Skip to main content
ULI SPRING MEETING ULI SPRING MEETING
Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO, United States May 12-14, 2025
Presenter

Dr. Carlos Cerezo Davila

Global Director of Sustainability Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF)

Carlos is a building science expert and the Global Head of Sustainability for KPF, where he leads the firm’s inhouse Building Performance Simulation team, KPF-EP, closely collaborating with design teams across the firm’s global network. His work focuses on coordinating firm-wide initiatives to minimize the environmental impact of KPF projects and operations through an “evidence based” approach, and developing new computational tools to incorporate carbon, energy, thermal, and daylight modeling in design. Carlos has led the sustainable design for some of KPF’s most ambitious projects, including a carbon neutral ready research campus for HKUST in Guangzhou, one of the first fully electric laboratory buildings in New York City, and climate resilient commercial waterfront district in Boston. Before joining KPF, Carlos worked as a Research Scientist and Instructor at MIT’s Sustainable Design Lab, collaborating with municipalities including Boston, Lisbon, and Kuwait to model and analyze building energy use patterns at an urban scale. Carlos is a licensed architect by the University of Seville (Spain, 2010), having practiced in Spain, Japan, and the United States. He also holds a Master’s from Harvard University (2013) and a PhD from MIT (2017). He has contributed to numerous research publications and has been a guest lecturer at MIT’s Center for Real Estate (MIT CRE) since 2022.

Speaking at

Wed Apr 10 10:00 AM — 10:20 AM (GMT-05:00) Eastern Time New York Hilton Midtown - Level 3, Americas Hall I - Area A

The Carbon Sweet Spot: Tradeoffs between Embodied Carbon and Operating Carbon

Designing buildings to operate on less energy and carbon is essential to net zero goals, but some design choices—particularly in facades—can increase a building's upfront embodied carbon. This session explores the design decisions and tradeoffs real estate professionals should know to create buildings that are low carbon from construction to end of life, based on research from ULI Greenprint, architecture firm KPF, and the University of Washington's Integrated Design Lab.