The National Institute of Building Sciences team and staff criss-crossed the country for meetings, speaking engagements, and conferences, including A’19 with the American Institute of Architects, Resilient Virginia, Disaster Resilience Symposium at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, ASAE Annual Meeting & Exposition, Energy Exchange 2019, SEAOC Convention of the Structural Engineers Association of Central California, and BIMExpo in Hanover, Germany.

At Resilient Virginia, for example, NIBS team member Jiqiu Yuan presented about mitigation and gave an overview of the 2020 National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program recommended seismic provisions, which have been in development by the NIBS Building Seismic Safety Council (BSSC) Provisions Update Committee (PUC). Yuan oversees the BSSC.

The U.S. is approaching a tipping point, with $990 billion a year being spent on new construction and buildings between 2008 to 2017.

The 2020 edition of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program provisions (as well as previous editions) have been sponsored by FEMA.

This state-of-the-art document summarizes the major code change proposals that are considered to have wide-ranging implications regarding future seismic design requirements for buildings. It will serve as a national resource for design professionals and U.S. standards and code-development agencies.

Also this summer, NIBS hosted a conversation to envision a U.S. national BIM roadmap led by the Centre for Digital Built Britain.

This week, NIBS will be at Chicago Build, a leading construction, design, and real estate show for Chicago and the Midwest. And, coming up on Oct. 4, we will host the inaugural Women Executives in Building Summit.

The event is being held at the headquarters of the National Restaurant Association in Washington, D.C.

Lakisha A. Woods, CAE, President and CEO of NIBS, says the summit is “an opportunity to bring together the unique and intelligent group of female leaders in the C-suite that represent building industry-related associations.”

“This is a very niche group, but it is important for us to come together to learn, share, and grow,” Woods says, in a release.

The NIBS team hand-picked the executives to be invited to the first annual summit. Already, the wheels are in motion to open up the event in 2020 to female business owners and C-suite leaders across the built environment.