Paz Arroyo

Paz Arroyo, PhD, is a Quality Leader at DPR Construction in San Francisco, California. She has expertise on both teaching and implementing the Choosing By Advantages (CBA) decision-making system internationally for design and construction decisions involving diverse AEC stakeholders. She has published papers at several International conferences, and at peer reviewed journals on CBA. Dr. Arroyo is also co-founder of CollabDecisions a platform to share knowledge on how to make collaborative decisions. She holds a PhD in civil and environmental engineering from UC Berkeley.

Glenn Ballard

Glenn Ballard, PhD, served as Research Director of the Project Production Systems Laboratory from its founding in 2005 until 2019. He has taught and conducted research at the University of California, Berkeley since 1989. He is a co-founder of the International Group for Lean Construction in 1993, the Lean Construction Institute in 1997. His Last Planner System is in wide use throughout the world and he was instrumental in adapting product development’s target costing for use in built environment projects.

Alireza Borhani

Al Borhani is a designer and researcher whose scholarly interests focus at the intersection of emerging building technologies with current and next-generation design strategies. By bringing together digital and analog fabrication work-flows across scales, his interdisciplinary research practice broadly investigates the potency of transformable design principles, helping to create adaptive designs, building components and architecture. Borhani’s research projects cast light on how an exploratory concept of motion can be oriented toward shaping a better environment. Alireza is a co-founder of [trans]LAB, a design-build practice, which conducts design research ranging from the scale of the object to that of the building to the scale of the city itself. Prior to California College of the Arts (CCA), Borhani held a teaching position at Texas A&M University. Alireza holds his second master of architecture from Virginia Tech. He is pursuing a doctoral degree in design research at Virginia Tech.

Stan Chiu

Santiago Diaz

Santiago’s educational background is in Architecture, Civil Engineering, Digital Media Arts, and Computer Science. Santi has worked in the manufacturing industry in a variety of roles including quality control, technical writing, and time studies. Throughout those years in the manufacturing sector, Santi learned lean manufacturing philosophies and methods. He then worked in design firms as a Computational Designer, focused on complex geometry for buildings with advanced timber structures in North America, as well as steel and concrete mega-projects in the Middle East and Asia. Today Santi is a Computational Designer at Katerra, developing software solutions to support the design and fabrication of mass timber buildings.

Joseph Garcia

Joseph Garcia, CHC, LEED AP, DBIA, is a senior executive with 30+ years of design and construction experience in Healthcare. He is a long-term student in the development and execution of Lean, DB, Integrated and Alternative Delivery Form projects and has experience in design, engineering, FM, and construction executive roles. At SR Construction he helps improve design & construction project teams in their application, execution, and delivery of healthcare projects by using DB, lean, and alternative delivery systems to improve reliable project delivery, exceed owners expectations, create added value and provide meaningful and measurable improvements to an industry long overdue for change. SR Construction is a full-service DB GC founded in 1991 with in-house design, preconstruction and construction services. Their “SR Built” process is founded on “Respect for People” and defining and understanding the client’s vision, purpose and goals in order to develop the appropriate strategy for every project and ensure successful outcomes for the entire team.

David Grau

David Grau, PhD, PE, Associate Professor at Arizona State University, is an internationally renowned researcher with a focus on streamlining design and construction. With an Industrial Engineering background, his work has investigated the project delivery process from a production systems perspective. His work at the intersection of innovative project and production controls aims at proactively supporting with accurate and timely information the decisions on behalf of the project, portfolio of projects, and stakeholder organizations. David is also well-known for the design of an automated materials tracking approach that has been leveraged in support of construction projects around the world.

Prior to his academic career, he practiced in private industry for more than ten years as construction program manager for industrial projects and director of a large engineering department. He has led large interdisciplinary and multicultural teams to deliver capital projects in Europe, Africa, and South America.

Negar Kalantar

Negar Kalantar, PhD, conducts research and practices at the intersection of architecture, science, and engineering. By bringing together digital and analog fabrication work-flows across scales, her interdisciplinary research practice investigates the potency of transformable design principles, helping to create designs, building components and interior spaces that are adaptable and demonstrate real-time morphological changes into users and environment. Negar has expertise in additive manufacturing (3D printing) and robot technologies. Before joining California College of the Arts (CCA), she was an assistant professor of Architecture at Texas A&M where she headed up the Advanced Infrastructure Materials and Manufacturing (AIMM) Lab at the Center for Infrastructure Renewal (CIR). Negar is the recipient of the Autodesk Technology Center Grant 2018, the Dornfeld Manufacturing Vision Award 2018 (a National Science Foundation-sponsored accolade recognizing visionary concepts with the potential to influence the future of manufacturing investigation and education), the 2017 Montague Teaching Excellence Scholar Award, the National Science Foundation EAGER Award 2015 for Initiative Research on “Interaction of Smart Materials for Transparent, Self-regulating Building Skins”, and X-Grant 2018 from the Texas A&M President’s Excellence Fund on developing sustainable material for 3-D printed buildings.

Ron Migliori

Ron Migliori, SE, has 40 years of industry experience and is an active member of the LCI Northern California and Core Group Member Emeritus. He co-authored “A Structural Engineers Perspective of Lean Design and Construction” and has presented at the Structural Engineers Association of California convention. Ron was on the IPD Advisory Council and a Peer Reviewer for the recently published book “Integrated Project Delivery – An Action Guide for Leaders.” He has presented at the LCI Congress, the Lean Design Forum, LCI CoP Chapters in Arizona, Nevada, Northern California, as well as the Central Valley (Sacramento). He has also presented at the LCI/P2SL Design Forum in Berkeley, CA and in St. Louis, MO. He has participated in over two dozen IPD projects and has facilitated and conducted training workshops for the Last Planner System in Design and Choosing By Advantages over the last 10 years. Ron is a past President of the DBIA Western Pacific Region. He has been involved in numerous Design-Build (DB) projects throughout his career with recent projects taking on Lean practices. Ron has seen and experienced the active trend of Lean in Design-Build gaining more traction every year and has a vision of an enhanced future state.

Christian Thuesen

Christian Thuesen is Associate Professor in project and construction management at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and currently a Fulbright scholar at UC Berkeley and Stanford. He has worked with projects for more than 20 years as lecturer, researcher, and consultant in various engineering settings, including construction and IT. This has sparked his fundamental research interest in the role of projects as vehicle for industrial and societal change but also more broadly in projects role in today’s society – as a human condition. To pursue this agenda he co-founded DTUs ProjectLab (www.doing-projects.org) which he currently directs. His current research develops an research agenda on the transformation of the construction industry towards sustainability, leveraging developing digital capabilities.

Michael Williams

Michael is a Principal and Senior Healthcare Planner in HMC’s Phoenix office. He has dedicated his 30 years in the profession entirely to Healthcare planning and design. His lean journey started in the mid 90’s when he began to apply process planning methodology and VSM to the operational design integration of healthcare functions into building designs. Over the years Michael has had the opportunity to work in leadership on several IPD and IPD-Lite deliveries of large scale healthcare projects. Additionally, he is a co-leader of HMC’s internal lean transformation efforts. Currently Michael is the leader of the LCI’s Arizona Community of Practice and is a certified instructor for LCI’s Immersive Education Program as well as a core group member of the Arizona Improving Capital Projects series of symposia.