A journalist and author focused on architecture, cities, and climate, Sam Bloch examines how design decisions shape everyday experience under conditions of environmental stress. His work brings close attention to the spatial, political, and material dimensions of climate adaptation—particularly where questions of comfort, health, and equity intersect.

Sam is the author of Shade, an investigation of how societies have used architecture, landscape, and urban form to manage heat across history and how those strategies are being re-examined as extreme heat becomes one of the most urgent climate risks facing cities today. Through reporting that bridges building science, urban policy, and lived experience, in The New York Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and other national outlets, Sam's work reframes thermal comfort as a cultural, technical, and ethical challenge.

A bioclimatic architect and Principal at the Green Design Collaborative (GDC), Victor designed his first passive solar house in 1978. Since he has worked as an architect, writer, researcher, daylighting designer, and environmental consultant. As a Principal with RMI for 20 years, Victor encouraging widespread adoption of net zero district developments, low embodied carbon materials, and comprehensive building energy retrofits. He has consulted on hundreds of high performance building projects, lectured worldwide, published dozens of papers and testified to the US Congress in support of building efficiency. 

From 1993 to 2000 Victor was an Associate Professor and Director of Research at the University of Hawaii School of Architecture and was Chairman of the AIA Honolulu Energy and Environment Committee. Victor served on the Board of Directors for the American Solar Energy Society, the University of Colorado Design Review Board, the Carbon Leadership Forum, ASHRAE’s Task Force for Building Decarbonization, the AIA National Committee on the Environment (COTE AG) and the United States GSA Green Building Advisory Committee, where he ran a task group to promote the procurement of low embodied carbon materials by the Federal government. His company Green Design Collaborative consults on high performance buildings internationally.

An Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University and a practicing architect with over twenty years of professional, national award-winning, sustainable design experience, Robin focuses on the pedagogy related to the built environment’s role in both carbon neutrality and human health and well-being, with an emphasis on the connection between academia and the allied professions. She is the editor and contributing author of Teaching Carbon Neutral Design in North America: Twenty Award-Winning Architectural Design Studio Methodologies (Routledge 2025) and a contributing author of Programming for Health and Wellbeing in Architecture (Routledge 2022).

Robin is the project architect of many LEED certified buildings as well as the first US Department of Education Green Ribbon School recognized by President Barack Obama. Robin won the 2025 AIA Georgia Educator of the Year Award and her students have won the AIA/ACSA COTE Top Ten for Students Award and the AIA Georgia Student Design Award. Robin serves as the 2025 Chair of the National AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) Leadership Group and has earned two degrees from Virginia Tech: a Bachelor of Architecture and a post-professional Master of Architecture.

Through his 19-year tenure at Architecture 2030, Vincent Martinez has been working to solve the climate crisis by catalyzing built environment decarbonization efforts through the development and activation of robust networks focused on private sector commitments, education, training, and public policies. Vincent has facilitated the collective impact of a large spectrum of industry partners and organizations to create local, regional, national and international initiatives and programs.

Vincent previous acted as the 2030 Districts Network Interim Director from 2013 to 2016, helping co-found the 2030 Districts model that has now been adopted by 22 North American cities and a founding member of the 2030 Districts Network Board of Governors. Vincent also formerly managed the development and dissemination of the AIA+2030 Professional Education Series, which provided design professionals in 27 markets across North America with strategies for reaching zero net carbon building operations and has since been developed into an AIA online education series. Through his work with the Zero Cities Project, a collaboration with national partners and 11 leading US cities, he led the development of Achieving Zero, a framework of incremental actions that cities and governments can put in place to ensure carbon neutral built environments by 2040. Vincent has most recently been leading Architecture 2030’s delegations at international climate convenings, including the UN Climate Conference COP28 in December 2023 and the Buildings and Climate Global Forum in 2024 hosted by the UN Environment Program and the Government of France.

Vincent is an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and was the 2018 chair of the AIA Energy Leadership Group, a former member of the AIA Sustainability Leadership Group, and was the 2022 chair of the AIA Committee on Climate Action and Design Excellence. He was named an Emerging Leader by the Design Futures Council in 2015 and one of Building Design+Construction's 40 Under 40 class of 2022. Vincent is also a former member of the World Economic Forum’s G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance Sustainability Task Force and the Forum’s Urban Infrastructure Task Force.