The Green Engineer: Chris Shaffner

<p><strong>Chris Shaffner,</strong> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">Founder and Principal with The Green Engineer, Inc., a sustainable design consulting firm providing LEED Project Management, Building Performance Analysis, and Sustainable Design Consulting.  Chris grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio but went to MIT in Boston where he earned his mechanical engineering degree.</span></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">“</span></em><em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">If I was going to do it again, I would've gone to architecture school instead of engineering.  But the nice thing about being an engineer is you've got a lot of tools that you can apply to a lot of different problems and a lot of different ways.</span></em><em><span style="font-weight: 400;">”</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">- Chris Shaffner</span></p> <p> </p> <h2><strong>Energy and Sustainability Minded</strong></h2> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chris worked in the Boston area as a mechanical engineer then got married and moved to California.  He worked for a couple different firms in California and that is where he started to make the connection between the stuff he was doing and the environmental impact of buildings. Chris was energy minded and then became sustainability minded.  He moved back to Boston 10 years later and started working in a firm where they saw him as the green guy because he had been in California.</span></p> <p style="text-align: center;"><em><span style= "font-weight: 400;">“At some point I made the connection that, well, that's just not right.  I started speaking up and saying, look, you know, if you do it this way, not only will it work better, but it'll be better energy.  And actually it was a really critical point because then I really felt like I was fully engaged in the work I was doing. And I would say that was an inflection point in my career that if I hadn't figured that out,  I wouldn't have moved into the green building world in the way that I did.”</span></em> <span s