Sara Bronin

Education

Bronin graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001 where she studied architecture and Spanish. She attended Magdalen College at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. While there, she co-founded the Oxonian Review and served as its publisher. In 2003, she graduated with a master's degree in economic and social history. She attended Yale Law School and was senior editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review and graduated in 2006.

Career

Bronin is professor of law, Thomas F. Gallivan chair in real property law and faculty director of the Center for Energy & Environmental Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Her legal research focuses on property, land use, historic preservation, green building and solar law, and renewable energy law. She argued in the Vanderbilt Law Review in 2012 that a primary obstacle blocking "building-related renewable energy" (BRRE) projects was not siting considerations but legal obstacles preventing developers from allocating renewable energy costs to end users. She is the faculty director for the Center for Energy and Environmental Law at the university. As a lawyer, she is a member of the American Law Institute. She is working to coordinate the land use portion of the forthcoming Fourth Restatement of Property. She is a past president of the Connecticut Hispanic Bar Association. She has served as an expert witness and as a consultant to cities, state agencies, and private firms interested in creating or facilitating places of value. Among other projects, she served as lead attorney and development strategist for the 360 State Street project, a mixed-use, transit-oriented, LEED-Platinum project in New Haven, Connecticut. She studied microgrid efforts around the United States as a means of preventing energy sprawl and handling energy blackouts. She advocated efforts to limit use of water and energy in architectural building standards.

As a licensed architect, her design firm, Studio Voladizo, received the 2014 Alice Washburn Award of the AIA of Connecticut in the category of Renovations and Additions. She won the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation Award of Merit, and she was one of 11 winners in the 2013 Hartford Preservation Alliance Preservation Awards for her design and rehabilitation of her family’s Civil War-era brownstone in downtown Hartford. The American Institute of Architects praised the renovation for "its blending of styles and for bringing the traditional into the present."

She is an advocate for historic preservation. She chairs Hartford's Planning & Zoning Commission and is a board member of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation and the Connecticut Fund for the Environment. She is a major factor in Hartford's attempt to build a proposed ballpark for minor league baseball.

Personal life

Bronin is a fifth-generation Texan, born in Houston. She is of Mexican American descent. She has three children and is married to Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin. She administered the oath of office to her husband during the mayoral induction ceremony.

Publications