Catherine Malmberg Dannenbring

Biography: Catherine Malmberg directs economic development and placemaking activities of the Destination Medical Center initiative. DMC is a 20-year, $5.6 billion plan designed to position Rochester, MN – home to Mayo Clinic – as the world’s premier destination medical center. DMC is the largest public-private economic development partnership in Minnesota’s history. Catherine works to advance 21st century city design practices with particular attention to centering health in all DMC investments. She also maintains her solo practice Malmberg Projects, which works at the intersection of imagination, research and reality to create projects that inspire. Catherine’s background is in urban development, particularly mixed-use, transit-oriented, urban infill projects with a focus on a triple bottom line investment approach that incorporates environmental, social, and economic goals. Design excellence, resiliency planning and innovation are common threads in her past projects in New York, Boston-Cambridge, DC, Houston, Atlanta and Seattle metro areas. She completed her undergraduate work in History & Literature at Harvard and holds a master’s degree in architecture from Princeton University. She is adjunct faculty and an affiliate practitioner at the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Design Center, where her research interests include civic participation and the built environment, project prototyping as a market catalyst and the intersection of urbanism, behavioral economics and health.