Elizabeth Hausler

Founder & CEO , Build Change

About This Expert

Elizabeth Hausler is founder and CEO of Build Change, which designs disaster-resistant houses in emerging nations and trains homeowners and professionals to build them. She also provides technical support to development agencies, performs post-earthquake technical reconnaissance, and contributes to case histories. Previously, Hausler spent five years in the engineering consulting industry for Peterson Consulting in Chicago and Dames & Moore in Denver. Her honors include the 2016 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, the 2011 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability, and a Schwab Foundation US Social Entrepreneur of the Year. Hausler has lectured globally and served on the 2002-2003 US National Research Council Committee to develop a research agenda for earthquake engineering.

In 2014 Elizabeth was named to the Academy of Distinguished Alumni of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of University of California, Berkeley. She was named a 2011 US Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the Schwab Foundation, and is the winner of the 2011 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability. Elizabeth is a 2004 Echoing Green Fellow, a 2006 Draper Richards Kaplan Fellow, a 2009 Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow, and was a Fulbright scholar to India in 2002-2003.

Dr. Hausler is a skilled brick, block, and stone mason with an M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.S. in Environmental Science from the University of Colorado, and a B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before graduate school, she spent five years in the engineering consulting industry for Peterson Consulting in Chicago and Dames & Moore in Denver. She has lectured on sustainable disaster-resistant construction in eleven countries and served on the 2002-2003 US National Research Council Committee to develop a long-term research agenda for earthquake engineering.

Build Change was a winner of the OpenIDEO Urban Resilience Challenge in early 2016, and was the winner of a 2008 Tech Award for Technology Benefiting Humanity in the Equality Category for making earthquake-resistant housing solutions available to homeowners regardless of income level. Elizabeth and Build Change’s work have been featured featured in the New York Times, BBC website, NPR All Things Considered, abcNEWS World News Tonight Person of the Week, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and Elle Magazine.

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