Well at Work: Creating Wellbeing in Any Workspace

Join the Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design and AIA Los Angeles for a thoughtful program on the simple, science-backed things that can be done to help people thrive where they work—in an office or at home. Esther M. Sternberg, MD, pioneer in design and health and author of award winning Well at Work: Creating Wellbeing in Any Workspace (Little, Brown Spark, 2023) will share the research she has carried out with scientists, engineers, designers, architects and building science professionals on how workspaces can be designed to reduce stress and improve resilience.

Street parking only. Lunch not included. We regret that this venue is not currently ADA accessible.

Following the presentation a panel of design, public health, and building science experts will offer a variety of perspectives.

Keynote

Dr. Sternberg is a Professor of Medicine in the University of Arizona College of Medicine Tucson, with joint appointments in Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, and is Research Director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine and Director of the UArizona Institute on Place, Wellbeing & Performance.

Following the presentation a panel of design, public health, and building science experts will offer a variety of perspectives. Panelists include Penny Herscovitch, co-founder of Padlab design studio, and Associate Professor of Spatial Experience Design at ArtCenter College of Design, where she co-leads international collaborations with Tama Art University Tokyo and Chilean nonprofit children’s burn center COANIQUEM. Also Joon-Ho Choi, Ph.D., Associate Dean of Research & Creative Work and an Associate Professor of Building Science in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California (USC) and Howard Hu, MD, MPH, ScD, the Flora L. Thornton Chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine, at the Keck School of Medicine at USC will be joining the panel. Raymond Neutra, son of the architect Richard Neutra, will moderate the panel.

Panelists

Penny Herscovitch is a Los Angeles-based designer and educator, who co-leads the design studio Padlab.

An Associate Professor in the Spatial Experience Design Department at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, she has co-taught international collaborations, including the FutureCraft initiatives with Tama Art University in Tokyo and Tongji University in Shanghai. Penny has co-lead ArtCenter Designmatters collaborations designing for social impact, including: Safe Niños, co-creating holistic healing environments to support children recovering from burns, in collaboration with the Santiago, Chile-based nonprofit COANIQUEM; and Safe Agua, an educational initiative to design innovative, affordable solutions to address water poverty in Latin America, with the NGO Socialab. These international initiatives have received grants towards implementation and been exhibited world-wide, including at the United Nations. Penny has conducted research and writing for design institutions and firms, including Pritzker Prize winning Morphosis Architects. Her publications include the Design Strategy for Social Innovation Toolkit, an online resource that supports educators in applying principles of design education for social impact. Penny has lectured at Design China Beijing, Hebei International Design Week, the Cumulus Association Conference in Wuxi, China, as well as LightFair International in NY and the VentureWell Conference in Portland, OR, on Design Thinking for Social Innovation. In 2003, Penny received her B.A. in Architecture, Magna Cum Laude from Yale University.

Joon-Ho Choi, Ph.D., Associate Dean of Research & Creative Work and an Associate Professor of Building Science in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California (USC).

Dr. Choi’s primary research interests are in the areas of advanced controls for high performance buildings, bio-sensing controls in the built environment, smart building enclosure, passive building strategies, human-centered building environmental control, building systems integration, environmental sustainability, and comprehensive POE (post-occupancy evaluation), indoor environmental quality, and human health, and work productivity. As an interdisciplinary researcher, he has participated in multiple research projects sponsored by governmental agencies, industry partners and research grant programs including those of the General Services Administration (GSA).

Howard Hu, MD, MPH, ScD, is the Flora L. Thornton Chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, at the University of Southern California. He is a physician-scientist, internist and preventive medicine specialist, with a doctoral degree in epidemiology.

Since 1990, Dr. Hu has led multi-institutional and international teams of scientists, students and fellows devoted to investigating the environmental, nutritional, social, psychosocial, genetic and epigenetic determinants of chronic disease and impaired child development in birth cohort and aging cohort studies in the U.S., Mexico, India, China, and elsewhere around the world. His team’s work has generated over 300 publications and won several awards, such as the 1999 Progress and Achievement Award from the U.S. NIH/NIEHS, the 2009 Linus Pauling Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2011 Award of Excellence from the American Public Health Association, and the 2015 John Goldsmith Award for Outstanding Contributions from the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology.