Janika McFeely Joins Introba as Associate, Sustainability

Integral Group is excited to welcome Janika McFeely, as Associate, Senior Sustainability Consultant in Integral Group’s Oakland office.

Janika joins Integral Group with over ten years of experience in the sustainable building industry. Working as an architect for eight years, Janika collaborated with Integral Group on multiple Integral Group projects, including Millikan Laboratory and Andrew Science Hall at Pomona College, Packard Foundation, and Exploratorium. During that time she acted as a designer and internal sustainability consultant, working with teams to explore innovative strategies to allow their projects to hit higher sustainability goals, including Zero Net Energy and LEED Platinum.

“Environmental issues were the main catalyst for me getting into architecture. During my masters I did a lot of research around sustainability issues in building design and infrastructure. I see it as being the fundamental catalyst for larger change because each building project involves so many people. Built structures last for a long time; it’s critical to do it right the first time around. Or to continue doing it right.  I love design, but my passion has been driven by sustainability issues and trying to make the lightest impact on the environment possible.”

Most recently Janika worked for the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) on climate action planning and reporting, green building policy and implementation, system wide stakeholder engagement and training, and sustainability metric tracking and analysis. Janika has certified over 25 LEED projects, worked on over a dozen projects that achieved LEED Platinum certification, and has assisted with the ZNE analysis for over a dozen projects.

“As an architect, I was always tasked with MEP coordination.  I was heavily engaged with the mechanical side and interested in energy benchmarking and net zero energy. It’s always been a focus of mine, and it was a natural fit.” Janika also collaborated with Introba Principal, Neil Bulger at UCOP co-hosting educational workshops on building performance to educate policy makers in the UC and CalState systems.

Throughout her career, Janika, has been instrumental in the success of projects in the built environment and through her policy work, but her real strengths lay in her ability to integrate those two worlds. “I practiced architecture for almost eight years before moving in to higher education. My interest in working at UCOP was around how to drive sustainability at the system level to drive organizational change, recognizing that once an architect gets a building and site, many of the important decisions affecting sustainability have already been made.  Working for UCOP was a great experience, but I really missed getting my hands dirty on tangible projects, so the move to Introba and master planning is an opportunity for me to synthesize my experiences in architecture and the building scale with the organizational and policy side.”

For Janika, professional goals also align with her personal mission to address climate change. “While I care about all aspects of environmental and social sustainability, climate change affects everything and everyone, although disproportionately. It’s the biggest challenge facing us as a species and I am driven to find solutions in the built environment to reduce our impact and adapt to future change.”

Janika approaches engineering problems in a holistic, multi-dimensional way, leveraging her arts background with her designer’s mind. “I spend a lot of time in nature and I have a fine arts background. I love creative problem solving in art and in design. Having a creative bent gives me the ability to think outside the box and identify synergistic opportunities to achieve the best solution.”

Janika looks forward to opportunity to collaborate with her MEP colleagues and sustainability team at Introba to build on her continued success integrating design process with architecture and institutional clients alike.