Towards Zero Carbon 2025: Speaker Details
Symposium Speakers
Amanda Kaminsky
Amanda Kaminsky is Director of Sustainability for Consigli Construction, which recently acquired Lendlease Construction. Building on a couple decades of deep collaboration with multidisciplinary teams to pilot and standardize systemic industry sustainability improvements to portfolio organics collection, material ingredient transparency and health, concrete decarbonization, drywall closed loop recycling, and uptake of electric construction equipment, Amanda is continuing progress at scale with supply chains, recycling networks, policy makers, and the teams and communities where Consigli builds.
Amanda sits on the Boards of Carbon Leadership Forum, Health Product Declaration Collaborative, Construction & Demolition Recycling Association, Center for Zero Waste Design, and is a Reuse Partner of Build Reuse. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Architecture from the University of Virginia.
Anish Tilak
Anish Tilak is a manager with RMI’s Carbon-Free Buildings program where he manages projects in the Embodied Carbon Initiative. Anish applies a depth of industry experience and subject matter expertise to develop scalable approaches to decarbonize the built environment, with a current focus on policy research and market development to advance low-embodied carbon materials.
Kim Olson, PE
Kim Olson, PE is a licensed structural engineer. She is currently an engineering manager in Nucor’s Buildings Group. Prior to joining Nucor, she was the HSS Consulting Engineer for the Steel Tube Institute. At FORSE Consulting and Martin/Martin, Inc. she managed and designed a variety of structures, from research labs and sporting grandstands to recreation centers and schools. Kim is a licensed professional engineer (PE) and a member of several AISC, AWS and ASTM Technical Committees.
Erika Winters-Downey
Erika Winters-Downey, SE, LEED AP BD+C, is an Associate Principal and Director-Sustainable Structures for the Clayco/Lamar Johnson Collaborative enterprise. She has spent her career building relationships to foster the sharing of best practices in structural design and construction. With a breadth of experience spanning structural design, a technical institute, and construction, her experience allows her to drive success from project pursuits through design and construction. In her current role, she works across the enterprise to lead embodied carbon reduction strategies. She has established prototype client deliverables for Embodied Carbon studies, as well as a pilot testing program to assist clients in implementing low-carbon concrete designs. She is the current board chair for the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) Central Plains chapter, and a member of the inaugural board of the Kansas City Building Energy Exchange. An accomplished speaker and author, she thrives on the ability to distill technical topics for all to understand and apply.
Kjell Anderson
Kjell Anderson, FAIA, LEED Fellow, practices architecture and serves as a Principal and the Director of Sustainable Design at LMN Architects, working with all of LMN’s clients to set and exceed sustainable design goals. He wrote the first architect-centered book on energy modeling and co-authored AIA’s first policy statement on climate change.. He founded the Seattle Hub of the Carbon Leadership Forum, served on the AIA National COTE and currently serves on the Washington State Building Code Council where he leads the Energy Code Technical Advisory Groups.
Jerry Hajjar
Jerry Hajjar is the CDM Smith Professor, University Distinguished Professor, and Department Chair in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. His research and teaching interests include analysis, experimental testing, and design of sustainable and resilient steel and composite building and bridge structures, regional modeling and assessment of infrastructure systems, and earthquake engineering, and he has published over 300 papers and authored or edited five books on these topics. Dr. Hajjar was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2022 and has received numerous honors and awards, most recently the 2023 Lynn S. Beedle Award from the Structural Stability Research Council.
John Kevern
Dr. Kevern is senior researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory focusing on cement and concrete resilience. He is an internationally recognized expert on concrete durability and non-traditional concrete applications. Dr. Kevern has been named one of the top five most influential people in the concrete industry by Concrete Construction Magazine and is a Fellow of both ACI and ASCE.
Sheng Zheng
Sheng Zheng is a Professional Engineer with five years of industry experience at Martin/Martin Consulting Engineers in Lakewood, Colorado. He specializes in AI and technology initiatives as part of his role. He is also a member of SEAC.
Will Lepry
Will Lepry is the Director of the Colorado Mass Timber Coalition where he leads over 350 members across 150+ organizations to help support healthy, resilient forests and encourage a thriving forest products economy through mass timber in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain Region. He has a background in materials engineering and management consulting.
Ian McFarlane
Ian is a Senior Principal who has led the design of mid- and high-rise buildings ranging from residential and office to innovative mixed-use developments. He leads MKA’s sustainability experts, working as a resource across all market sectors to develop strategies on sustainable design and construction practices.
Iris Loureiro
Originally from New Jersey and now based in Miami, Florida, Iris holds a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Rutgers University. She started her career at Turner Construction, spending three and a half years as an Engineer and a Sustainability Engineer. Now, she is the Construction Innovation Manager at Prologis, focusing on researching and piloting new technologies and processes to drive efficiency and sustainability across Prologis’ Developments in Canada, US, Mexico, and Brazil.
Laura Karnath
Laura is a registered architect and a Principal at Walter P Moore. She spent her early career as a computational designer and has experience working on a broad range of projects spanning four continents. She now splits her time between Walter P Moore’s sustainability and enclosure engineering teams. She supports firm-wide embodied carbon reduction initiatives, co-chairs Walter P Moore’s Sustainable Design Community of Practice, and leads whole building life cycle assessments for a wide range of project types and scales. Laura is also a founding co-leader of the Los Angeles Hub of the Carbon Leadership Forum and an advocate for low embodied carbon buildings.