Leadership

Wen Xiao, AIA, LEED AP - Principal

Ms. Xiao has 25 years of diversified experience leading the design and planning of a great variety of projects in the government, institutional, corporate, science & technology and mixed-use development sectors in the US and international market.
In 2012 Ms Xiao founded the small woman owned business, AVANTurs LLC. She has been responsible for business development and operation of the firm which won three government IDIQ contracts and several subcontracts and private commissions in the first four years. She is personally involved in executing and delivering each of the contracts and projects the firm has; and also works closely with the project teams and subconsultants to ensure the projects are completed on time and on budget. She is fully responsible for client satisfaction and aim to meet and exceed clients' goals for their projects.
Prior to establish AVANTurs LLC in 2012, Ms. Xiao has worked for 20 years at several large multinational architectural firms in the Metropolitan DC area. From 2000 to 2006 while working at SmithGroup JJR, she spearheaded the effort to expand the firm's practice to the east Asian market with the focus in China. She lead the team to won several major design competitions and successfully designed more than 10 large scaled architectural and planning projects in China. Her experiences ranged from intern architect, project architect to project manager and project principal. These valuable experiences provided the unusual opportunities for her to design and manage large-scaled government, institutional, laboratory, medical and private sector projects. In January, 2007 Ms. Xiao joined HDR, Inc (CUH2A before merged by HDR in 2008) as Project Principal and Director of Internal Ventures. During the following five and half years she managed four large scaled laboratory projects including State Public Health Lab of North Carolina, Maryland and West Virginia and National Cancer Institute Advanced Technology Research Facility, while continue to help the firm's business development effort in the China market.
These unique and hands on experiences helped form Ms. Xiao's focus in practice in the next 20 years to Support Better Environment and Health through Design, which is the mission of AVANTurs LLC.