Prof. Sergio Palleroni

Short CV

Sergio Palleroni,(B.Arch. University of Oregon, MSArchS MIT) was a tenured professor at the University of Washington and the Luce Foundation Visiting Professor in Sustainable Development at the University of Texas, Austin, before joining Portland State University as a Professor and Senior Fellow of the new Institute for Sustainable Solutions in 2009. In 2013 Professor Palleroni he became the director of the Center for Public Interest Design, the first such center in the Americas. Professor Palleroni’s research and fieldwork for the last three decades has been in the methods of integrating sustainable practices to improve the lives of communities worldwide typically underserved by the profession of architecture. In 1988 to serve the needs of these communities he founded an academic outreach program that would later become the Basic Initiative (www.basicinitiative.org) , a service learning fieldwork program which each year challenges students from more than fifty US, and universities worldwide to apply their education in service of underserved communities throughout the globe. Today the Basic Initiative is one of the most recognized outreach programs addressing sustainable condition of the poor worldwide, with over a hundred and ten development projects in Asia, Latin American and Africa. In addition Professor Palleroni has worked and been a consultant on sustainable development and architecture and development in the developing world since the early 1980's both for not-for-profit agencies and governmental and international agencies such as UNESCO, the World Bank, and the governments of China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Taiwan.