Regular biography
Sarah Billington is the Gary Retelny and Family Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UPS Foundation Professor, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Her research program focuses on the impact of sustainable building design and materials on human wellbeing, including developing design tools to quantify nature experience in buildings, understanding and increasing wellbeing in affordable housing, and identifying the risk of forced labor in building material supply chains through fingerprinting and AI methods. While no longer active in this area, her group has a long history of expertise in the design and evaluation of sustainable, durable construction materials including bio-based composites and ductile cement-based composites.
Scholar-generated biography
Sarah L. Billington is a researcher in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, focusing on Human-Building Interaction, Design for Wellbeing, and Sustainable Design & Materials. Her work explores the integration of human-centric design principles with sustainable materials and structural systems to enhance building performance and occupant wellbeing. Billington's research includes the development of advanced composite materials, such as biobased composites and high-performance fiber-reinforced cementitious composites, for use in seismic-resistant and energy-dissipating structures. She also investigates innovative construction systems, including precast segmental substructures and controlled rocking systems, to improve the resilience and sustainability of infrastructure.