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By design
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by Stephanie Hall
Though Leerie Jenkins has called Florida home for decades, he’s still a Bulldog. His cell phone rings the UGA fight song and he even has a daughter named Georgia.
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| Leerie Jenkins |
“I’m just a die-hard Dawg,” says Jenkins (BLA ’70), chairman and CEO of RS&H facilities and infrastructure consulting firm in Jacksonville.
A nationally recognized Fellow Landscape Architect, Jenkins has been with the firm for 35 years—20 of them at the helm. His firm’s design projects have included airports, university campuses, environmental initiatives and space shuttle launch sites.
“This all came to me rather naturally, in part because the landscape architecture program at UGA gave me the fundamentals to visualize and form complete solutions,” Jenkins says. “Our professors provided real-world projects and design process applications. It was a fantastic experience, with a lot of hard work, and I benefited from some exceptionally hard-working professors.”
He also has built teams and increased the firm’s revenue. The company has grown from five to 28 U.S. offices since he arrived, and staff has increased from 200 to more than 825. RS&H has also been a leader in the green movement, designing North Florida’s first LEED certified office building, creating a prototype for sustainable schools, and working to increase energy efficiency in government and military buildings. RS&H teams have worked on watershed projects, such as one in Tampa’s Cypress Creek, to address runoff and replenish the watershed. By 2009, Jenkins says, 20 percent of RS&H’s employees will be LEED certified.
“I’m very proud of UGA,” Jenkins says. “I believe that the School of Environmental Design is ranked so high nationally because of its leadership—those who teach there.”
—Stephanie Hall is director of development for the College of Environment & Design.
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