The Changemaker Award Recipient

George Tingwald

Dr. George Tingwald, with an unusual combination of skills and expertise, applies his qualifications as an architect and Doctor of Medicine to create practical, efficient and innovative designs for healthcare facilities.

Having received special training in surgery and ancillary services, emergency services, and women’s and children’s health, he is committed to designing facilities that merge excellent medical functionality with the primary needs of patients and families. Dr. Tingwald is especially adept in authoring campus and hospital master plans. At Stanford, he has fostered the planning and design of over 4 billion square feet of construction over a twelve-year planning period, culminating with the opening of two award-winning replacement hospitals for Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children's Health.

George has been a member of the Facility Guidelines Institute Health Guidelines Revisions Committee (FGI HGRC) since the 2002 edition of the FGI Guidelines. In this role, he has used his expertise to bring major modernizations and improvements to the design of many hospital facilities, including surgical, emergency, and trauma care spaces.

His background as a physician and architect, while also representing complex Owner’s perspective, provides George a unique opportunity to be a trusted interpreter and bridge-builder. He has continually worked to bring a diverse group of stakeholders, sometimes with conflicting views, to find common ground for progressive change.

With an expansive intellectual curiosity, effective, inclusive communication skills, and creative design abilities, he has been instrumental in the development of a wide range of issues encompassing infection prevention research, patient and family centered care models, artificial intelligence care systems, radiology and medical equipment/technology innovations, and evidence-based surgery safety improvement protocols.

The unwavering passion, enthusiasm and inclusive, interdisciplinary approach he brings to his work provides inspiration to the industry. 

The Russ Coile Lifetime Achievement
Award Recipient

Frank Zilm

With more than forty years-experience, Frank Zilm is a consummate practitioner of his craft and a role model for his peers. Elevated to Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1997, Frank gives freely of his time and talents, and exemplifies the spirit of fostering change in the ways designers conceive, plan, design and evaluate places for healing and caring.

Frank has practiced in the healthcare design field since the late 1970s. During that time, he has consulted on more than 300 projects and worked for such prestigious institutions as M.D. Anderson, the Cleveland Clinic, Princeton University Hospital, Barnes Jewish Christian Hospitals, St. Louis University, the University of Cincinnati, and the Mayo Clinic. He is recognized as one of the leading experts in emergency department planning and design, and has directed multi-disciplinary conferences and workshops in this field at Harvard and Cambridge Universities and The Center for Health Design.

He is the author of more than two dozen scholarly articles and is a major contributor to the Emergency Department Benchmarking Alliance.

Dr. Zilm has served as President of the AIA Academy of Architecture for Health, the AAH Foundation, and was a founding Board member of the American College of Healthcare Architects. Frank has been involved in architectural education at the University of Kansas since the 1970s. In 2009, Frank helped establish the Institute for Health & Wellness Design, where he serves as Director, introducing healthcare design to over 150 students.

As editor and author of a textbook on healthcare planning that is heavily used in academia, he has also been a guest critic and instructor at Clemson, Texas Tech, Louisiana State, and Cornell. He has been recognized as a Distinguished Alumnus of the University of Kansas and an Honorary Alumnus of Clemson University. 

For the past twenty years, he has expended many of his consulting frequent-flyer miles as well as his time and resources to help those in need, improving the lives of countless people around the globe, including work in Haiti, Kenya, Ethiopia, and India.