Kelly is a father, architect, educator, and activist. His holistic approach to the design of the built environment has been shaped by his experiences working across the world first in the resource development sector and at MASS Design Group’s East African office where led the design and implementation of several of MASS’s projects, notably the award-winning Munini District Hospital and the Rwanda Institute for Conservation Agriculture. Working in these contexts brought about a profound sense of a building’s provenance and the scales of social and environmental impacts inherent to the built environment.

In 2020, Kelly established the Ha/f Research Studio at the University of Toronto to catalyse a conversation around the embodied carbon and life cycle impacts of buildings in Canada. The graduate level studio has engaged over 20 leading offices, trained 34 students, and has published internationally acclaimed research demonstrating how and where a building’s upfront impacts reside. The Studio’s research underpinned the embodied carbon policies co-authored by Kelly that were recently adopted by the City of Toronto.

Kelly is a regular speaker, writer, and advocate for the integration of life cycle assessments into design thinking. He is a Senior Fellow of Architecture 2030 and a member of the Royal Architectural Institutes of Canada’s Committee of Regenerative Environments.