The People Behind BuildingGreen
Alex Wilson – Founder, Executive Editor
For more than 30 years, Alex Wilson has been the most trusted voice on energy efficiency and environmentally responsible design and construction. Since launching Environmental Building News (EBN) in 1992, he’s built a reputation, resources, and staff to provide the foundation for BuildingGreen, an information company that produces GreenSpec, BuildingGreen.com, and LEEDuser, as well as providing consulting for a variety of companies for whom sustainable design is a core value. He is executive editor of EBN and GreenSpec, and his Energy Solutions blog is widely read.
Alex’s expertise in energy efficiency comes from hands-on engagement in the industry, including serving as executive director of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association for five years in the early 1980s and teaching workshops on the construction of solar greenhouses in New Mexico in the late 1970s. A noted author, his work includes Your Green Home; the Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings, as co-author; and the Rocky Mountain Institute's comprehensive textbook, Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate, along with hundreds of articles for publications from Architectural Record, to Popular Science. Alex also leads BuildingGreen’s involvement with Boston Architectural College’s sustainable design curriculum. He served on the board of directors of the U.S. Green Building Council for five years, was a founding member of the USGBC Research Committee, and received the 2008 USGBC Leadership Award for Education. Alex is currently a trustee of The Nature Conservancy–Vermont Chapter, an appropriate role for someone who has written guidebooks on quiet-water paddling throughout the Northeast. (Read More)
Nadav Malin – President
Nadav Malin is the building industry’s acknowledged go-to resource when you need thoughtful perspective on the materials and design solutions that define sustainable building practice. As president of BuildingGreen, he oversees the company’s industry-leading information and community-building resources, including Environmental Building News, its sister publication GreenSpec, and the project certification help tool LEEDuser. He also lends his technical expertise and vision to McGraw-Hill Construction, serving as executive editor of the award-winning GreenSource magazine.
When the LEED rating system was just starting out, Nadav was tapped to lead its new Materials and Resources Technical Advisory Group, which he chaired throughout LEED’s formative years. A long-serving member of the national LEED Faculty, he is a sought-after speaker for USGBC, AIA, and CSI events, and as a consultant to architecture firms and government agencies alike. Nadav led the team that created the U.S. Department of Energy’s High Performance Buildings Database, and continues to oversee BuildingGreen’s responsibility for ensuring the quality of case studies and collecting meaningful data on actual building performance. When he is not facilitating a rich conversation among design professionals, he can often be found chasing a hockey puck or a soccer ball, depending on the season.
Peter Yost – Vice President, Technical Services
Peter Yost is the person you turn to if you want to truly understand how to design or retrofit a high-performing building. He brings more than 25 years experience in building, researching, teaching, writing, and consulting on high-performance homes to his twin roles as vice-president of technical services for BuildingGreen, and technical director for Taunton Press’s GreenBuildingAdvisor.com. His expertise stretches from construction waste management and advanced framing to energy efficiency and building durability.
Peter has been called upon to provide this building-science expertise to the nation’s leading homebuilding programs, including NAHB’s Green Building Standard, USGBC's LEED for Homes, EPA’s WaterSense, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Building America. Peter is an instructor for the Boston Architectural College's Sustainable Design Certificate program and for the University of Massachusetts Department of Building Materials and Wood Technology program in Amherst. A LEED AP, he is a past co-chair of the USGBC's LEED for Homes program, a member of the LEED faculty, and a certified instructor for the NAHB Advanced Green Building: Building Science course. When not at his computer or teaching a class, Peter is often in the attic, basement, or inside the walls of his own 100-year-old home, which he is methodically transforming from an energy hog to a model of efficiency.
Tristan Roberts – Editorial Director
As Editorial Director for BuildingGreen, Tristan Roberts brings a deep commitment to environmental stewardship, a broad knowledge about sustainable design, deep understanding of green building products, and a mastery of all things LEED. A longtime contributor of in-depth feature articles in Environmental Building News and regular reporting on green news in BuildingGreen.com, he may be best known for his role in launching and managing the continuous updating of LEEDuser, a tool sought by the U.S. Green Building Council to provide demystify LEED on a credit-by-credit basis for project teams. Tristan is a daily presence on the LEEDuser forum, where he provides advice and facilitates conversations on knotty LEED issues.
A speaker known for his sparkling wit and insight, Roberts has recently spoken at the AIA National Convention, Greenbuild, Yale University, the State University of New York, and the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont, and you’ll find his byline in Landscape Architecture, Energy Design Update, and GreenSource magazines. A LEED AP BD+C, Roberts is an instructor for the Boston Architectural College’s Sustainable Design Certificate program, and can tell you, in dozens of variations, how many green builders it takes to change a light bulb. Tristan has a personal passion for combining natural building materials, energy-efficiency, and budget-friendly construction practices with sustainability at the community level.
Jennifer Atlee – Senior Research Associate
As senior research associate for BuildingGreen, Jennifer Atlee steers the in-depth independent research that is the hallmark of all BuildingGreen resources: GreenSpec, Environmental Building News, LEEDuser, and other BuildingGreen activities. With her broad knowledge in sustainability, analytical acumen, and passion for improving the standards used to assess the sustainability of products, processes, and organizations, Jennifer brings strong direction to the research process behind GreenSpec’s product-screening decisions, and technical rigor to BuildingGreen’s contract research projects such as the ASID/USGBC ReGreen Guidelines and CSI’s GreenFormat.
In her prior work with MIT, Rocky Mountain Institute, Toxics Use Reduction Institute, and Demand Management Institute, Jennifer addressed commercial and industrial energy efficiency, community-scale renewable energy, electronics recycling flows, and the economics of toxics use reduction. She has a dual MS from MIT in Technology Policy and Material Science & Engineering, and a BS in Environmental Science from Brown University. Jennifer spends as much time as possible outdoors, and soothes her creative impulse with pottery, but her main obsession is working to change our social, political, and economic systems so that people going about their daily lives make the world a better place by default.
Brent Ehrlich – Products Editor
As products editor for BuildingGreen, Brent Ehrlich conducts research and writes product- and category-level descriptions for the company’s GreenSpec product directory. He also contributes product reviews and feature articles for Environmental Building News, and is a contributing editor to McGraw-Hill’s GreenSource magazine. He has taught college composition; written pre-SAT test questions (in case you ever wondered who wrote those sadistic readability passages); worked as a freelance writer for Green Builder; and copy-edited for the science journals Neuron, Molecular Cell, and others. He became interested in green building while working as a trim carpenter in Boulder and watching sprawl envelope the front range of Colorado.
Angela Battisto – Operations Director
Ben Hewitt – Web Developer
HB Lozito – Sales Administrator
Paula Melton – Managing Editor
Walter Pearce – Publisher
Sarah Rice – Office Manager
Charlotte Snyder – Customer Service and Circulation Manager
Erin Weaver – Editorial Intern
Jerelyn Wilson – Outreach Director