Brad Benke is a Research Engineer at the Carbon Leadership Forum focused on developing data-driven resources to help practitioners and policymakers adopt and scale decarbonization strategies in the built environment. With a background in deep-green architecture and consulting, Brad works to synthesize and improve life cycle assessment practices and tools within the AEC industry and deliver practical solutions for low-carbon building design and construction. His recent work includes leading the CLF WBLCA Benchmark Study and developing the background data and methodologies for the CLF Embodied Carbon Policy Reduction Calculator. Brad is a former co-chair of AIA Seattle’s Committee on the Environment, and a former Senior Architect at McLennan Design, where he led diverse teams and stakeholders toward achieving decarbonization goals for buildings and organizations across the country.

Brie McCarthy is an architect and sustainability researcher at the Miller Hull Partnership in Seattle, WA. She graduated with an M.Arch from Cal Poly Pomona and received the AIA COTE Top Ten for Students award for her graduate thesis in 2018. Her work at Miller Hull has spanned from large overseas government projects to private residential in the Pacific Northwest. Since joining the firm, Brie has helped lead sustainability research efforts on embodied carbon and climate smart forestry, and is a planning committee member for the Seattle hub of the Carbon Leadership Forum where she collaborates with fellow industry professionals on LCA methodologies and benchmarking. She is passionate about bringing awareness to the urgency of construction impacts on climate change, and is constantly looking for new ways to deliver actionable carbon data to design teams. Disclosure information not submitted.

Lindsey Kahler understands that embodied carbon data is key to minimizing the most devastating impacts of climate change. She has dedicated her work as an architectural and sustainability designer at SERA Architects to developing research-based, process-oriented, climate-positive design solutions. In this effort, she co-authored a case study that quantifies the environmental impacts of a deep retrofit project, emphasizing the complexity of measuring embodied carbon emissions, shedding light on the need for harmonized data and methodologies. Lindsey advocates for the need to standardize whole building life cycle assessment modeling and embodied carbon benchmarking across the AEC industry. She has led the charge at SERA with her efforts to track embodied carbon data for the firm’s portfolio and she has future aspirations to inform firm-wide benchmarking and reduction targets.