After 17 years main engineering groups centered on healthcare, in 2019 Kimberly Cowman was elevated to her present place as nationwide director of engineering at Leo A Daly. On this position, she’s had the chance to additional pursue her career-long ardour {and professional} mission for growing consciousness and adoption of sustainability and high-performance design in healthcare and past.
She believes healthcare has not solely a chance however a accountability to remodel the way in which its buildings function and turn out to be a frontrunner in creating extra sustainable and more healthy locations.
“As designers, we now have a direct impression not simply on the climate-related outcomes of communities, however on the well being outcomes of the individuals who occupy healthcare services,” she says.
For instance, in 2021, Cowman helped type Leo A Daly’s firmwide Design Integration Group (DIG), which strives to advance an built-in design agenda centered on high-performance constructing outcomes. The group’s efforts embrace benchmarking throughout sectors, together with two main hospital tasks: Veterans Hospital in Tulsa (VHiT) in Tulsa, Okla., and St. Francis Hospital in Muskogee, Okla. Built-in design workshops, which included representatives from throughout the complete design staff and ranging design disciplines, have been introduced collectively for every of those tasks to establish efficiency purpose targets, akin to for vitality use depth (EUI), and to seek out design methods that might end in a greater performing design.
That effort included issues for thermal consolation, website group connection, daylighting alternatives, and indoor air high quality, amongst others. By working to develop a design tradition round cross-disciplinary options, Cowman believes the trade could make bigger strides towards reaching objectives relating to vitality conservation, carbon discount, and more healthy indoor environments.
In the meantime, she regularly presents her information to advance the trade through publications, talking engagements, and extra. Her latest work contains the whitepaper “Elevating indoor humidity to cut back the unfold of pathogens,” which pioneers new approaches in constructing design to sluggish the unfold of COVID-19 and different airborne pathogens, in addition to outreach efforts to advance the adoption of Vitality Star certification in healthcare services.
Cowman encourages Vitality Star certification in healthcare services to focus on the operational vitality impression of a facility and give attention to discovering effectivity alternatives by means of the lifetime of a constructing’s operation.
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