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Kate Simonen is a licensed architect and structural engineer with significant professional experience in high performance building design and technical expertise in environmental life cycle assessment. Her work accelerates the transformation of the building sector to radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions attributed to the materials used in buildings and infrastructure, often referred to as embodied carbon. She is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and an honorary fellow of the UK's Institution of Structural Engineers, recognized as a Top 25 Newsmaker by Engineering News Record in 2020 for her impact in rallying the industry to reduce embodied carbon. Taking an entrepreneurial approach to academic work, she has helped launch impactful nonprofits, including the Carbon Leadership Forum, and has initiated embodied carbon commitment programs such as SE2050 and MEP 2040. Through her leadership of the Life Cycle Lab, she advances the methods of life cycle assessment (LCA) to provide actionable data for decision makers while evaluating strategies to optimize material decisions across various scales. Her interdisciplinary research group focuses on foundational research necessary to develop methods that accurately assess and radically reduce the embodied carbon of materials, buildings, and infrastructure, thereby optimizing broader impacts on human, social, and ecological health throughout the full life cycle.
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