Kais Al-Rawi, AIA works at the intersection of architecture, engineering and technology with expertise in solving complex building challenges through digital design. He the Enclosure Design Leader at the Los Angeles office of Walter P Moore. His experience has been leveraged on a number of high-profile projects including SoFi Stadium, Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, New Orleans Airport, among others. He is a subject matter expert in computational design and its implementation in the AEC industry from concept to construction

Dana Cupkova holds Associate Professorship at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture and is a Co-founder and Director of EPIPHYTE Lab, an architectural design and research collaborative. From 2005 to 2012 she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Cornell University Department of Architecture. From 2014 to 2018 she served on the ACADIA Board of Directors and currently she is on the Editorial Board for the IJAC. Professor Cupkova is Track Chair of SoA’s Masters of Science in Sustainable Design (MSSD) program. Cupkova's design work engages the built environment at the intersection of ecology, computationally driven processes, and systems analysis. In her research, she interrogates the relationship between design-space and ecology as it engages computational methods, thermodynamic processes, and experimentation with geometrically driven performance logic.

Ariane Laxo is Director of Sustainability at HGA. She leads HGA’s resilience planning services, including collaborating with climate scientists to understand how climate projection models can be downscaled and used to inform architecture and engineering workflows. Ariane is an adjunct professor at Kent State University, serves on the AIA Resilience & Adaptation Advisory Group and the Advisory Board of the University of Minnesota’s Climate Adaptation Partnership. Earlier this year, Ariane and Parag co-authored Projected climate data for building design: barriers to use, a peer-reviewed paper published in Buildings & Cities.

Parag Rastogi is a building scientist with a background in civil engineering and 10 years’ experience in research and development. He joined arbnco after working and studying at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, Japan. At arbnco he supports the product development teams with research on building decarbonisation, health and wellbeing, IoT-based controls, integrating climate risk analysis into building performance evaluation and planning, and the use of machine learning and data science in software and hardware for buildings. Parag is also a visiting instructor at CEPT University, Ahmedabad.

Jose Sanchez is an Architect, Game Designer, and Theorist based in Detroit, Michigan. He is the director of the Plethora Project (www.plethora-project.com ), a research studio investing in the future of the propagation of architectural design knowledge. He is the creator of the video games Block’hood and Common’hood, digital social platforms that aid the authoring of architectural and ecological thinking to non-expert audiences. He is the author of the book “Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms” published by Routledge in 2020 and the co-creator of Bloom, a crowdsourced interactive installation which was the winner of the Wonder Series hosted by the City of London for the 2012 Olympics. He has taught in renowned institutions in the United States and in Europe, including the Architectural Association in London, The Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, at the University of Southern California. He is currently at the University of Michigan, where he is an Associate Professor at the Taubman College School of Architecture. His research “Architecture for the Commons” designs and interrogates social media platforms as tools with the potential to author architectural content in the public domain.