Good design supports health and well-being for building occupants and the surrounding community. This educational session features healthy building expert Dr. Joseph Allen, who will share his team’s work on the 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building, and how they affect all levels of educational facilities and the students, teachers and community members who inhabit them. The 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building is a holistic, evidence-based approach to understanding how buildings affect the people inside them, created by a multidisciplinary team of experts from the Healthy Buildings Program at the Hard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Joseph G. Allen is an associate professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-author of Healthy Buildings: How Indoor Spaces Drive Performance and Productivity, with John Macomber at Harvard Business School. He began his career conducting forensic health investigations of sick buildings in several hundred buildings across a diverse range of industries, including healthcare, biotechnology, education, commercial office real estate and manufacturing. At Harvard, Dr. Allen directs the Healthy Buildings program where he led the creation of ‘The 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building’. To drive research into practice, he works with Fortune 100 companies on implementing Healthy Building strategies in their global portfolios. He earned his Doctor of Science (DSc) and Master of Public Health (MPH) degrees from the Boston University School of Public Health, and a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Biology from Boston College. More information on his research can be found at: www.ForHealth.org.