Brian Butler, LEED AP
PHNE Board Vice President

Brian founded Boston Green Building in 2007 and put together a team that shared the same enthusiasm for a better way of general contracting, and a sensitivity to the impacts of what we build and how we build it. His goal is to establish a model for general contracting that looks at the entire lifecycle of the built environment, as well as the impacts of the contracting operation that brings it to fruition. His passion is for high performance, high comfort, healthy buildings, and for the modernization of our existing housing stock, reworked to meet the energy challenges of the 21st century.

Mike Duclos, CPHC

Mike Duclos is a principal and founder of The DEAP Energy Group, LLC, a consultancy providing a wide variety of Deep Energy Retrofit, Zero Net Energy and Passive House related consulting services.

 Mike is a HERS Rater with Mass. New Homes with ENERGY STAR program, a Building Science Certified Infrared Thermographer, a Certified Passive House Consultant who certified the second Passive House in Massachusetts, holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from UMass Lowell, and two patents.

Paul Eldrenkamp, CPHC

Paul Eldrenkamp is owner of Byggmeister, Inc., a Newton, MA-based remodeling company. He is also a principal of The DEAP Energy Group, an energy consulting firm that specializes in three areas of residential construction: Passive House, Zero-Net Energy, and Deep Energy Retrofits. For most of his career Paul was pretty hypocritical in terms of talking "green" but really just practicing business as usual. He feels he has about 25 years left in his career to try to undo the damage he did in the first 25 years.


Fred Gordon
PHNE Board Treasurer

Fred Gordon owns and manages real estate in South Boston at the Distillery, an old industrial building on almost 2 acres of land.  The 1860’s building (now being partially renovated) has about 60 artists, artisans, and various small manufacturing and service organizations. For past 5 years, he has been planning to add a 65 unit Passivhaus on a portion of the property.    It will try to bring together the cause of the arts—maintaining affordable arts space in the City, supporting art projects and integrating them with architecture and community-building, and a broad variety of environmental goals—which includes Passivhaus’ energy efficiency, but goes beyond them esp.  to urban agriculture.

He studied philosophy, at Harvard and got his PhD at UC San Diego, spent years on researching and consulting on democratic workplaces (8 of them at the Harvard School of Education), and over the past 10 years got increasingly interested in architecture and the environmental crisis.  He is on the Board and Executive Committee of MCAN (Mass Climate Action Network).  His wife teaches psychology at Northeastern, they have 3 kids (who live in Brooklyn), and intend to move to Southie (they now live in Newton) when the project is up and running.     

Stephanie Horowitz, AIA, CPHC
PHNE Board Secretary

Stephanie Horowitz, AIA, is the Managing Director at ZeroEnergy Design. She designs high performance projects that range from Deep Energy Retrofits to Passive Houses. Stephanie is a graduate of the Cornell University School of Architecture, a Passive House Consultant, and a Massachusetts Registered Architect.

Kristen Simmons, AIA, LEED AP
PHNE Board President

Kristen Simmons is an architect and consultant with ICF, where she is developing and managing the Massachusetts multi-family energy efficiency pilot program. Ms. Simmons is also the principal of Kristen Simmons Architects in Boston, a practice that focuses on energy efficiency and sustainable design. She has been trained by the Passive House Institute U.S.