CHARLIE SZORADI
For Speaking Engagements contact:
M: 610.551.5224
Learn from Looking covers over 20 years of travel insights and drawings from around the world on over 300 pages with 200 sketches and 60,000 words. The book focuses on actionable intelligence for innovation, sustainable design, and critical thinking.
To order Learn from Looking click here:
https://www.iuniverse.com/en/bookstore/bookdetails/724223-Learn-from-Looking
and on Amazon (SKU-001147547)
Audio BOOK: On Audible: Order Here
Full Length Presentation (Video: 20 minutes + Q&A)
SOCIAL MEDIA and GEAR
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sustainability_charlie/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sustainable_CS
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charlie.szoradi/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@learnfromlooking998/featured
Szoradi Art: https://fineartamerica.com/profiles/charlie-szoradi (Purchase framed or unframed prints and other products, plus roll over to see full-resolution details of any of the travel drawings.)
Eco-Friendly GREAR (PLAN PLANT PLANET): Apparel (T-Shirts made of recycled material), tote bags, and drinking canisters. See: https://learn-from-looking.mybigcommerce.com/shop-all/
Online Drawings: LEARNfromLOOKING.com
Table of Contents:
- Biography
- Speech topics with descriptions
- Video of a speeches given before a live audience
- Testimonials from previous audiences
- Book/film information
- Speaking Engagements (separate page)
- Public Relations (separate page)
1. Biography
Author and entrepreneur Charlie Szoradi is a design and sustainability professional with 30 years of experience and over 10 years of public speaking across a diverse range of engagements. He is the author and illustrator of the book LEARN from LOOKING How Observation Inspires Innovation. Over the course of his career Mr. Szoradi has founded GREENandSAVE, as well as multiple clean energy companies focused on LED lighting, HVAC optimization, and indoor air quality. He is also the founder of Monsoon Microstudios, a graphic design and marketing firm. Mr. Szoradi focuses on high performance design, business development, sustainable living, and next-generation agriculture. In addition to ongoing design and marketing services, he is a Strategic Advisor for CYTO | PHL, and the nonprofit organizations 98 Octane and Student Farmers. In 2023, Mr. Szoradi launched Future Food Right Now which became a springboard for Acceler Fitness and OnlyKale in 2024. He is Certified Personal Trainer (CPT) by the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM). In the early 1990s, he wrote his Masters of Architecture thesis on “Eco-Humanism.” Mr. Szoradi is a graduate of the University of Virginia, and he earned his Masters from the University of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Szoradi brings three decades of hands-on experience to sustainability and cost-savings for retrofits, new construction, controlled environment agriculture, and wellness. He has developed strategic relationships to provide 360° services and clean-technology solutions to commercial properties in the US and around the world. The 21 point schematic is one of his infographics reflecting the breadth of solutions for next-generation real estate.
Mr. Szoradi is a LEED AP (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design – Accredited Professional), a Certified Building Performance Institute (BPI) Energy Auditor, and he has taken a leadership role in sustainability at the regional and national level. He is a prior member of the Energy and Sustainability Committee for the Society of American Military Engineers (www.SAME.org) and the Leadership Council Chairman of the American LED Alliance. In 2009, Mr. Szoradi was elected to the Board of the Sustainable Business Network and selected as a member of the Green Economy Task Force, with direct participation on the Capitol Hill Delegation. The next year, he moved the company’s LED manufacturing from China to southeastern Pennsylvania. The advanced technology is Buy American Act (BAA) Compliant, manufactured in the U.S.A with over 50% domestic components.
Mr. Szoradi led the team, wrote the primary claims, and developed the key figures for the July 21st, 2011 Patent Filing for: LIGHT ENGINE DEVICE WITH DIRECT TO LINEAR SYSTEM DRIVER. The Patent file has multiple different claims and figures. In that same year, the company won the Green Business of the Year Award by the Main Line Chamber of Commerce, followed two years later with the Best Lighting Retrofit by the U.S. Green Building Council for the Urban Green Award. Independence LED Lighting has since earned the trust of facility managers and engineers across the market with installations ranging from Fortune 100 clients to the U.S. Military. The company has also provided the lights for the largest LED tube retrofit in U.S. history with over 2 miles (38 football fields) of installed energy saving tubes. From the cover profile of Inventors Digest Magazine to a speaker at the Made in America State of the Region panel, Mr. Szoradi has dedicated his career to innovation in clean energy technology.
Prior to his work with Independence LED Lighting, the Energy Intelligence Center and Purge Virus, Mr. Szoradi founded and ran GREENandSAVE, a leading efficiency resource focusing on Return on Investment (ROI), that was one of the finalists of the Sustainability Awards. Mr. Szoradi has always been inspired by the potential of making environmentally sensitive architecture accessible to mainstream Americans. Rather than just defaulting to techniques from 1970s technology and aesthetics, he created a platform to produce active/passive integrated systems. The design solutions focus on function, style, significant cost-savings, and environmental sustainability. Mr. Szoradi encourages the adaptive re-use of existing structures and materials, all while maintaining functionality and an overall aesthetic that appeals to the traditional as well as contemporary aesthetics. Mr. Szoradi completed the renovation and a major addition to a formerly in-efficient 1950s residence that he and his family were able to “re-use” and transform rather than tear down. The home focuses on saving money as well as the environment, and it is one of the most eco-friendly homes in America. This adaptive-reuse concept is also core to the business model of Independence LED Lighting, in that for many applications the LED tubes replace the less efficient fluorescent tubes while re-use the existing fixture housing for cost-effective results.
Mr. Szoradi is a sought-after subject matter expert and speaker on adaptive re-use and sustainable design with appearances at a diverse range of leading institutions such as the Green Building Council, Brain Reserve Think Tank, and the Wharton Business School. He has served multiple years as the Senior Lecturer at the University of the Arts, where he has created programs such as Urbitec, which focus on innovative product design through recycling and re-use. He has also been featured in a documentary film that received the Director’s Award at the Black Mariah Film Festival. The film specifically profiles his vision and follows the process of adaptive re-use in converting a 22,000 square foot abandoned church complex into a mixed-use residential and commercial property. Mr. Szoradi has also served as a consultant to the Philadelphia Office of Recycling across many years. He created the education kiosk program and the website as the cornerstone of the interactive marketing initiative.
In 1995, Mr. Szoradi founded Monsoon Microstudios, that was one of the first of its kind agencies to provide integrated media services that include branding strategy along with website development, print marketing, and television commercial production.
In 1994, Mr. Szoradi conceived and produced a pilot Eco-Culture/Recycling show “Fix the Hut.” The show was the culmination of over twenty-five interview segments shot across the country over a two-year period. The show focused specifically on people that had created innovative habitats, furniture, fashion, and lifestyles related to adaptive re-use and environmental sustainability. This interest in communicating through eco-education programs, speaking engagements, and media has coincided with Mr. Szoradi’s ongoing work in architecture, energy smart real estate development, and high-performance lighting. Over his career, Mr. Szoradi has partnered to purchase over 200,000 sq. ft. of urban space that he has had a hand in converting from “left for ruin” factories, warehouses, and schools into mixed-use residential and commercial property.
Transforming neighborhoods and salvaging urban landscape has been an integral part of overall sustainability in his career. Over the course of his energy auditing, Mr. Szoradi continued to see commercial properties with fluorescent tubes that had not been optimized for decades. He found that lighting accounted for over 25% of commercial electricity, which inspired the LED technology which now cuts the wattage and cost by more than half.
In 1993, Mr. Szoradi completed his Masters Thesis and secured his first US Patent #5,215,490 on the modular building block set of tenon engaging edge connecting members. The thesis set the stage for the groundbreaking new approach to energy efficient and environmentally sustainable architecture. The invention set the stage for a new modular approach to lighting, given the patent’s focus on modular construction sets, which also led to applications in high performance concrete and structural insulated panels.
Mr. Szoradi’s early inspiration to focus on sustainability came at the end of the 1970s when he sat at a young age in a gas line with his dad during the gas crisis. His father, an architect that had escaped through the Soviet iron curtain to come from Hungary to America in 1957, introduced his son to colleagues that were then pioneering active and passive solar powered houses in America. Mr. Szoradi learned from is dad that Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House, so he teamed up with two friends at St. Albans School for Boys and proceeded to build “Omega – The Boat of the Future” and subsequently won the Grade School Science Fair Popular Prize with their solar powered ship. Over extended family events, like Thanksgiving, Mr. Szoradi also learned in his childhood about his great grandfather on his mother’s side. Carl Zwermann had secured over a dozen patents of his engineering designs for what we all use and take for granted today. He invented key aspects of the “water closet” with the bowl, tank, and interior mechanics that we now call the modern toilet. His manufacturing facilities in Michigan and Illinois became key cornerstones of production in the early decades of the 1900s. The production plants also used innovative thermal management to increase efficiency in the porcelain kiln and drying processes. By the end of the 1920s, Carl Zwermann had built the family’s U.S. porcelain sanitary plant into one of the largest manufacturing facilities of its kind in the world. Years later, major influences on Mr. Szoradi have also included working in Northern California’s bay area, working in Japan for the celebrated eco-architect Kinya Maruyama, living in Eastern European hubs like Budapest and Prague, rural villages, and Amish communities that rely almost exclusively on sustainable living practices.
Over his academic and professional career, Mr. Szoradi has traveled extensively throughout Asia, Africa, Central America, North America, plus Central and Eastern Europe, where he has studied specifically how people build cost-effective and environmentally sensitive homes, commercial structures, and communities. Mr. Szoradi grew up in Washington, DC and graduated from St. Albans School for Boys. He then earned his undergraduate degree in Architecture from the University of Virginia and went on to earn his Masters of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Szoradi currently lives in Greater Philadelphia and also spends time at his family residence in Stone Harbor, NJ, which includes a solar roof, EV car charging and rain water collection for the homes edible garden.
Mr. Szoradi comes from a four-generation line of patent holders, U.S. manufacturers, and innovators across the built world with 100 Years of Family Innovation.
Charlie’s most recent patent is for clean air technology to improve building safety and preserve human life. UV-C Germicidal LED Strip Kits for HVAC Ducts: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20210318008A1/en
HVAC ducts serve as a means for air capture and exchange within an indoor location. In many locations, it is critically important to mitigate the spread of infection by capturing or destroying airborne pathogens (such as COVID-19). Patent Abstract: An air disinfection system comprising: a plurality of LED diodes mounted on an LED strip; a driver for driving the LED diodes to a given power; a DC power source configured for direct connection to the LED strip; the system configured for positioning within a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system (HVAC), wherein said system comprising at least a first LED strip and a second LED strip, said first LED strip mounted opposing said second LED strip within a void within an HVAC system; wherein an air passing through said void is contacted by irradiated light from the LED diodes.
During Covid-19, Charlie took the initiative to covert his family beach house on the New Jersey shore into a near net-zero residence with solar power, electric vehicle charging, rain water collection, an edible garden and much more. See the photos and video here for OASIS Stone Harbor.
Experience Highlights specifically for Controlled Environment Agriculture
Over the past six years, Charlie has developed Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) solutions for growers ranging from the producers of lettuce and basil to microgreens and hemp (Envista Farms, Molly Grubb Farms, Hydroponic Life). He has also been the lead developer of the CEA plans for the following:
Philadelphia Zoo – The first zoo in the U.S. with onsite shipping container farming to feed the herbivore primates and other animals leafy greens with advanced sensors and IoT included in the final implementation.
Conestoga High School – S.T.E.M. education through light-emitting diode (LED) grow lights.
Pennsylvania Farm Show – Aquaponic showcase with combination fish and vegetable production.
Penn State University – Custom wavelength modulating grow lights for the Agricultural Studies program.
Taproot Kitchen – Development of indoor farming for this non-profit that incorporates fresh food and education for people with autism and intellectual disabilities.
NASA – Development of a Perpetual Food Machine for Mars colonization with fish effluence, nitrifying bacteria, leafy greens and renewable direct current microgrid power, presented at Kennedy Space Center.
2. Speech topics with descriptions
- Trends to watch across Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) related investing
- Cost-Effective Sustainability – Insights from Overseas, Energy Saving LED Lighting, Air Conditioning Optimization, Hydrothermal Carbonization, U.S. Cleantech Job Creation
- Sustainable Triple Bottom Line – Impacting People + Planet + Profit
- The Business Case for LED Lighting – Next-Generation Technology
- Future Food – The Path to a Healthy and Sustainable Future
- Future Home – Cost Effective Solutions and Green Job Creation
- Travel with Open Eyes – Insights from Japan and Eastern Europe to Islands and countries around the world.
3. Video of a speeches given before a live audience
Radnor RED Talk (Radnor Excellence & Design) 18 minute TED Talk length. Presentation: FUTURE FOOD RIGHT NOW
Video: https://youtu.be/QxZunIy0uxg
Main Line School Night – Growing Superfood
Video: https://youtu.be/7aqM6pSlDv0
The Agrarian Group Grow Wall at CYTO | PHL in Philadelphia on September 23, 2022
Video: https://youtu.be/aXcN23fx4Qo
Cost-Effective Sustainability – Council of State Governments (CSG) Conference for the Easter Region on July 29, 2019.
Video: https://youtu.be/bPpREHrMnmI
Sustainability – Learn from Looking presentation at Penn State on October 5, 2017
Video: https://youtu.be/-hj_oLr4Hy0
4. Testimonials from previous audiences
“It was the best class I have ever taken at MLSN.”, “The notes were great, the hands on was fantastic. The instructors were super knowledgeable and experienced.”, “This was an interesting, informative and fun class with lots of value added – from take home plants to resource material.”
Students of Main Line School Night class on Growing Superfood
“You were a huge success. Thank you for being part of our Barrett thought series… ‘inaugural’ event actually. Hope we can do it again. Please let me know your preferred mailing address so I can send your gift. On behalf of our team, thank YOU again for being a Barrett friend and advocate.”
Graeme Campbell, Managing Director – Barrett Asset Management, LLC
direct: 646-445-5048 mobile: 917-873-8072 gcampbell@barrettasset.com
(Note: Ms. Campbell was the event coordinator, and the speaking compensation was $5,000 for Mr. Szoradi. The annual investor appreciation event was held at the Cosmos Club in New York City and then again at the Fields Club in Greenwich Connecticut.)
“It was a pleasure to include you in the discussion; and thanks for sending your presentation and for offering to send a video of your talk. Just a heads up that we do videotape a lot of our sessions and post them, along with session presentations, though we tend to keep the discussion that occurs during committee meetings off the record, because sometimes legislators make candid comments that they would like to keep within the committee. But in this case, it should be no problem to post your edited video. I have forwarded your expenses to our administrative staff. The Puerto Rico meeting is being organized by our national office, so I will not be involved with the programming. I will, however, let them know that you are available if they are planning to have a discussion on sustainability. Thanks again for making the trip to Pittsburgh. I wish that we had more time to explore some of the ideas that you introduced regarding food waste-to-fuel technologies and job creation, but perhaps we can take up those topics at a future meeting.”
Rona J. Cohen, Editor, Print and Multimedia Projects, Senior Policy Analyst – Energy & Environment Program
The Council of State Governments, Eastern Regional Conference – 22 Cortlandt Street, 22nd Floor New York, NY 10007
T: (646) 383-5712 F: (212) 482-2344 rcohen@csg.org
(Note: Ms. Cohen was the event coordinator, for the Council of State Governments event that was for the Easter Region, which included over 500 state senators and representatives, held in Pittsburgh, PA for 2019.)
5. Book/film information
Book Release: Mr. Szoradi’s latest book is LEARN from LOOKING – How Observation Inspires Innovation.
Documentary Series: CISCO Systems selected Mr. Szoradi, for their One Million Acts of Green. Video profiles: Small Acts, Big Rewards and The Most Energy Efficient Home.
The HUT Documentary, winner of the Black Maria Film Festival Director’s Choice Award, and directed by Seth Kramer in the mid 1990s. Seth is one of the founders of Ironbound Films (http://www.ironboundfilms.com/about-us) This documentary profiles three urban pioneers – Charlie Szoradi, Kate Bartoldus, and Steve Stormer. Collectively, they undertake the inspiring transformation of an old run-down Philadelphia church and the adjacent buildings into an arts collaborative. The shared studio spaces that they develop serve as catalysts for many local artists to execute their creativity, and the celebrated events at The Hut range from sculpture exhibitions to “Trash and Fashion” shows. As a young architect, Charlie speaks about his vision to transform the remnants of a disposable society into a meaningful way to improve the lives of his partners, the other artists in the film, and also the extended community. https://youtu.be/nxwGC8wV3so
6. Speaking Engagements (separate page)
Mr. Szoradi is a sought-after public speaker on Sustainability, Energy Intelligence, and Controlled Environment Agriculture. For a breakdown of speaking engagements, Click Here.
7. Public Relations (separate page)
Over the course of his 30 year career as a Sustainability Professional, Charlie Szoradi has been profiled by hundreds of print, radio, television and online media platforms. Click below to learn more: