In the Room Where Change Is Made – Ivana Krsteska

I came to the United States from Macedonia in 2022 as a Fulbright student to pursue a second master’s degree in Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University. I arrived with a clear objective: to understand American construction practices, particularly how biobased materials are evaluated, certified, and integrated into building systems, and to bring that knowledge back home, where natural resources are abundant but underutilized. What I did not anticipate was how far that knowledge would reach.

At Kent State, I focused on the performance and certification of biobased materials such as mass timber and other renewable building products within sustainability frameworks like LEED. I engaged in research, published, and presented at conferences, connecting with scholars approaching similar questions from different disciplinary perspectives. Fulbright did more than support my degree; it provided a methodological foundation, an international research network, and the confidence that my background, shaped by architectural practice in the Balkans, offered a valuable perspective in U.S. academic and professional contexts.

That experience led me to pursue a PhD in Sustainable Construction Management at the State University of New York–ESF, where I work on a federally funded project examining the life cycle assessment of embodied carbon in mass timber buildings. Alongside my research and teaching responsibilities, I continued building on the interdisciplinary approach Fulbright had initiated. During this time, I was awarded third place in the U.S. Department of Energy’s national building science competition for a biobased façade insulation system. I presented my work at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which led to an opportunity to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory through the ORISE program.

Through my PhD projects, I began engaging directly with practitioners and policymakers, connecting with NYSERDA, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and state legislators on issues of domestic wood manufacturing, building performance, and forestry supply chains. My work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory taught me how to translate technical findings into forms policymakers can use: clear, comparable, and actionable. That was the missing link. The science was already there; what was needed was translation. I came to understand that my role is not only to generate knowledge, but to ensure it reaches the people who make decisions, so that findings do not remain in academic papers, but are recognized, operationalized, and implemented where they can create measurable change.

I found myself no longer just reporting findings. I was in the room where findings became policy. That is what Fulbright gave me: a purpose large enough to build a career on.”

Ivana Krsteska

Fulbright to United States in 2022