A native of Stuttgart, she grew up in a family that saved resources and helped found the German Green Party. As a child, she remembers the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, which spurred the drive for renewable energy. She was on German and American teams in the Solar Decathlon in 2005 and 2007. In 2010, she was certified as a passive house consultant. “The standards grew from superinsulated houses in Canada in the 1970s,” she says. “First, invest construction money in the building envelope, of which windows are the most expensive part. Smaller house size and a low ratio of surface to volume help energy performance too.”