Keynotes

Anica is HOK’s global sustainable design director, serving on the firm’s board of directors and design board. 

Based in Washington, D.C., Anica served as a mayoral appointee to the District of Columbia’s Green Building Advisory Council 2012-2025 and co-chaired the Building Energy Performance Standard Task Force 2019-2025. Anica has served three terms on the Green and Energy Codes Committee, supporting the district’s decarbonization code development. 

Nationally, Anica serves on the Board of the New Buildings Institute and the Urban Land Institute Net Zero Imperative Steering Committee. She is outgoing Chair of the USGBC LEED Steering Committee, delivering LEED v5; and a former chair of the AIA Codes and Standards Committee; Anica co-authored with the AIA Blue Ribbon Panel on Codes “Disruption, Evolution, and Change: AIA’s Vision for the Future of Design and Construction”. Her testimony before Congress and recommendations for building policies and incentives were included in the House Select Committee report “Solving the Climate Crisis: The Congressional Action Plan for a Clean Energy Economy and a Healthy, Resilient, and Just America”. 

Globally, Anica recently was a speaker and delegate to the inaugural United Nations Environment Programme Buildings and Climate Global Forum, describing how the building sector can scale up decarbonization efforts to meet the targets in the Paris Agreement. 

Mary Ann Piette is the Associate Lab Director of the Energy Technologies Area (ETA) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. ETA conducts research to accelerate innovation to provide affordable, reliable, secure and abundant energy systems. She has been at LBNL for over 3 decades. ETA’s work ranges from advancing building technologies, to novel manufacturing systems, advanced materials for energy storage, cybersecure grid technologies and efficient data centers. She has authored over 120 peer reviewed publications related to energy efficiency and demand response research and received a Lifetime Achievement Award at Berkeley Lab for her work in energy-efficient and grid-interactive buildings. She has received two R&D 100 awards related to city and building energy modeling tools and she is a board member of the OpenADR Alliance. Piette has engineering degrees from UC Berkeley and the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. 

Dr. Rania Labib is an Associate Professor of Architecture and the Director of the Artificial Intelligence for High-Performance Buildings Lab at Prairie View A&M University, part of the Texas A&M University System. With over 15 years of experience at the intersection of architecture, building performance, and emerging technologies, Dr. Labib specializes in building simulations, energy modeling, and the integration of AI methods into the built environment.  

Her work focuses on leveraging advanced computational tools to enhance the design, operation, and optimization of high-performance buildings. She has secured over $1 million in research funding, including a recent $400K National Science Foundation grant to embed AI and data science into AEC education. Dr. Labib was honored with the “Most Promising Digital Solution” award for her AI-driven educational platform, AI EnergiGuide, at the 2024 World Summit on the Digital Built Environment. The award was jointly presented by the Republic of Estonia’s Ministry of Climate and the Finnish Association of Civil Engineers.  

Dr. Labib holds a Ph.D. in Architecture with an emphasis in Environmental Design from Texas A&M University and is an active member of IBPSA, where she served as the Houston Chapter Lead from 2020 to 2022.