Mahesh Ramanujam
President & CEO
US Green Building Council

Mahesh Ramanujam believes that everyone deserves to benefit from better buildings. As president and CEO of the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), Green Business Certification, Inc. (GBCI) and Arc, Ramanujam unifies green building standards and ensures an equitable future where public health and a healthy economy are complementary, not competitive values.

A graduate from India’s Annamalai University with a degree in Computer Engineering, Ramanujam couples an extensive background in technology and innovation with his goal of democratizing sustainable living and building healthier, more prosperous communities and cities across the world.

Prior to becoming President and CEO of USGBC, Ramanujam served as both the organization’s COO and CIO. Before joining GBCI in 2009, he led a succession of groundbreaking business transformation programs for both IBM and Lenovo.

Transformative initiatives and partnerships remain at the heart of Ramanujam’s work today. In addition to serving on Bank of America’s National Community Advisory Council, in 2018, he conceived an ideological bridge between USGBC’s first and second generation. Appropriately titled Living Standard, the campaign is designed to focus the organization’s efforts on what matters most about buildings — the people inside them. While originally an educational storytelling series on the benefits of green building, Living Standard is now USGBC’s pivotal grassroots initiative, a galvanizing and inspiring tool to share best practices and support the organization’s ambitious, inclusive, and resilient vision for the decades ahead: Healthy people in healthy places equals a healthy economy.

A leader of more than 13 million green builders, including hundreds of USGBC employees, and thousands of tireless volunteers, Ramanujam’s unorthodox approach to green building is that it must ultimately be about reimagining how we treat each other. He envisions a world where construction is as much about compassion as it is about the convenience and efficiency of the structures themselves.

Ramanujam’s storied career is rooted in his passion for that vision, in his efforts to evolve society beyond a passing awareness of green building to a universal adoption of its high-minded practices, and in his sincere desire that healthier building becomes not only an urgent civic responsibility, but a guarantee of a better quality of life for generations to come.