Mara Baum, HOK’s Healthcare Sustainable Design Leader, has been elevated to the LEED Fellow class of 2013 by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).
According to the USGBC, the LEED Fellow program ”designates the most exceptional professionals in the green building industry.” Mara becomes one of only 128 Fellows – a very small percentage of the approximately 180,000 LEED professionals across the globe. The LEED Fellow is a relatively new honor; this year’s cohort represents only the third class of Fellows. Applicants must demonstrate a minimum of a 10-year history of “exceptionality” across four of five dimensions of green building: technical proficiency, leadership, education and mentoring, commitment and service, and advocacy.
Mara first joined HOK in St. Louis in 1999 to work on the first edition of the HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design. She became one of HOK’s first LEED APs in 2001, and has continued to dedicate her career to improving the health and sustainability of the built environment through project work as well as research and teaching. Now based out of San Francisco, Mara manages sustainable design for HOK’s firmwide healthcare practice and is on the leadership team that guides HOK’s firmwide sustainable design practice. Her major projects include the Rhine Ordnance Barracks Medical Center Replacement in Kaiserslautern, Germany, the Sydney and Lois Eskenazi Hospital in Indianapolis, and the Kaiser Redwood City Replacement Hospital in Redwood City, Calif. Outside of the office, Mara continues to teach health and healthcare topics online at the Boston Architectural College’s Sustainable Design Institute.
“Mara’s strong leadership, intuitive technical understanding and exceptional communication skills have helped to transform HOK’s healthcare group from pockets of knowledge to a practice whose basis of design centers around green building,” says Mary Ann Lazarus, the AIA Resident Fellow and HOK’s former director of sustainable design.
Mara will be receiving the LEED Fellow award at the Greenbuild Conference and Expo this November in Philadelphia. She will also be speaking at both Greenbuild and the Healthcare Design Conference. Her Greenbuild session, “LEED for Healthcare: Lessons Learned from the First Three Years,” will be on Friday November 22, with Kim Shinn of TLC Engineering for Architecture. She joined HOK’s Alan Bright and Jim Sharpe of Affiliated Engineering, Inc. at Healthcare Design on November 17 to present the Oregon State Hospital projects: “The Next Generation Hospital – Meet the 2030 Challenge for Energy Efficiency.”
