Dr. Elizabeth Hausler is a skilled brick, block and stone mason with an M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.S. in Environmental Science from the University of Colorado, and a B.S. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before graduate school, she spent five years in the engineering consulting industry for Peterson Consulting in Chicago and Dames & Moore in Denver. She has lectured on sustainable disaster-resistant construction in eleven countries and served on the 2002-2003 US National Research Council Committee to develop a longterm research agenda for earthquake engineering.

Founded by Dr. Hausler, Build Change saves lives in earthquakes and typhoons. Their mission is to greatly reduce deaths, injuries and economic losses caused by housing and school collapses due to earthquakes and typhoons in emerging nations. Not only do they design disaster-resistant houses and schools in emerging nations, they train builders, homeowners, engineers and government officials to build them. They leave in place permanent change in construction practice by building local skills and stimulating local demand.

Build Change was a winner of the OpenIDEO Urban Resilience Challenge in 2016, and a 2008 Tech Award for Technology Benefiting Humanity in the Equality Category for making earthquake-resistant housing solutions available to homeowners regardless of income level. Elizabeth and Build Change’s work have been featured in the New York Times, BBC website, NPR All Things Considered, abcNEWS World News Tonight Person of the Week, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and Elle magazine.

In 2014, Dr. Hausler was named to the Academy of Distinguished Alumni of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of University of California, Berkeley. She was named a 2011 U.S. Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the Schwab Foundation, and is the winner of the 2011 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability. She is a 2004 Echoing Green Fellow, a 2006 Draper Richards Kaplan Fellow, a 2009 Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow, and was a Fulbright scholar to India in 2002-2003.