Henderson Engineers Presents at Greenbuild

One of Henderson Engineers’ senior architectural lighting designers, Ginger Rucker, was a guest panelist on the topic of Steps to a Healthy Lightstyle: A Circadian Lighting Discussion at Greenbuild in Boston on Wednesday.

The panel discussion examined the latest research on circadian lighting and reviewed different perspectives ranging from a pragmatic design approach to the scientific method. The discussion focused on a holistic discussion around circadian lighting design, including perspectives from a lighting designer, researcher, and product developer.

Rucker joined John Hwang, founder of Human Centric Lighting Society and CEO of PlanLED and Dr. Steven Lockley, neuroscientist and associate professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School for the prestigious panel discussion.

The panel was moderated by Henderson’s Director of Sustainability, Ryan Evans, who helped guide the conversation through common ground and differences in opinion to better inform the audience about current technology offerings and the future of circadian lighting.

“A recent trend in sustainability is to consider the impact of our designs on the health and wellbeing of building occupants,” Ginger explained. “There’s been a lot of research on the impact of lighting on human circadian rhythms, but lighting and controls product technologies are ahead of those findings. Combine that with confusion surrounding the topic, and many are left wondering what to make of it all. Our presentation sought to fill in some of the gaps.”

The circadian rhythm centers on the signals our eyes send to our brains to trigger the release of serotonin (the body’s natural antidepressant) during the day and melatonin (a hormone affecting sleep) at night, which in turn affects our mental and physical health, mood, and energy.

“This topic came up when we were discussing potential industry research our team could focus on,” said Ginger. “We felt this panel discussion would help highlight where we could focus research on this topic. As we’ve done in the past with LED lighting and sustainability, our goal is to always stay ahead of coming trends like this.”

Each year, Henderson Engineers empowers its employees to commission fully-funded, proprietary research projects on behalf of the firm through its Henderson Research program.

Henderson Research is just one way we challenge our engineers to continuously develop better solutions for the built environment,” said Rich Smith, Henderson Engineers President and CEO. “Our goal is to always be driving the industry forward, which is why Henderson has made the commitment to fund proprietary research projects each year. Through these projects, we’ve uncovered real-world solutions for our clients and stay on the cutting-edge of the latest building system design trends.”

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