BuiltWorlds US Summit 2021 Sessions: Anne Ellis, Executive Director, Charles Pankow Foundation

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In this BuiltWorlds Summit Session, take a few minutes to meet Anne Ellis, PE, Hon. M.ACI, F.ASCE, M.NAC, Executive Director of the Charles Pankow Foundation.  More than 15 years ago, the Charles Pankow Foundation was established as a non profit organization, and its stated mission is “to be a catalyst to advance innovation in the design and construction of buildings.” The organization’s vision is “to provide the AEC industry with a better way to design and build.” As part of its charter, the Foundation has doled out millions of dollars in grants to fund research and collaboration toward better solutions in areas including:

  • Building Structure: Rethinking how buildings are designed and built
  • Collaborative Project Delivery: Integrating the Design and Construction Processes
  • Environmental Transparency: Enabling Evidence-Based Design and Procurement Decisions to reduce impacts.

This past spring, we had the honor of hosting a panel discussion at our annual Buildings Conference with Ellis and collaborators from a Pankow Foundation project leading to the development of the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator Tool (EC3). Click the image below to access the video recording of the session featuring:

Stacy Smedley, Executive Director, Building Transparency

Jimmy Mitchell, Sustainability Engineer, Skanska

Larry Busch, Area General Manager, Cadman

The effort is a fascinating illustration of the increasing importance of understanding carbon impacts in our building projects.

Beyond sustainability and carbon impacts, the organization has recently embarked on new initiatives aimed at improving building enclosures and strengthening design management guidelines, in light of advances in building modeling and the growing number of diverse stakeholders in the design process.

In this session, we have an opportunity to learn about Ellis’ perspective on the influence of emerging technology in opening new opportunities for the industry to collaborate and about her views of an industry that is now on the precipice of unlocking significantly impactful innovation across the full life cycle of projects by virtue of all that is currently afoot.