Ayers Saint Gross Expands Leadership in Design, Data, and Technology

The world of design is changing fast. Rapid advances in design technology and data analytics, combined with growing expectations around resilience, building performance, and human-centered design, are changing how we work and practice. The spaces we create are being asked to perform better, adapt faster, and respond more meaningfully to the people who inhabit them. At the same time, the tools available to designers are evolving just as quickly, creating new possibilities for how we understand, measure, and shape experiences.

To meet this moment, Ayers Saint Gross is making strategic decisions about advancing designers who blend technical rigor with design intelligence. By investing in our leadership, we can continue creating environments that are beautiful, functional, and resilient.

Technical Excellence is Design Leadership

We believe technical rigor lies at the heart of every successful design project, ensuring that projects function most effectively. Technical excellence is design leadership.

Newly Promoted Principal Greg Overkamp’s work reflects a conviction that design ambition is inseparable from technical execution. The ability to deliver complex projects with exacting craft, to meet increasingly rigorous sustainability and performance standards, and to execute at the highest level is not a back-office function. It is a core expression of our commitment to our clients and to the built environment.

A trusted technical authority, Greg has a deep understanding of code, life safety, and regulatory process. He has led teams on complex projects including the Howard Community College Kahlert Foundation Complex, King Salman University, the Northern Virginia Community College Medical Campus Expansion, The Brooks Short-Term Housing, the Anne Arundel Community College Dragun Building Renovation, and the George Washington University Student Center and District House.

Principal Greg Overkamp speaks to the firm during Collaboration Day. 

From Intuition to Insight

Today’s clients are navigating increasingly complex decisions about how their spaces are programmed, how they perform over time, and how they deliver measurable value for the people who use them every day. Data is a central piece of that conversation.

Leading this charge at Ayers Saint Gross are newly promoted Associate Principals Katy Potts and Jeffrey Phang. Together, they translate data into insight, giving our clients a clearer picture of what is working, what is not, and what is possible.

Associate Principal Katy Potts leads an engagement session at Ohio University. 

Katy’s work focuses on the relationship between space and human behavior, helping us understand how each space is experienced — how people move through it, how it shapes their behavior, and how it supports their well-being. She combines her architectural background with superb analytical skill, making her an indispensable bridge between data, planning, strategy, and design. She is also refining key firm tools and processes for increased efficiency and consistency across projects and disciplines.

Jeff brings a rigorous analytical lens to the way space functions — turning complex information into clear, actionable decisions that shape better environments from the ground up. He has a passion for the future of higher education planning and consulting, and the new possibilities and challenges AI might bring. He is proud to have had the opportunity to work with clients across very different enrollment scales, resource levels, urban contexts, and cultures.

Associate Principal Jeffrey Phang leads an interactive exercise. 

Integrated Practice, Coherent Experience

The environments we create are experienced as a whole — not as a collection of separate disciplines. Yet too often, the design process treats architecture, interiors, landscape, and planning as parallel tracks rather than a unified endeavor.

Principal Marina Carroll is committed to changing that. Marina’s work sits at the intersection of architecture and business leadership, bringing a strategic and design-forward perspective across all disciplines. She leads the firm’s efforts to connect design decisions to larger organizational outcomes, helping clients to pursue larger goals around student belonging, research growth, operational efficiency, financial sustainability, and institutional resilience.

Principal Marina Carroll addresses colleagues during a firm meeting.

Technology as Enabler

The rapid advancement of AI and the proliferation of innovative design tools have made design technology a fundamental component of our process, reshaping how Ayers Saint Gross designs, visualizes, and delivers work at every scale. Director of Design Technology and Senior Associate, Mike Talbott, leads this work at Ayers Saint Gross.

With a career spanning architectural design, software development, and immersive visualization, Mike brings the perspective of both a technologist and a designer, as well as a conviction that technology’s role is to support our designers and elevate our design. Under his leadership, our design technology team is building the tools, workflows, and AI capabilities that expand what is possible at the drawing board.

That work spans data science, computational design, visualization, immersive technologies, software development, and research. Since launching the Design Technology team, Mike and the team have built a data platform that turns scattered information into meaningful insight, computational tools that open new possibilities in facade and form, and AR/VR experiences that bring designers and stakeholders into designs before they are built. They’ve also developed a custom in-house AI platform that gives every team access to the latest models and agents — adopted with the guardrails to use AI responsibly rather than just quickly. Paired with curated training and close partnership with our sustainability and planning practices, this will equip our designers to deliver work that is faster, sharper, more resilient, and more responsive.

Director of Design Technology Mike Talbott leads a technology demonstration. 

Investing in the Future

The demands on the built environment will only grow more complex. More than passing trends, climate resilience, shifting patterns of work and learning, the integration of data and technology, and the growing evidence linking design to human health and well-being are the new conditions of practice.

With these leadership investments, Ayers Saint Gross is building the expertise and the infrastructure to meet these challenges and help our clients create environments that are successful now and into the future.

Learn more about our team of experts.