A desire to help after 9/11 motivated Tara to focus her career on healthcare design. Even though she would not be in the ER treating patients herself, she found comfort in knowing she could help by providing healthcare workers with high-quality environments for patient care.

Having worked in healthcare design for nearly 30 years, Tara has cultivated a deep sense of empathy for patients and a keen awareness of the power of design to improve highly stressful experiences.

As a Health Principal in HDR’s Phoenix, Arizona, architecture studio, Tara leverages her network, reputation and experience to establish and maintain long-term relationships with new and existing healthcare clients. With two IPD-lite projects with co-located Big Rooms under her belt, Tara has a proven track record of working with multidisciplinary teams to deliver designs on time and on budget. As a mentor, Tara encourages designers to engage in imaginative thinking to develop design solutions that meet and exceed the needs of various hospital stakeholders.

An active member of the local design community, Tara is the Arizona sponsorship chair of NOMA’s Phoenix chapter, the co-chair of the Women in Healthcare mentorship committee, and a member of the Urban Land Institute’s Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI).