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.”

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.” 

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.”

Erica McBride is the Regenerative Operations Manager at Architectural Nexus -- known as Arch Nexus. She oversees the performance and integrity of the firm’s two certified Living Buildings, in Sacramento and Salt Lake City. Erica was honored with the Living Future Hero Award in 2025 and holds credentials as a WELL AP, LEED Green Associate, and Living Future Accredited professional. Her work reflects a deep passion for regenerative design and sustainable building operations.

Erica is living these buildings -- experiencing and nurturing them in a hands-on way. She shared some great stories with us about what that means (including days that require a squeegee on the roof in the rain or even a swim in a cistern!). 

She has inspiring advice about how the living building challenge is, as she puts it “so attainable! You really just have to, to think about the building as an ecosystem. Then ask: ‘How do all of these pieces within the building ecosystem fit together?’ Once you understand how your building likes to be operated, it’s easy.”

She also has thoughts about what could make it even better: She’d love to see the operations people at the table at the outset of the project design and planning. She believes that operations people have a lot of practical experience that could be leveraged as design decisions are made.

Jenn Taranto has more than 25 years of experience in commercial real estate and construction and serves as Vice President of Sustainability at STO Building Group, a major construction organization. Passionate about reducing environmental impact, she drives STOBG’s internal sustainability strategy, helps clients define CSR goals, guides project teams to achieve milestones, and supports efforts to lower costs and emissions. We talked with Jenn about her long-term role with Built Environment Plus, the New England-based regional green building nonprofit, and how such groups are supporting market and industry transformation. 

Jenn suggests that people working on sustainability in the construction sector should be “deeply curious, have loads of tenacity, and be interested in breaking systems to build better ones.” She was instrumental in getting the Contractors’ Commitment off the ground and shared its reason for being. “We saw a real need for a system to encourage companies to track progress and engage in this transformation, she says. 

As for how we’re progressing -- the movement, the industry, and society overall -- we asked Jenn if we’re where she thought we’d be by now. “Not exactly,” she said. “Where’s my hoverboard?”

Stacy Glass is co-founder and executive director of ChemFORWARD, a nonprofit that creates access to chemical hazard data and seeks safer alternatives in partnership with industry. Stacy drives partnerships, collaborations and stakeholder engagement to support this mission and her aim to end toxic chemical exposure and advance human and environmental equity. 

ChemForward’s theory of change is rooted in collaboration with industry and other parties -- the entire supply chain. What ChemFoward is really working toward, Stacy says, is “a world where all chemicals are vetted before use.” This would be a fundamental change. “We’d like to see no more hazardous chemicals entering circulation and existing hazardous chemicals being drawn down and replaced with safer alternatives.” She points out that chemical pollution is a significant threat. In planetary boundaries conversations, “novel entities” are in the high risk zone. 

Stacy notes that people -- consumers of personal products and building products and more -- need to be smart about how to ask for products that are as good as they can be. “We encourage buyers in all parts of the supply chain to be thoughtful about what they are asking for -- and not just ask for things that are ‘free of’ one thing. This can lead to what we call ‘regrettable alternatives.' Instead, as the entire supply chain knows more and understands developing metrics to measure progress in safer chemistry, we can all work toward better, safer, and healthier.” 

Kaarin Knudson is an architect, a writer, and an educator with more than 25 years’ experience in design, sustainability, and community building. Trained as a journalist before becoming an architect, her work has always focused on people and place. In 2017, after a decade in architectural practice, she organized the public-interest project Better Housing Together to address Lane County’s housing crisis. This work supported the creation of Eugene’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, Lane County’s first Affordable Housing Action Plan, and Oregon’s landmark middle housing reforms. In 2024, she was elected as Mayor of Eugene, Oregon, with 73% of the primary vote and 96% in the general election. Kaarin teaches planning and urban design at the University of Oregon, and she speaks at regional and national conferences about sustainable cities, housing, and the work of guiding community change. She is co-author, with Nico Larco, of The Sustainable Urban Design Handbook (2024).

We discussed what this moment is calling us all to do. “I think we are building new muscles and new relationships and new patterns of behavior with one another,” she said. “This is challenging us to think about how to work in different ways and how to stay focused on the future that we want to build. The framing of the problem is going to determine the solutions. We have to be the people who are framing the problem in a way that allows the solutions to be more connected, more productive, more about advancing into this future together.” 

Kayleigh Houde is an Associate Principal and Global Computational Projects Lead at Buro Happold, where she is responsible for the harmonized development of new technologies within the open-source coding platform BHoM. Her leadership extends to chairing the MEP 2040 Commitment, participating in the ECHO Project and ASHRAE Center of Excellence for Building Decarbonization. She is also a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches Parametric Life Cycle Assessment. 

We spoke with Kayleigh soon after the MEP 2040 and Carbon Leadership Forum had released The Beginner’s Guide to MEP Embodied Carbon, a critical resource that was eagerly awaited in the community. Naturally, we spoke with her about that effort and about the broader question of why embodied carbon is important for MEP practitioners. “We have coalesced a lot of data to to bridge gaps for the MEP disciplines and provide clarity about the MEP impact,” she says.

Kayleigh’s technical leadership is paralleled by her deep commitment to collaboration across disciplines, evidenced in many ways, including her work on the ECHO effort to harmonize data across disciplines and certification programs. 

“Computers aren’t the thing,” Kayleigh says of the potential of computation in climate work and the built environment. “They are the thing that gets you to the thing. Really, what computations helps you to solve are some of issues that we have in human collaboration. Sometimes we think we’re connecting but we are not really speaking the same language. Getting people to talk and collaborate is a big part of the solution in the computational work.”

As the Head of Sustainability for Henning Larsen, Kritika Kharbanda spearheads the global sustainability team’s initiatives, goals, and growth. She serves on the ULI New York’s Climate and Sustainability Council and is the co-chair for AIA New York’s Building Science Committee.

We talked about her journey from India to Japan, Denmark, and the U.S. We discussed storytelling and negotiations; evidence-based design; and her role with Pathways AI,a climate-tech startup using AI to automate Environmental Product Declarations; and her Substack. 

We also asked her about whether she feels like she’s a part of an industry or a movement (a question that feels more important now than it has since we began asking it in our first episodes in early 2020). 

“If I were just part of an industry,” she says, “I’d probably be doing my nine to six, designing buildings, and calling it a day. But in my head and heart, I feel called to join with others in learning and collaboration and advocacy. We are building relationships and working together toward tangible outcomes. This is a movement. I am part of it, and I think everyone should be a part of it, because just being part of the industry is not enough anymore.”