Case Studies Region: Midwest

In 1948, Nick Thomarios started a small painting company to meet the needs of his neighbors as well as residents of nearby communities. His son Paul Thomarios would often join him, wielding brushes and rollers. Later on, as a political science undergraduate student at The University of Akron, the younger Thomarios would spend his summers […]

Paige Butterfield is many things: a small-town girl-turned-city woman, a volunteer for causes like Athletes with Disabilities and—since 2018—assistant vice president and director of workplace environment for Iowa-based insurance company UFG Insurance. But perhaps her favorite role is that of mentor. A single mom who had to make her way in a male-dominated field, Butterfield […]

When Pete Muscio started at Rochester Community Schools in late 2015, he was surprised by how different schools looked. Not just floors and paint, but furniture and fixtures in each of the buildings varied greatly, with little consistency or standardization. Muscio, the director of capital projects and facilities, knew that making these features uniform would […]

While serving in the Peace Corps in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, after graduating college, Patrick Gavin vividly remembers being bitten by a bug—though thankfully it wasn’t a tsetse fly, a local pest that can cause debilitating illness. Instead, the Michigan native caught the “bug” for construction and engineering. Part of his duties […]

Patrick Sise is used to building in the clouds. Most of his time at Wood Partners LLC, where he’s vice president of construction, has been spent building high rises in Chicago. The past couple of years, though, he’s started working on smaller, multi-family buildings. The projects aren’t only different because of their size. The materials […]