Bruce King
Founder and Director. A registered structural engineer for 27 years, Bruce has worked on high-rise structures in San Francisco, aircraft remodels in Miami, Tahitian resorts, Buddhist monasteries in the Colorado Rockies, passive solar designs all of the world, and hundreds of houses of every shape throughout North America. He has given lectures and talks on ecological building at universities around the world – from showing young schoolchildren about natural building with clay and straw, to speaking on ecological building at the invitation of Prince Charles' Foundation for the Built Environment in London, and at the invitation of the Chinese government in Shanghai and Beijing. He has been featured on public radio in the UK and USA, and print publications such as the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.
King is an advisor to Serious Materials, Foundation Capital and GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. With his wife and partner, Sarah Weller King, he is also the founder of the Green Building Press and author or Buildings of Earth and Straw, Making Better Concrete, and Design of Straw Bale Buildings. In 2010 he completed revisions to ASTM 2392 | Standard Guide for Design of Earthen Wall Building Systems, and has contributed dozens of papers and articles to conferences, books and journals. He lives with his family in Lucas Valley, California.
Sarah Weller King
Secretary/Treasurer. Sarah Weller King has over 25 years of fund raising and marketing communications experience, operating her own freelance consulting business and working with over 75 nonprofit organizations in the local, regional, national and international arenas. In addition, she has worked extensively in corporate communications, video production and proposal development. For EBNet, she is responsible for all management and administration, budget development and implementation and reporting. With her husband, Bruce, Sarah is co-founder of Green Building Press, a small publishing company.
Sarah is one of the founding parents of Dedication to Special Education, an all volunteer organization in Marin County committed to improving the quality of special education. Since 2003 she has served as co-chair of the executive board and is responsible for the organization's Grants to Special Educators program Sarah and Bruce have 2 children, Tyler, 24 and Lucy, 19.
Peter Kloepfer
A co-founder of NexCore Group, healthcare real estate owners and developers in Denver, Colorado, Peter Kloepfer is pivotal to the company's strategic planning. His leadership drives the structure of NexCore's development and acquisitions projects, the evaluation and negotiation of capital and debt sources, and major project delivery. In his 23 years of real estate development financing and structuring, Peter has been responsible for over $2 billion of real estate transactions and has invested in more than $450 million of projects. He holds Juris Doctorate and Master of Law in Taxation (LL.M.) degrees and is a licensed CPA.
Kirsten Ritchie
Kirsten Ritchie is a Senior Associate and Director of Sustainable Design, Asia/Pacific Region, for Gensler, a global architecture and design firm. She has more than 25 years' experience in various aspects of high performance building design, green product certification, environmental clean-up, business intelligence technology and sustainable infrastructure. At Gensler, her numerous projects include leading the sustainability assessment of LEED certification of new and existing corporate campuses across the Pacific, including projects in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chengdu, China. She also created environmental guidelines for Oracle's office projects worldwide and works on a number of LEED projects in the United States and China. She sits on San Francisco's Green Building Task Force and the national board of directors of the USGBC. Recently, Kirsten became the operations chair for the Business Council on Climate Change (BC3), a joint collaboration of the San Francisco business community, San Francisco Department of the Environment, the Bay Area Council and the United Nations Global compact. She is a much-sought-after guest speaker who offers her vision and insight into environmental topics. She is widely and fondly known as a Green Products Guru, Data Geek, Sustainability Strategist, Foodie and Perpetual Optimist.
Larry Strain
Larry Strain is a senior partner with Siegel & Strain, an award winning architectural design, research, and consulting firm committed to sustainable design with a particular expertise in green building materials. Larry Strain's ReSourceful Specifications -- guideline specifications for environmentally sustainable materials and methods -- is an outgrowth of this research and is now incorporated into the GreenSpec Directory, published by Building Green, Inc.
Larry has been involved with sustainable design for over 35 years. He studied ecological systems at the Evergreen State College in the early 1970's, was a student instructor at the Farallones Institute in California with Sim Van der Ryn and Peter Calthorpe, and in the mid 1970's, co-founded and served as the General Contractor for the Solar Center, one of the largest solar design and installation companies in the Bay Area. Mr. Strain received a Masters in Architecture from UC Berkeley in 1983, and became a partner at Siegel & Strain Architects in 1990.
Strain has consulted on sustainable design to the San Francisco Department of Architecture, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, and led workshops for the EPA and GSA. He has taught sustainable design courses at U.C. Berkeley, and in 2001 was a visiting faculty at the International Laboratory for Architecture and Urban Design in Venice, Italy. Mr. Strain is a LEED AP and Fellow in the American Institute of Architects. Siegel & Strain Architects has won numerous awards for sustainable design, including three AIA COTE Top Ten Projects Awards
