer, and educator in Pontiac, Michigan. This mother of two is the co-director of the Midwest Building Decarbonization Coalition, which focuses on inspiring and educating Midwesterners to end new installations of fossil fuel equipment in residential and commercial buildings by 2030, and to achieve zero emissions from th...

Stephanie Greene has just stepped down from a role as managing director at RMI, where she led the Buildings Program. She also helped launch RMI's building electrification initiative, which is focused on enabling a cost-effective, sustainable, and equitable path to building decarbonization, with work spanning the U.S., China, and India. We talked to her about this work, her previous work at PG...

Davida Herzl is co-founder and CEO of Aclima, where she leads a team pioneering a new way to diagnose the health of our air and track pollution. A Public Benefit Corporation, Aclima measures air pollution and greenhouse gasses with block-by-block resolution. The company's enterprise software, Aclima Pro, translates billions of scientific measurements into analytics for companies, governments,...