Professional Profile: Liz Chen, PMP, LEED AP BD+C, ENV SP
Liz Chen, PMP, LEED AP BD+C, ENV SP, is a lab planner with HGA Life Science + Advanced Technology Group in San Diego, CA. Lab Design News recently spoke with Liz about her career, experience, and personal interests.
Liz grew up in Shanghai and received the National Scholarship of China (an award-winning ratio of less than 0.2 percent) and was the valedictorian in the architecture program. She then completed her master’s degree in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. She currently works as a lab planning specialist to transform underutilized offices into life science and therapeutic healthcare spaces.
Q: Could you please tell us about who inspired you, and how would you describe your career journey?
A: My grandparents were the pioneers of post-modern architecture in the late 1940s. My father inherited this career and passed the torch to me. I grew up with drawing boards, sketches, and T-Measures, and built dressing rooms with Lego bricks for Barbie when I was six. I often accompanied my dad to his studio and sat in front of screens to draw lines and circles using AutoCAD. We had a fun time together!
I am blessed to receive meaningful guidance from world-renowned architectural design and engineering experts to propel my desire in promoting green building, sustainable infrastructure, and city development for a greater quality of life. Emer. Prof. Vukan R. Vuchic encouraged me to use an integrative perspective to observe the board picture, then apply a systems approach to dissect causality and interlocking elements. Robert Venturi and Denise Scoot Brown’s son, Jim Venturi, enriched my design thinking and emphasized that the necessity of understanding the evolutional history of an event with a holistic perspective is beneficial to create novel craftsmanship solutions for virtuous outcomes. PennDesign’s comprehensive, yet, intensive curriculum provided me with full-stack expertise while approaching design development, schematics, construction delineations, and researching design alternatives and best practices.
Q: What is your favorite building, lab-related or not?
A: The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex for 44 years was once our nation’s top R&D facility. The facility went through a great transformation process and was now repositioned for multipurpose uses with a more than 90 percent occupancy rate in Q1 2023. I particularly enjoy this design as a.) it went through a phenomenal transformation process with prudent details and b.) the design introduces natural atrium lighting with a calculated placement of Saarinen's metal panels and glass.
Q: Having been involved in the lab design industry for a while, what is your assessment of the industry? What advice would you give someone joining this industry?
A: Architects, doctors, and lawyers took years, even decades, to train and develop their top-notched skills. Lab design is a specialized field and its significant contribution to our nation’s science and technological breakthrough (e.g., vaccination development) stood out in the unprecedented pandemic. A lot has changed since the pandemic. City officials and policymakers are eager to repurpose a large number of vacant and underutilized offices to avoid entering a more severe economic downfall triggered by commercial real estate. CNBC reported that nationwide trends and obstacles were stopping cities from converting offices into apartments, however, not enough guidance or incentive was given to the rules and processes of office-lab conversion.
The demand for highly sophisticated laboratories has skyrocketed since the pandemic; therefore, lab planners and architects specialized in lab design have become a scarcity; in particular, lab planners who specialized in turning lead into gold (i.e., turning vacant and underutilized offices into life science uses). The imbalance of design specialists in our industry is going to curb our nation’s life science development and pose delays in therapeutic breakthroughs. Our country is facing a significant shortage of sophisticated lab planners and design specialists.
A proficient lab planner is challenged to provide lab programming insights as a daily routine and provide a direct impact on design performance and architectural planning strategy. One must develop a habit of addressing highly intricate and sophisticated design issues with an aptitude to apply multifaceted schematic design skills to real-world challenges, often on a compressed schedule.
Q: What lab projects are you working on at the moment?
A: An anonymous pharmaceutical client was committed to developing a cutting-edge treatment for acute disease, and sought a new lab environment at a size of about 100,000 square feet to fulfill the mission. To begin, I put efforts to investigate award-winning best practices in pharmaceutical laboratory design from corporate knowledge archives, design magazines, and architecture diaries carefully responded to design expectations and user requirements, and established open dialogues to identify users with different needs. In the design development phase, my team and I provided technical design inputs to facilitate a sustainable strategy and shared the strategy, design criteria, conceptual design, and subsequent detailed design with the client and project teams to develop a sense of collaboration among all stakeholders. The project aims to create a state-of-the-art office-medical lab commingling for inpatient and outpatient treatment and therapeutic research where neuroscientists and patients can work together to identify life-saving treatments. The final design represented an intricate consolidation of chemistry, discovery biology, and DMPK (Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics) into a single lab facility to improve cross-pollination research on the disease among departments.
Q: What is one important skill you think that all lab design experts should have?
A: I’d say turning complexity into simplicity is the imperative skill that differentiates and stands out in my mind. The ability to prioritize critical few from trivial many with a solid understanding of the causality from a holistic view definitely makes my daily work easier.
In brief, I’d define a solid lab planner specialized in office-lab transformation, requires a mastery of three elements simultaneously: managerial strength, technical expertise, and creative design thinking.
Lastly, it is important to think differently! The beauty of our business is looking at things differently. A process of re-imagination. Creative design thinking is necessary to fulfill this craftsmanship transformation.
Q: What do you hope to accomplish in the next few years in this position?
A: In a crisis like the recent pandemic, we were keenly aware of the capacity of the local healthcare system and the robustness of the life science research facility, and it was not as resilient as we thought. I have witnessed that our citizens lost their treasurable family members due to a severe shortage of beds, ventilators, and medical supplies; doctors and nurses were overwhelmed and tried all means to convert any possible rooms into treatment care to rescue invaluable lives. It was a turning moment for me. Since then, I am determined that I wanted to be the architect who designs hospitals that heal us, labs that develop novel treatments, and facilities that sustain us.
As a lab planner in between the real estate and life science industries, my great achievement comes from the design outputs (e.g. specialized labs and medical treatment/research facilities) I contributed to helping improve the health and well-being of Americans and the globe. I would love to continue this transformative path along with my amazing colleagues, partners, and clients who share the same values to keep turning lead into gold, carrying out ESG practices, harvesting this ecosystem, and making our world a better place for generations to come.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
