The Center for Healthy & Efficient Spaces

Rasha Hasaneen is the vice president of innovation and product excellence for Trane Technologies. She is a seasoned executive and innovation leader with a proven track record in product management, product marketing, engineering, strategy, planning and lean thinking. Over a series of leadership roles for GE, SAP, Hitatchi, Lucent Technologies and GM, Rasha developed a keen sense of transforming the customer experience through data-driven solutions. Throughout her career, she has consistently leveraged her technical and business background to bridge the gap between market expectations and technology solutions in engineering-driven companies.

Rasha will lead the Center for Healthy & Efficient Spaces, coordinating with our integrated internal and external advisory councils and technology partners. In leading both innovation and CHES, she will be the focal point for Trane Technologies on the topics of indoor environmental quality, bringing innovative thinking and a customer focused approach to this critical topic.

Russ Carnahan served as a U.S. Representative for Missouri from 2005 to 2013 and has been a vocal proponent of addressing the impact of buildings on climate change and human health. While in congress, he founded the bipartisan Congressional High-Performance Building Caucus to raise awareness about building-related policies that can address energy and environmental challenges. As co-founder of Building Action, an advocacy-oriented nonprofit focused on building sustainability, Carnahan works with a broad coalition of stakeholders to advocate for building policy that improves communities and combats climate change.

Jim Freihaut specializes in indoor air quality, building science, enclosed space air quality issues, and system constraints on air treatment/filtration solutions and is part of Penn State’s Institutes for Energy and the Environment (IEE). IEE is one of the lead institutes for the Global Building Network, a global network supported by the United Nations to create an international framework to make buildings healthier, more efficient, and more sustainable.

Memo Laurent is part of the environmental health group at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Associate Director of the Healthy Buildings Program. Laurent’s research focuses on developing tools that leverage the data collection potential for mobile health quasi-experimental studies of the built environment. His research advances the understanding of mechanisms by which environmental exposures impact health, productivity, and safety; provides evidence linking energy efficiency opportunities in buildings to public health co-benefits; and disaster response resources to characterize environmental exposures and evaluate health effects.

Lidia Morawska is a Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. She is also the Director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at QUT and a Co-Director of the Australia – China Centre for Air Quality Science and Management. She conducts fundamental and applied research in the interdisciplinary field of air quality and its impact on human health, with a specific focus on science of airborne particulate matter. She is a past President of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate and a consultant for World Health Organization.

Bill Sisson is currently the Executive Director of North America, for the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Sisson directs and oversees multiple sustainability-oriented projects at WBCSD including the Transforming the Built Environment Initiative, which focuses on creating built environments that are healthy, circular, and have net zero-emissions. Prior to this role, he was on the Board for the Global Buildings Performance Network, a Paris based NGO that offers a knowledge hub for best practice policies.