What has had value, and what will last?

Architect, designer, and author, and the founder whose work the Institute exists to carry. Across five decades, from the first solar-heated house in Ireland to buildings, products, cities, and frameworks on every continent, his practice has been an answer to that question.

With The Hannover Principles in 1992, and then Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things in 2002 and The Upcycle in 2013, he helped give the world the language of circular design. What began as a way of designing became an industry: companies remaking carpet, clothing, buildings, and chemistry around the idea that waste equals food, and a certification program now applied to thousands of products.

The results so far are visible in the record collected on the Ideas page: factories that clean their own water, products designed to be disassembled and used again, and a generation of designers who take it for granted that industry can add value rather than take it. His honors, from the Presidential Green Chemistry Award to the World Economic Forum's Award for Circular Economy Leadership and the TIME100 Climate list, mark how far the idea has traveled.

His attention stays on the horizon. Through writing and speaking with leaders, governments, companies, and the next generation of leaders and innovators, he keeps asking what comes next: a safe, then circular future, designed to keep adding value for generations none of us will meet. The Institute is his way of making sure that question keeps getting asked, and answered.

His own account of the work is at mcdonough.com.

Works alongside William McDonough as Managing Director, carrying the Institute's fifty years of ideas into their next fifty years of use: the demonstration, the convenings, and the partnerships that put the ideas back to work.

He came to the Institute after 25 years in direct service and philanthropy, from education and housing to climate and applied economics, and as founder and CEO of Complère he works on how evidence reaches the people making decisions.

His focus at the Institute is the geothermal possibility in Virginia, convening the people who can measure, build, and decide.

Underneath all of it is a commitment to intergenerational design: the conviction that what we make today should keep adding value far beyond our own time, for the children of all species.

Founder and former CEO of Apex Clean Energy, and before that Greenlight Energy, he has spent nearly two decades commercializing utility-scale wind, solar, and storage power facilities.

After those years building companies, he founded Generation180 to inspire and equip individuals to join in the transition to clean energy, and built Pearl, which brings the energy performance of a home into view when it is bought and sold.

He knows what it takes to move from a promising idea to an operating business: the capital, the patience, and the people. That experience helps the Institute aim its work at places where it can actually take hold.

Founder of Secret Lab, Bright Blue, and Bright.Green, where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer, he has spent his career creating companies around new technology, from software and connected retail to electric vehicles.

Based in Miami, he has built teams that re-engineer how industries work, not just how their tools do.

He stays close to how technology actually gets made, which keeps the Institute's ambitions grounded in what can be built. His question for any plan is simple: does it work, and will it keep working?