Designing for Resilience in a Changing Climate

Yvonne Castillo is the Director of Risk Advisory for Victor Insurance Managers, LLC. – the underwriting arm for the CNA Insurance professional liability program. Her legal career includes litigation practice, and extensive policy and regulatory work at the American Institute of Architects – Texas Chapter and the Institute’s National Headquarters. Yvonne joined Victor’s Risk Advisory group in 2016 and draws on more than two decades of experience exclusively in the design and construction industry. She is a graduate of the University of Colorado School of Law in Boulder with an undergraduate degree in Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin. She also serves as a Board Member for the National Institute of Building Sciences.

Margaret Hopkins is a Vice President at AKRF, where she leads the firm's climate resilience and adaptation practice. She combines her engineering and planning expertise for climate resiliency and disaster recovery work with flood resiliency project design, community asset inventories, risk assessment, and environmental review of resiliency projects. She has led several flagship climate resiliency projects including the NYC Climate Resiliency Design Guidelines Pilot Program and design of the $1.45B East Side Coastal Resiliency project. She is a licensed Professional Engineer registered in Virginia and New York and holds degrees in water resources engineering from Duke University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Margaret was named to ENR’s 2023 national Top 20 Under 40 cohort.

Chris Mundell, AIA, LEED Fellow has over 30 years of architectural experience in a variety of architectural projects for education, government, healthcare, and commercial clients. He has worked on over 50 LEED projects around the country including three that were certified Platinum. Chris works closely with Clients to set up and achieve their sustainability project goals. In addition to his work, Chris is also involved in local AEC organizations including the AIA Dallas, CSI Dallas, and the USGBC Texas Chapter.

Since 1997, Darren S. Black has leveraged his experience as a former litigator and coverage counsel with Armstrong Teasdale, LLP in his role as a risk advisor and professional liability broker serving design and design-build firms across the U.S. After having led Aon’s National Design Liability Practice from that firm’s then-Chicago headquarters for several years, Darren returned to his hometown of Kansas City to establish IMA’s Professional Services Practice in 2011.

In 2019, he became the National Professional Services Practice Leader for Risk Strategies, which serves more than 5000 design firm clients from its A&E specialty offices in eight U.S. cities. In addition to having served a wide variety of ENR-ranked firms directly, Darren has published a number of articles and is a frequent speaker on topics related to the sound management of design and design-build firms.

Examples include Expanding Liability Coverage: Insured Contracts and Additional Insureds, Drake Law Review, Volume 44, No. 4, pp. 791-833 (1996, with co-author Douglas Richmond); moderator and panelist for a presentation entitled Sustainable Risk: Implications of Green Design at the USGBC’s GreenBuild International Conference held in Chicago in November, 2010; The Economics of E&O at the AIA CFO Large Firm Roundtable held in San Diego in 2013; and Climate Change and the New Normal of Sustainable Design at the EFCG’s Executive Leadership Conference, July, 2020.