Deirdre Thauer is the Senior Director of Space and Facilities Administration at Emory School of Medicine, where she leads strategic planning, space management, and capital investment initiatives across a complex academic health sciences environment. She began her career as a structural engineer before transitioning into project management within the biomedical private sector. This technical foundation informs her systems-level approach to facilities strategy, space optimization, and research infrastructure planning. Deirdre later moved into higher education as Assistant Director of Planning and Resource Management at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she played a key role in opening the Mount Sinai Hess Center for Science and Medicine, an approximately 422,000 gross square foot state-of-the-art mixed-use facility with clinical cancer patient care, imaging, and multi-disciplinary research. In 2014, she joined Emory School of Medicine as Manager of Space and Facilities Administration, where she established a centralized space and facilities team. Now in her current senior leadership role, Deirdre is responsible for developing school-wide space management policies, implementing processes to evaluate research space utilization, and guiding strategic capital project investments. Recently, she acted as owner/occupant representation for the design and construction of the award-winning 350,000-square-foot Health Sciences Research Building II, a $380 million project. She was responsible for programming and overseeing the occupation of the building by 42 individual lab groups and six integrated research cores. This included coordinating approximately $4 million in post-occupancy laboratory modifications to meet specialized research needs for the occupying groups. Currently, Deirdre is leading a transformative space optimization initiative focused on increasing utilization efficiency, reducing leased space, and lowering infrastructure and operating costs.