Faculty bio | Institute for Health in the Built Environment

As a designer, Mark Fretz has worked on projects ranging from product design to healthcare, single and multi-family housing, embassies, office buildings and district scale master planning. His research and teaching focus on exploring the unseen in the design of the built environment that affects human health across scales ranging from microbes and molecules to energy and carbon. Fretz is the interim co-director of the Institute for Health in the Built Environment, an organization with a focus on transdisciplinary collaboration between designers and scientists, and a research assistant professor of architecture. He also directs the institute’s industry research consortium, Build Health, which leverages design thinking and research findings to develop and apply innovative design solutions for low-carbon buildings that simultaneously promote healthier individuals, communities and planet. Prior to practicing architecture, Fretz was a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service. 

Recent Media:
Can science cure its addiction to plastic? (Nature, Sept. 25, 2024)
To make a building healthier, stop sanitizing everything (Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 16, 2020)
Buildings have their own microbiomes – we’re striving to make them healthy places (The Conversation, April 17, 2020)