Architecture focused on social justice, environmental health, and sustainability. Director of Sustainability and mentoring/overseeing project managers, interns, design crits with teams and occasionally teaching at university. The type of work has shifted as my own personal office was focused on passive house retrofits and new construction for residential and office clients and occasionally research and work with nonprofits. This was mixed with my activism and interest in policy to move the needle faster on passive house / hyper-efficiency through government policy. Now, in a larger office, our work is focused on architecture and urban design and urban planning and the work is mostly public projects - public realm from exterior landscapes to interior spaces whether adaptive reuse or new construction. I am working on WELLNESS spaces for hospitals, modular construction for employee bathrooms and facilities to support staff, workshops at state parks, nonprofits - clinics and youth center, recreation areas along a canal, resiliency hubs for NYCHA public housing.

I am one of the oldest and most experienced in my office, so similar to when I am teaching at university, I need to provide support to staff to work with them, listen to them, and help them to succeed on projects in our office. I also want to bring in new methodologies to practice so that sustainability is synonymous with good design and is part of every step of the design process and thinking.

Implementation of my new role as Director of Sustainability in an office that focuses on architecture but also urban planning and urban design is a big responsibility and I have lots of ideas of how this could be done. But this training in regenerative design is very important as our work involves alot of community engagement and larger scale and the thinking in our office is probably very much in alignment with regenerative design thinking.

Definitely growing into this role leading project managers and providing design crit and direction for a 60-person office - as a Snr Associate - vs previously I had my own architecture office with never more than 7 people working.

Professional growth - I would like to present research and work to audiences, to clients, to community. Grow a cohort of capable environmental-focused professionals within the 60 person firm to then lead and provide guidance to the rest of the team.

I have invested 24 years of practice since graduate school with Masters in Architecture. Exams for licensing, passive house designer certification, WELL & LEED AP. 24 years of running my own office and moonlighting at night before that invested in learning architecture. Written a book on passive house - 18 case studies. Research and activism for probono projects for nonprofits and people in the community and on advisory boards

In undergraduate I studied African Studies with focus on colonialism and neocolonialism along with French. I also studied Russian, Hebrew, Amharic. I study Spanish now. So, the importance of languages and connecting to people - in addition to the architecture studies. Understanding colonialism and its ramifications - was important for me in the early 90s - in undergraduate. Thinkers from African Studies was Franz Fanon, Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa) and then from travels in South America (husband's family) - Open Veins of Latin America - Eduardo Galeano. In architecture, Le Corbusier. In sustainability - Kiel Moe and his work points to embodied energy and beyond - called emergy - the amount of extraction and shipping all across the globe for materials for buildings. In Green New Deal - Jeremy Rifkin. From local community-based thinkers in design - Lily Yeh, Rick Joy, and my boss at WXY - Claire Weisz. African Architects - Francis Kere, David Adjaye. In writers - Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith. Architecture is a language too so while I was learning it, studying for exams, and green certificates - I wasn't able to also study languages as much - as it seemed I had to focus on the language of architecture. But after years in the field, I have time now to study languages again - and I think that is good because building spaces is about community.

Philosophy is very closely tied to Tikkun Olam - repair the world. From my Jewish culture - this idea of helping to repair the world and help out mother nature from what we have done with our over-population and heavy use of everything here and pollution.