Green Building Blog
Dr. Mohr has applied her expertise in sustainability to minimizing the environmental footprint of her home in the San Francisco bay area. She chronicles this experience in a blog called 301 Monroe.
Prior to going to medical school, Catherine Mohr worked in the field of alternative energy transportation and sustainable technologies, working for many years with Dr. Paul MacCready at AeroVironment developing alternate energy vehicles, high-altitude aircraft, and high-efficiency fuel cell power systems aimed at reducing our world’s energy consumption and emissions.
Although she moved into medicine, she never abandoned her interests in sustainable technologies. These interests, or rather obsessions, came to the forefront when it was time to build a house, and wade through the maze of information (and misinformation!) out there. In her blog “When Geeks Build Green” she documents the process of building this house, interspersing it with a wealth of information she found when struggling to make the right choices.
In 2010 she gave a TEDU talk about this experience, about which they said: “In a short, funny, data-packed talk at TED U, Catherine Mohr walks through all the geeky decisions she made when building a green new house — looking at real energy numbers, not hype. What choices matter most? Not the ones you think.”