William McDonough is a world-renowned architect and designer. Throughout his career, he has been considered a global thought leader in the articulation of design for Sustainable Development. He is recognized as a primary author of the concepts of Cradle to Cradle and the Circular Economy. McDonough received the inaugural U.S. Presidential Award for Sustainable Development in 1996 and the U.S. Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award in 2003. For the World Economic Forum, he chaired the inaugural Global Meta-Council on the Circular Economy (2014-2016) and in Davos received the Fortune Award for Circular Economy Leadership in 2017. From 1999-2009 he was the U.S. Chairman for the China-U.S Center for Sustainable Development. He is an architect and designer with a globally recognized firm for pioneering green design across many scales from urban design to architecture to products to safe material chemistries. He currently holds a faculty position at Stanford University and has had professorships at Cornell University and the University of Virginia where he was Dean of Architecture from 1994-1999. He has written extensively on design as the first signal of human intention and co-authored The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability (1991), Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (2002), The Design of the Circular Economy (China, 2005) and The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability—Designing for Abundance (2013). Time magazine recognized him as a “Hero for the Planet,” noting: “His utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that—in demonstrable and practical ways—is changing the design of the world.”