Speakers

Lalit Agarwal Director of Utility & Energy Management, University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL).

Lalit Agarwal is the Director of Utility & Energy Management at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL). He began his career as a computer analyst at UNL in 2000 as part of a team that designed and developed the 3rd generation of UNL’s proprietary building automation system. As facilities needs have morphed, Lalit has taken an increased responsibility for managing all facilities business systems and campus utility production, distribution and consumption. He has a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering from Osmania University in India and a Master of Business Administration from University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Lalit is an active member of APPA and received his Certified Educational Facilities Professional (CEFP) in November, 2017. He has presented at the various APPA and Big 10 and Friends conferences and is a guest instructor for the APPA Institute.

Bharathan Balaji Research Scientist, Amazon AI Labs

Bharathan Balaji is a Research Scientist in Amazon AI Labs, where he works on reinforcement learning services and applications. He did his PhD at University of California, San Diego, where he developed smart buildings applications such as personalized thermostat control, fault detection and occupancy based control. He also helped develop the Brick ontology which is being adopted as an industry standard.

Kristen Cetin Assistant Professor, Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Iowa State University

Dr. Kristen Cetin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, with a courtesy appointment in Mechanical Engineering. She has over 9 years of experience in the building industry in both academia and industry, and is also a licensed Professional Engineer. Previously she worked at Simpson Gumpertz and Heger where she was involved in significant building systems and envelope performance and commissioning efforts. Her research focuses on the use of validated building energy modeling, data-driven modeling, IoT, and smart grid-connected technologies to improve building energy performance while maintaining occupant comfort. She currently leads several nationally-funded research projects, including funding from ARPA-E, ASHRAE, the National Science Foundation, and industry. She is an active member in ASHRAE, and is a technical committee member and Smart Grid sub-committee chair of TC 7.5 – Smart Building Systems, and member of TC 4.4 – Building Materials and Building Envelope Performance.

Gregor P. Henze Professor • RASEI Associate Director • Charles Victor Schelke Endowed Chair • Professional Engineer (PE), University of Colorado Boulder

I am a professor of architectural engineering in the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. At the undergraduate level, the architectural engineering programs aims at educating engineers to design high-performance commercial buildings such as offices, schools, hospitals, and industrial facilities. At the graduate level, our building systems engineering program investigates emerging trends and issues revolving around low-energy high performance building design concepts, renewable energy solutions applied to buildings, and novel approaches to building control and performance analysis.

My research emphasizes model-based predictive optimal control and model-free reinforcement learning control of building energy systems and building thermal mass, model-based benchmarking of building operational performance, whole-building fault detection and diagnosis, control strategies for mixed-mode buildings that incorporate both natural and mechanical ventilation, uncertainty quantification of occupant behavior and its impact, energy analytics and decision analysis as well as the integration of building energy system operations with the electric grid system.

Srinivas Katipamula Staff Scientist, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Srinivas Katipamula is a Staff Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). At PNNL, Dr. Katipamula leads a number of research projects in advanced controls, automated fault detection and diagnostics, building operations and building-grid integration. For over 25 years, Katipamula’s career has focused on improving the operating efficiency of commercial buildings. Prior to joining PNNL, he led the analytics group at the Enron Energy Services. Previously, he also worked at Energy Systems Laboratory, at Texas A&M University, where he developed a number of measurement and verification techniques to measure energy savings from retrofits. He has extensive technical experience in the evaluation of advanced design concepts for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems, development of automated fault detection and diagnostic techniques, self-correcting controls, building and energy system simulations, and analysis and evaluation of new energy efficient technologies, development and use of analytical modeling techniques.

A fellow of the American Society for Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Nationally, Katipamula held a number of positions, including serving as a member of California Technical Forum, ASHRAE Standards Committee, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Technology Institute, reviewing proposals for National Science Foundation and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and also served as an associate editor of the ASME Journal of Energy Resources Technology from 2006 to 2014.

Timothy Koch PE -- Engineering Principal, HDR Inc

An accomplished and published engineer, Tim is a Vice President and Engineering Principal at HDR with over 30 years of experience. He is experienced in all phases of electrical and technology design from concept to commissioning, specializing in the many facets of healthcare design and planning including patient care, research, data-center, and campus infrastructure design. Tim is a leader in the industry at integrating electronic medical records and the building management system to maximize both patient safety and energy savings in the operating room. He has a passion for the design of sustainable integration methods for operational technology which support known use-cases on a future capable cyber-physical protected designed network. He is also engaged on the ASHE Healthcare Code Review Committee, UNO AE Industry Mentor Program, and NARI-Cyber Test Bed Development Committee.

David Lehrer Communications Director / Researcher, Center for the Built Environment (CBE) - Berkeley

David Lehrer serves as the liaison between CBE's research team and its industry partners, and is responsible for catalyzing and managing industry/university collaborations. He is a frequent writer, speaker and event organizer for topics related to commercial building performance and workplace design. He is a primary contributor to CBE's research on occupant feedback and visualizing information in buildings, and recently received DOE's Catalyst Energy Innovation Award.

Prior to joining CBE, David had acquired over 10 years of experience as a designer and architect. He has been an adjunct faculty member at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and served for several years as co-chair of the AIA San Francisco Committee on the Environment. David holds an M.Arch from UC Berkeley. He also maintains a freelance design practice LehrerDesign and produces the case studies for the annual Best Practices Awards.

Cory Mosiman Smart Building Specialist, WSP USA

Cory Mosiman is a Smart Building Specialist at WSP USA and his role is to research a wide range of building technologies and platforms, ranging from traditional mechanical / lighting / electrical systems, to integration platforms and Internet of Things solutions, in order to understand their functionality, capabilities, and limitations. At WSP USA, we install, commission, integrate, and test systems in our ThinkBOLD&R innovation center located in Boulder, CO, gaining hands on experience with individual systems. Cory’s experience and knowledge of Smart Buildings is essential in today's highly dynamic and rapidly evolving environment, providing us with the skills and experience to make informed recommendations to clients, both for individual systems or solutions comprised of integrated systems. Expressing this creativity and understanding in the context of building systems allows our team to create truly SMART buildings and environments. It's like playing Legos with technology - understanding how specific pieces fit together to create the Millennium Falcon, Navy Destroyer, or Hogwarts Express.

Zheng O’Neill Associate Professor, University of Alabama

Zheng O’Neill is an Associate Professor at Department of Mechanical Engineering in the University of Alabama. She is also an Adjunct Professor of Architectural Engineering and an Assistant Director of Alabama Industrial Assessment Center. She was a Principal Investigator at United Technologies Research Center from 2006 to 2013, where she was responsible for the development and field-implement of advanced building optimal controls, building performance monitoring, and energy diagnostics. Her current research emphasized intelligent building operations, control strategies for demand control ventilation, uncertainty quantifications in buildings, ground source heat pump systems, and smart, resilient and connected community. Her current research is supported by ASHRAE, NSF, DOE, ARPA-E, and industry. Zheng is a registered Professional Engineer and an active member of ASHRAE and IBPSA. She received 2010 UTRC Outstanding Achievement Award, 2013 Best Paper Award from Journal of building simulation, 2015 DOE IAC junior faculty research award, 2016 Educator of the Year from ASHRAE Birmingham Chapter, and 2017 ASHRAE Innovative Research Grant Award.

Hung Pham Director Integrated Technologies in Emerson Commercial & Residential Solutions Business, Emerson Commercial & Residential Solutions

Hung Pham is Director Integrated Technologies in Emerson Commercial & Residential Solutions Business with over 40 years of experience in HVAC industry and system technology integration involving refrigerants, control and diagnostic solutions. He currently leads innovations efforts for residential and light commercial HVAC at the Emerson Helix innovation center.

Owen Redwood Chief Research Officer, Nebraska Applied Research Institute

Dr. Owen Redwood is the Chief Research Officer at NARI. Dr. Redwood earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the Florida State University, focusing on vulnerability research and virtualization research of cyber physical systems. Dr. Redwood earned his B.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research background spans IT and OT vulnerability research, reverse engineering, cyber physical systems virtualization research, hybrid approaches for static/dynamic/symbolic analysis, physical-impact payload development, and automated exploitation and mitigation. Dr. Redwood also created and maintains the “Offensive Computer Security” online open-courseware which has been adopted by faculty members at over 20 universities and is the world’s top open-courseware on vulnerability research and exploitation.

In a past life, Dr. Redwood was a member of the Raytheon Deep Red team for the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, where he focused on automating vulnerability discovery, vulnerability mitigation, and exploitation. He also previously worked for Sandia National Labs and another government cybersecurity research and development organization focusing on securing critical infrastructure. Dr. Redwood’s past cyber physical system vulnerability research has covered devices in energy critical infrastructure, oil/gas critical infrastructure, maritime systems, vehicular systems, building automation systems, and more. Dr. Redwood has a Global Industrial Cyber Security Professional (GICSP) certification, and has passed the CISSP exam and is awaiting the CISSP certification award currently

Marina Sofos Ph.D. – Sensors and Controls Technology Manager, U.S. Department of Energy

Marina Sofos is a Technology Manager in the Building Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy. In this role she manages the building sensors and controls technology portfolio within the Emerging Technologies Program. Prior to taking this position, she was a Technology Manager in the Advanced Manufacturing Office where she led the development of the office’s program in scaling up manufacturing approaches for wide bandgap semiconductors and power electronics to enable reductions in cost and improvements in performance efficiency. Her overall interests are in improving power conversion and management technologies through advancements in semiconductor materials and control strategies.

Sofos began her career at the Department of Energy as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow (2010-2012) responsible for coordinating the U.S.-China cooperative clean energy R&D portfolio managed by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

Her research background is in the design of novel inorganic and organic semiconductor hybrid nanostructures to improve their performance in electronic and energy conversion applications. She earned her Sc.B. from Brown University and Ph.D. from Northwestern University both in materials science and engineering and conducted her postdoctoral studies at Argonne National Laboratory.