Thomas Hickey, 31
Senior associate and project architect at CannonDesign
Project architect Thomas Hickey specializes in designing medical properties, and his next big project is truly massive: a 31-story extension of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center campus in Manhattan.
Current plans for that project, which is in its very early stages, include 11 surgery floors and nine floors for inpatient beds, as well as three levels of parking, a two-story lobby and mechanical floors. It isn’t going to be easy, but that’s how Hickey likes it.
Hickey knew very little about health care design when he joined CannonDesign in 2018, but he quickly found his way into the niche, mostly because of the steep learning curve. “It took me probably three years or so just to get a handle on all the acronyms,” Hickey said. “And I’m still learning every day. And that’s really fun for me. I enjoy challenge.”
He was like that in college too, always choosing to take studios by the most difficult professors, the ones everyone else tried to avoid, which eventually led to his next challenge: a study-abroad program in Germany entirely in German, a language Hickey studied in high school but did not speak at the time.
He barely made it through the first semester, but failure was short-lived. “By the second semester, I was giving all my presentations in German and figuring it out,” he said. It paid off further when he landed his first job at a German company that needed a German-speaking American, which then launched his career.
Prior to working on the Memorial Sloan project, Hickey spent four years working on Northwell Health’s Petrocelli Advanced Surgical Pavilion in Long Island, a $325 million, seven-
story building with surgical spaces and critical care beds that is scheduled to open next year.
So what’s his next challenge? Not taking on any more challenges? Or picking up Mandarin?
“I think that would be fun,” Hickey said.
