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Biography of Sarah Slaughter

Head Shot
Credit: Mark Ostow

Dr. Sarah Slaughter is a recognized expert on resilience and sustainability for the built environment. She is the founder and CEO/President of the Built Environment Coalition, a research and education nonprofit (501c3) focused on community resilience and sustainability. She is a subject-matter-expert on community resilience, and currently advises government agencies on strategies for improving resilience and sustainability. Dr. Slaughter is currently a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Construction. She currently serves on the Green Building Advisory Committee (GBAC) to the U.S. General Services Administration and is Co-Chair of the Resilient America Roundtable in the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM). She recently served as the Chair of the NASEM Committee to Review the National Institute of Standards and Technology Engineering Laboratory and was a member of the NASEM Committee on Assessing the Capital Needs of the NIH Campus. 

Dr. Slaughter was recently a Visiting Lecturer on resilience in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and, before founding the Built Environment Coalition, was the Associate Director for Buildings and Infrastructure in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), and co-founder and faculty head of the Sustainability Initiative in the MIT Sloan School of Management. Earlier, Dr. Slaughter was founder and CEO of MOCA Systems, Inc., a software-enabled construction program management company based on her research at MIT. Before founding MOCA, she was a MIT professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and before that was a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Lehigh University.

Created May 21, 2021, Updated September 9, 2021