The IDEAS Center provides the regional leadership necessary to accelerate the cultural and technological shift to more sustainable practices as humans create and live in the built environment. The Center fosters dynamic and strategic research collaborations among multiple university disciplines, promotes a region-wide climate of cooperation to advance this goal, and offers students a knowledge base and experience that allows them to contribute to these advances. Our aim is to create and disseminate knowledge and apply it to yield high- performance and low-impact structural and environmental solutions that acknowledge the dependence of robust human social and economic systems on a healthy environment.

The Center's mission is to contribute to framing the challenges, providing the leadership, and creating the solutions that will accelerate the technical and social shifts needed to make our built environment more sustainable.