Pamela Sams is a Technical Director at the Washington DC office of Gensler. She has been a Senior Project Architect on design teams developing and building many innovative, large scale, and complex projects in the U.S., Africa, Europe and the Middle East. She was a project leader on the Western Expansion to Dulles Airport; Oqyana-World First, a multi-use development located on built islands off of the coast of Dubai; and she recently completed the design for a new Forensic Laboratory Campus for the Department of Justice and is heading the in-office Construction Administration team for Phase One. Before returning to the U.S. in 1998, she worked and taught in Paris and Ireland. She received her MArch from Princeton University and her BFA from Parsons School of Design. She is a member of the Women In Architecture Committee, Northern Virginia. She is committed to creating a more open and rich dialogue regarding the importance of excellent technical design and high building performance in achieving sustainable goals and innovative designs.