Railesha Tiwari

Railesha has joined the Washington University’s Office of Sustainability and Facilities teams in a unique position as a Sustainable Design and Construction Project Manager.  Her role is to foster sustainable design principles across all projects and help not only achieve the university’s sustainable operations goals, but set new goals that will expand WashU’s role as a national leader.

Railesha has a Doctorate degree from the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA. Her doctoral research focus was to develop an integrated design process model for the early design phase of Net-Zero Energy Buildings. Soon after graduating in 2015, Railesha joined the Green Building Services team at Harvard University. She led and successfully managed the LEED certification process, prioritized sustainability goals and helped deliver sustainable building projects of varying scale. She led collaboration of multi-disciplinary stakeholders, conducted sustainability charrettes and sustainability meetings utilizing her project management capabilities. As a graduate student, Railesha had the opportunity to work with Skidmore, Owings and Merill in San Francisco for a summer internship where she was actively involved in large-scale sustainable projects that were intended to have net zero-carbon footprints.

Railesha was awarded the King Student Medal of Excellence in Architectural + Environmental Research by ARCC in 2015. She is also a recipient of the Internship scholarship award from Baskerville, Richmond and has won multiple graduate scholar awards. She has presented her research at many conferences such as the iiSBE Net Zero Built Environment 2014 Symposium in Florida; the International Conference on Water, Informatics, Sustainability and Environment in Ottawa, Canada; Fifth International Conference on Constructed Environment at University of Philadelphia and Ninth International Conference on Design Principles and Practices, Chicago. She is a LEED Accredited Professional and also a member of ASHRAE, USGBC, SBSE, iiSBE, IBPSA, NIBS and ARCC, ACSA, and CIBSE communities. As a registered architect in India, her design experience includes residential, commercial, hotel, and resort projects. Her ongoing research and outreach interests focus on environmental design, Net-Zero Energy buildings, healthy building materials and Carbon-Neutral building design.

When asked about what she is looking forward to, Railesha responded, “I am absolutely ecstatic to join this wonderful team of enthusiastic individuals from diverse backgrounds that share a passion for sustainability. I am deeply thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute in the continuous development of Washington University’s leadership in sustainability and green building design.”