Gail Vittori

Gail Vittori, LEED AP, is Co-Director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a non-profit design firm established in 1975 that advances seminal prototypes, protocols, and policies where she has worked since 1979. She is the 2013 Chair of the Green Building Certification Institute's Board of Directors, and served as the 2009 Chair of the U.S. Green Building Council's Board of Directors, and on the USGBC Board from 2002-2010. She currently serves on the Founding Board of the Health Product Declaration Collaborative. Since 1993, Ms. Vittori has coordinated the Center's Sustainable Design Consultancy, including serving as a Sustainable Design Consultant for the Pentagon Renovation Program's Commissioning Team from 1999 to 2007, numerous City of Austin design projects including Texas' first public sector LEED certified building, the redevelopment of the 709-acre former Austin airport including piloting LEED for Neighborhood Development, the 1.1 million square foot Block 21 urban mixed-use project, the new Austin Federal Courthouse, and the first LEED Platinum-certified hospital in the world, Dell Children's Medical Center of Central Texas. Since 2000, Ms. Vittori has been a catalyst for several national initiatives focused on greening the health care sector and advancing environmental health considerations in green building. Examples include collaborating on the development of the American Society of Healthcare Engineering's (ASHE) Green Healthcare Construction Guidance Statement, and the Green Guide for Health Care, convened by the Center in 2002, a project of CMPBS and Health Care Without Harm. She currently serves as a Co-Coordinator of the Green Guide for Health Care and was Founding Chair of the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED for Healthcare core committee (2004-2008). She is co-author, with Robin Guenther FAIA, of Sustainable Healthcare Architecture, first published by Wiley and Sons in 2008 with the 2nd edition to be released in 2013. Also in 2008, she was recognized as one of "Twenty Who Are Making A Difference in Healthcare" in Healthcare Design Magazine. In her hometown of Austin, Texas, Ms. Vittori has been a driver of policy initiatives that have fundamentally influenced the city's future. In 1989, Ms. Vittori proposed a conceptual framework for what evolved as the City of Austin's Green Builder Program, the only U.S. program recognized at the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and the first green building program in the world. She along with Pliny Fisk collaborated on the program's early stage development through 1992. Austin's Green Builder Program was among the seminal policy initiatives that influenced the formation of the U.S. Green Building Council and LEED, in addition to scores of green building policies throughout the U.S. and abroad. Ms. Vittori was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design from 1998-1999, and attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she studied economics. She received the Presidential Award for Leadership in Federal Energy Management in 2002 recognizing her participation on the Pentagon Renovation Program. Ms. Vittori is on the advisory board of Environmental Building News and is the Treasurer of EarthShare of Texas. She was featured as an Innovator: Building a Greener World in TIME Magazine in March 2007 and, with Pliny Fisk III, in Texas Monthly's 35th year anniversary issue (February 2008) in '35 People Who Will Shape Our Future.' In 2009, Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed Ms. Vittori to the Department of Homeland Security's Sustainability and Efficiency Task Force, for which she served as Vice-Chair. In 2011, Ms. Vittori was honored to be one of 34 selected for the inaugural class of LEED Fellows. Ms. Vittori is married to Pliny Fisk III and has two children.