This summer five members of the CBE community received recognition for conference papers and for career contributions, plus travel funding to support conference travel. We commend these well-deserved awards and highlight below the efforts leading to them.
Three of the awards were presented last June at the 2024 ASHRAE Annual Conference, including for Assistant Professional Researcher Carlos Duarte Roa who received the Best Paper Award. His paper builds on years of research that he has dedicated to advancing the open-source common data model, Brick, in order to yield major energy savings in commercial buildings at scale. The paper, “Field Demonstration of the Brick Ontology to Scale up the Deployment of ASHRAE Guideline 36 Control Sequences” was co-authored by CBE’s Paul Raftery, Anand Prakash of Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and Therese E. Peffer of CIEE.
Also at the ASHRAE conference, Professional Researcher Paul Raftery received the ASHRAE Distinguished Service Award, which recognizes members for offering their time towards chapter and other activities. In addition to Paul’s key contributions at CBE towards acquiring funding and leading numerous multi-year projects, he generously offers his time as an active member of the Golden Gate Chapter of ASHRAE, and is also a frequent speaker at their events.
Riwayat Katia, an MS student in Building Science, Technology, and Sustainability (BSTS) at UC Berkeley (the academic program affiliated with CBE) received an Honorable Mention at the ASHRAE conference for her paper, “Load Shifting and Enhancing Energy Savings with Dynamic Ventilation Strategies in Multi-Family Residential Buildings.” With support from co-authors Paul Raftery, Carlos Duarte and Yan Wang, she simulated various load-shifting scenarios and found that dynamic ventilation offers energy savings when compared to constant ventilation. A video of Riwayat’s presentation at CBE’s April 2024 Industry Advisory Board meeting summarizes this work. We will update this post when the paper is online.
Two awards were presented this July at the Indoor Air 2024 conference, organized by the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate (ISIAQ). CBE Associate Director and Professor Gail Brager was elected to the ISIAQ Academy of Fellows, who are recognized for their contributions to the indoor air sciences. The announcement cited Gail’s decades of teaching and research in the fields of building energy performance and thermal comfort. Most recently she has focused her efforts on the study of variable, multi-sensory spaces as documented in her book, Experiential Design Schemas.
Ruiji Sun, a PhD candidate in Berkeley’s BSTS program, received the ISIAQ Student Travel Award, supporting his participation at the conference where he chaired a session and also presented on the topic of causal thinking, the focus of his studies. His recent paper on this subject is, “Causal Thinking: Uncovering Hidden Assumptions and Interpretations of Statistical Analysis in Building Science.”
Photos left to right: Carlos Duarte, Paul Raftery, Riwayat Katia, Gail Brager and Ruiji Sun.