Case Studies Region: West

It would be a typical day on the job for Michelle Swanitz, one that had her responding to one situation after another before the sun set on the Central California coast. Director of facilities for the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, Swanitz was handling […]

Daniel Munoz has never been far from a construction site. He swept the dust of drywall adhesive off floors as a boy and learned the trades from his father and anyone else who’d teach him at Warner Constructors. Now the company’s Vice President of Project Management and Construction, and soon to be one of its […]

John Eloe has always liked making people smile. When he was nineteen and deciding what he wanted to study in college, his mom encouraged him to pursue his love of cooking. He had never considered being a chef before, but soon realized he could bring people joy through good food. Eloe worked as a chef […]

Kris Garnhart knows good looks doesn’t always mean lasting value. When installing new windows at a school, for instance, he needs to weigh his options. Does he go with the large floor-to-ceiling panes that designers want? Or does he go with smaller ones in a large grid frame? The second option might not be as […]

There’s only one Leonardo da Vinci, one Picasso and one Michelangelo. But that didn’t stop a seven-year-old Virginia Howard from pursuing her passion as an artist. From summers spent on Cape Cod painting watercolors with her grandfather to working on her craft for hours each night after school, she was hooked. Her dreams of being […]

He can’t say when it’ll be a full return to Heritage Bank’s new Southern Operations Center in Tacoma, Washington, but it should be a simple transition. Social distancing will be made easy at the 80,000-square-foot former medical facility that Heritage purchased in July 2019, Mat Bergman explains, though at the time nobody could have anticipated […]

Thomas Polansky has loved The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens since he was a child. Often when he visited his grandparents in Pasadena, they brought him to these places at the San Marino, California, institution. The trips influenced Polansky’s early interest in art and architecture, and he eventually went on to receive his […]

John Neal remembers many moments where his Boise State University lacrosse teammates relied on him to put the ball in the net or to make a big defensive play. That was six years ago, and while he’s retired his lacrosse stick, he says he’s kept the leader mentality. Case in point: in 2017, Neal took […]

In 2009, while working as a senior project manager for a Pennsylvania-based engineering firm, Brian Horton remembers flying over Maine in a helicopter, in awe of the vast wilderness while seeing nothing but trees for miles. For Horton, it was hard to believe that this rural state was a placed visited by terrorists in advance […]

Though not a plant scientist by training, John B. McQueeney has garnered much knowledge on the job. Every day can be a learning experience for this young man who pivoted from solar energy to cannabis in 2018. Director of facility development for California-based grower, processor and retailer MedMen, the 29-year-old McQueeney oversaw the company’s assembly […]