The UCSB team gathers at the White House. From left: James Choe, Harry Bergmann, Alex Kovalick, Jacob McConnell, Melanie Jones, Justin Lichter, Assistant Secretary of Energy David Danielson, Martin Harrison, Jason Dale, Michael Georgescu, and Ben White. Credit: DOE courtesy image
An interdisciplinary UCSB team of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students were praised for their innovation, winning one of the top national prizes this month in the 2013 Better Building Case Competition at the White House.
Better Building Case is an annual U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) contest that aims to get college students searching for creative solutions for energy efficiency.
The 10-member UCSB team won the “Most Innovative” award in the Energy Efficient Buildings Hub portion of the competition. The students examined strategies for the Hub to assist Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in completing a renovation that produces significant energy savings in a publicly owned, multi-tenant office building.
The UCSB group was among 14 universities – including Yale, MIT, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Tufts – vying in the competition.
In an Office of Public Affairs and Communications news release, Jordan Sager, LEED program manager for UCSB's Facilities Management department, said this was UC Santa Barbara’s first year participating in the program. "Our team was one of only two West Coast schools in the competition, and was very diverse in terms of fields of study, with members representing five departments on campus. Winning in the ‘Most Innovative’ category is an acknowledgment of both the analytical power and the creativity fostered by this type of interdisciplinary collaboration."
Sager and Katie Maynard, sustainability coordinator for the Department of Geography, assembled the winning UCSB team: Bren School graduate students Ben White, Harry Bergmann, Justin Lichter, and James Choe; mathematics doctoral candidate Martin Harrison; Michael Georgescu, doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering; art history undergraduate students Melanie Jones and Jacob McConnell; and environmental studies undergrads Alex Kovalick and Jason Dale.
The university teams had one month to prepare their proposals. On March 8, they convened at the White House and presented their plans to a panel of expert judges, which included Assistant Secretary of Energy David Danielson.
“This competition provides the next generation of engineers, entrepreneurs and policymakers with skills and experience to start careers in clean energy and generates creative solutions to real-world problems to be used as models by businesses and other organizations across the marketplace,” the DOE says on its Better Buildings Web page. “Through the Better Buildings Case Competition, the DOE seeks creative and innovative solutions for energy efficiency that could be implemented by the commercial industry, thereby serving as ‘models for success.’”
Bren grad student Justin Lichter, a member of the winning UCSB team, is a long-distance hiker and backpacker who has written the book, “Trail Tested: A Thru-Hiker’s Insights Into Hiking and Backpacking.” One of the team members, Bren School’s Justin Lichter (MESM, 2013), spoke with the GradPost about his participation in the competition, what the award means to him, his thoughts on sustainability, and more.
“As a group member for UCSB, we all had similar roles,” Justin explained. “Since the timeline was so short and we only had three to four weeks to prepare our solutions, we all initially tried to gather as much background information on the case and options. From there, we brainstormed and suggested solutions, which ended tying together into a multifaceted approach for our submission. Since we were all coming from different disciplines, one of my main roles was to research the financing aspect and possibilities for the project.”
For Justin, the contest wasn’t primarily about winning but about making a contribution. “We went into the project trying to create an innovative and practical solution for the stakeholders,” he said. “We all would have been happy having accomplished that, had we not won. For the judges to acknowledge our solutions, it just validates the amount of time and energy that we put into the project and that our multi-disciplinary approach has real world application. It has been great to be recognized by the DOE!”
He described what it was like to compete at the White House. “It was a tremendous experience to be able to present our solutions at the White House and go to Washington, D.C., in this role. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Justin shared his thoughts on sustainability. “I think there are a lot of improvements that we can make towards being more sustainable and there always will be,” he said. “We can accomplish many of these without affecting our daily lives and with positive economic returns.”
For more information about the 2013 Better Building Case Competition, visit the DOE Web page and read the UCSB news release.