Marlene J. Berkoff, FAIA

San Francisco
305-873-8750
marlene.berkoff@bdcadvisors.com

Marlene has over 30 years experience as a registered architect specializing in strategic facility planning, master planning, project development and project management for healthcare clients ranging from academic medical centers to community hospitals and ambulatory care facilities. Drawing upon education and experience in economic analysis as well as architecture, she has developed successful methodologies for integrating operational, financial, and organizational requirements with facility needs and capital planning. She helps clients create flexible planning strategies for optimizing facility use in support of their strategic plans, service, and business goals in unpredictable economic environments.

Marlene has managed complex architectural projects from feasibility and concept development, budget and schedule analysis, and programming and design, through construction implementation for large institutional organizations with multi-layered decision-making structures. She has led and coordinated multi-disciplinary teams of technical specialists, including associate architects and engineers, while serving as liaison with client management and multiple stakeholders. Her special expertise is in integrating technical issues of complex facility developments with cost and schedule realities, and helping to align these with client priorities and goals.

Relevant project examples include:

• Comprehensive strategic facility plan, cost & budget analysis for large County healthcare system comprised of a major central-campus tertiary care hospital plus100 outlying ambulatory care facilities. Resulted in several key facility developments being successfully implemented, including a lynchpin ACC on the main campus, and positioning the hospital for subsequent mandatory renovations.

• Strategic master plan, operational & cost analysis, and complex phased implementation plans for faculty practice ambulatory care clinics and ambulatory surgeries at two major academic medical centers.

• Analysis and critique of proposed $1.2 billion replacement and expansion projects, triggered by seismic regulations, for municipality dealing with impacts of a premier academic medical center in its jurisdiction.

• Second opinion analysis of scope, cost and schedule of proposed billion-dollar new academic tertiary-care replacement hospital relative to renovation of iconic old hurricane-damaged hospital in New Orleans.

Marlene has worked as a healthcare facility strategist since 1997. From 1993 to 1997, she was a Senior Vice President of Ellerbe Becket, San Francisco, a major international architecture / engineering firm specializing in healthcare. Before that, she was a Principal and Healthcare Studio Director at Kaplan, McLaughlin Diaz, a similar architecture firm in San Francisco. Her early economic analysis experience was at McKinsey & Company in New York.

Marlene is a past President of the American Institute of Architects National Academy of Architecture for Health, former member of the San Francisco AIA Board of Directors, and former President of the National Forum for Healthcare Planning. She is past President and Emeritus Member of the Board of Governors at the University of Michigan College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and is a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects.

Marlene holds a B.A. in Economics from Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, and a B. Arch. and M. Arch. from the University of Michigan College of Architecture. She has lectured and published widely on healthcare architecture, strategic planning and project management.