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About the Speakers:
Megan Stringer,SE
Megan Stringer is an Associate Principal with Holmes in their San Francisco office. Motivated by our impact on the built environment, Megan is at the forefront of reducing structural embodied carbon. She champions Holmes' commitment to SE 2050 and gets sustainable structures built at impressive scales. Megan has overseen mass timber construction at Microsoft, low-carbon concrete pours at Intuit, and many life cycle assessments. Megan also serves as Vice President of SEAONC and has chaired numerous committees.
Michael Hoehn
Michael Hoehn is an architect and computational designer within Buro Happold where he helps a variety of teams solve complex problems through planning and executing computational workflows. Michael translates his transdisciplinary skillset to code by leading development efforts within Buro’s open-sourced coding platform called the Buildings and Habitats object Model (BHoM). He has recently led industry-wide initiatives across in developing digital tools for evaluating embodied carbon, which won the 2020 AIA Technology in Architectural Practice Innovation award. Additionally, Michael helps to encourage and facilitate a company-wide computational design adoption culture with regular internal instruction sessions as well as external client-focused collaborations.
Sara Neff
Sara Neff is the Head of ESG, Lendlease Americas, where she provides leadership and management oversight in developing, implementing and driving Lendlease's corporate sustainability framework in the Americas region, with the goal of achieving absolute zero carbon across all scopes by 2040. Prior to that role, she served as Senior Vice President, Sustainability at Kilroy Realty Corporation. Ms. Neff was instrumental in the architecture, initiation and execution of Kilroy’s sustainability program. Under her leadership, Kilroy has been recognized as a leader among publicly traded real estate companies on sustainability in the Americas by GRESB for seven of the last eight years and achieved carbon neutral operations at the end of 2020. She is a LEED Fellow and holds a BS from Stanford and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
Natasha Balwit
Natasha Balwit is a planner, writer, and researcher with a focus on climate change mitigation and decarbonization at the scale of cities and landscapes. She is the author of Buildingshed, a newsletter on buildings, materials, land use, and climate change.
Most recently, she led research and communications on building sector policy, energy, and emissions trends at Architecture 2030, where she performed city building stock assessments for Architecture 2030’s Zero Cities Initiative, led Architecture 2030’s work on equity in building decarbonization initiatives, and supported municipal governments in creating equitable and impactful building sector decarbonization policies. She lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her writing has been published online in CityLab, The Atlantic, CoLab Radio, ARCHITECT, and elsewhere.
Mike Romanowski, SE
Mike received his B.S. degree in Architectural Engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo in 1979 and was involved in the practice of structural engineering for a number of San Diego based firms over a span of 37 years. His experience includes design, construction administration, contract plan checking, peer review and forensic investigations for various types of projects utilizing all types of building materials. Mike has had articles published in Structural Engineer and San Diego Constructor magazines, has served as an SEAOSD Director, was a member of the SEAOC Code Streamlining Committee and is now Co-Chair of the SEAOSD Sustainable Design Committee. Mike is a licensed Structural Engineer in the State of California and is currently the Regional Director covering Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico for WoodWorks.
Brandon Wray
Brandon Wray is the Director of Building Innovations for the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association in California. In this role, Brandon promotes concrete and concrete technologies throughout the design community with a special focus on sustainability. Prior to joining the NRMCA, Brandon worked for US Concrete where he assisted in developing, evaluating, and launching various concrete technologies throughout North America. Most recently, he was a Design Manager on the project management team at Clark Pacific, a world renowned precast concrete designer and manufacturer.
Andrea Chiu, SE
Andrea Chiu is a licensed structural engineer in California with over a decade of design consulting experience. She has collaborated with developers, architects, and contractors to shape the built environment in various sectors, including medical offices, civic centers, schools, and office buildings. As the Los Angeles/Orange County Building Solutions Specialist with Nucor’s Construction Solutions division, Andrea is excited to partner with members in the AEC industry and share Nucor’s portfolio of innovative construction solutions and sustainability commitments.
Tye Bailey, AIA
Tye is an architect at LEVER Architecture with more than 10 years of experience creating elegant and sustainable design solutions for innovative projects at all scales. He has been instrumental in the design and completion of multiple complex commercial and mixed-use developments along the west coast; most recently serving as the lead designer for 843 N Spring Street—a mixed-use creative office development that is slated to be one of LA’s largest mass timber buildings.
Chris Smith, M.S., S.E.
Chris is a licensed civil and structural engineer in the state of California with over 12 years of experience. Chris has extensive expertise in: seismic evaluation and strengthening of existing buildings; high-rise and performance based seismic design methodologies; and design of reinforced and post-tensioned concrete, steel, light frame, and masonry structures in high seismic regions. His particular interest in complex retrofit projects was instrumental in the reuse and transformation of 843 N Spring Street. He regularly provides third-party plan checks along with structural and seismic peer reviews for the City of Los Angeles, City of San Diego, California State University, and University of California. He is certified with the California Emergency Management Agency (Cal-Ema) to provide post-earthquake structural damage and safety assessments and is regularly called upon to provide expert witness testimonies for structural damage claims ranging from site retaining walls to high-rise condominiums.
Rachelle Habchi, M.S., P.E.
Rachelle is a licensed civil engineer with 4 years of structural engineering experience in the Southern California area. She’s had the opportunity to work on a variety of structures, including K-12, higher education, multi-family residential, mixed used development and high-rise towers. Throughout her design experience, the use and implementation of sustainable materials has increasingly become an important aspect of consideration and one that she has readily embraced. Her work on 843 N Spring Street, one of the first mass timber buildings in Los Angeles and Park Habitat, a sustainability-focused concrete tower in San Jose have highlighted the importance of minimizing embodied carbon and the strategic role structural engineers play in realizing our collective net-zero objectives.
Margaux Burkholder, P.E., S.E.
Margaux Burkholder is a licensed structural engineer with 12 years of design experience in the Los Angeles area. She has worked on a range of project types and has experience with high-rise and performance-based design, seismic retrofit and rehabilitation, multi-family residential, commercial, mixed use, retail, sports and entertainment.
A graduate of Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Margaux has focused her career in the high seismic regions of California, working with architects and developers to provide elegant yet cost effective structural solutions to their projects. As a result of her experience with tall buildings and performance based design, Margaux has emerged as an area expert in concrete design and currently sits on the ACI Southern California Board of Directors. She is also an active member of the SEAOSC Concrete and Sustainability committees and co-chairs the Women in Structural Engineering Committee.
Gina Kope, PE
Gina Kope is a Senior Engineer at Holmes Structures in San Francisco, with 7 years of experience working on a diverse set of projects in which sustainable practices were implemented, including the largest mass timber project in North America (amassing ~350,000 SF of CLT), a new 8-story mass timber affordable housing building, a seismic retrofit of an existing 6-story concrete building and many custom high-end residential homes. She has been an active member of SEAONC over the years, currently serving as the Co-Chair for SEAONC's Sustainable Design Committee. Her passion for sustainable design has led to her involvement on a national level by joining a group that will spearhead the NCSEA Sustainable Design Committee. Within her local chapter she's organized the collection and analysis of concrete mix design data to help a local Bay Area jurisdiction implement benchmark values for the first Low Carbon Concrete Code. Currently she is facilitating a collaboration effort between SEAONC SDC and SE2050 to build out the organization’s online resources. This year she hopes to further develop the Embodied Carbon Intensity Diagrams (ECID’s) for practicing engineers to reference as they track their projects’ emissions as part of the SE2050 commitment. Gina is passionate about helping engineers recognize the environmental impacts we have as builders and plans to continue outreach to educate professionals on how they can reduce their carbon footprint in their every-day practice.
COVID Policies and Restrictions:
In order to ensure the safety of all summit attendees, masks must be worn when not actively eating or drinking, and COVID vaccination cards will be checked at the door. Attendees must bring either a digital or physical copy of their vaccination cards, or provide a negative COVID test within 48 hours of the event.
