Judi Heerwagen on connections and the richness of biophilia

Psychologist Judith “Judi” Heerwagen focuses on the behavioral and health impacts of building design and operations; she works with the U.S. General Services Administration and is on the architecture faculty at the University of Washington. She describes the serendipity of her path, which began with an E.O. Wilson book that led to her studying zoology and behavioral ecology, and then a PhD in psychology. Her early training in journalism taught her to always look for connections and she was once quoted as saying that we are doing better jobs with zoos for animals than buildings for people. The exploration around that observation led to her work in recent years on biophilia -- the human tendency to connect with other forms of life in nature.