UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Julia Ho, a second-year doctoral student in architectural engineering in the Penn State College of Engineering, was selected to receive the Innovation in Buildings (IBUILD) Graduate Research Fellowship. She is the first Penn State student to be selected for the fellowship since the program began in 2021.
Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and managed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, fellows receive $35,000 annually as a stipend, as well as up to $53,000 as an allowance for education, travel, materials, supplies and health insurance. The fellowship may be renewed for a maximum of three years.
IBUILD aims to strengthen the pool of well-trained scholars with an interest in building technologies and building decarbonization, according to the IBUILD website. Fellows participate in an annual symposium at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, present a poster at IBUILD peer review and submit a written research report.
In her research, Ho focuses on the carbon emissions of commercial and residential buildings, which use 40% of the total energy in the U.S., she said, mainly through heating and cooling systems.
“I am researching how to decrease those emissions by optimizing heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems using advanced modeling tools,” Ho said. “Specifically, I am interested in how we can improve the adoption of low-carbon heating and cooling systems, especially in communities where low-carbon HVAC systems have been less studied or implemented.”
Starting this fall, Ho will work on creating a modeling toolkit to evaluate the feasibility of low-carbon heating and cooling systems for rural communities, considering variables such as geography, climate, population density and housing stock.
“The project will help assess how to sustainably improve rural areas’ heating and cooling infrastructure at a community scale,” she said.
Ho is a part of the Sustainable Buildings and Societies Laboratory, which is headed by her adviser, Wangda Zuo, professor of architectural engineering and of mechanical engineering and associate director for research of the Global Building Network.
“Julia joined Penn State because of her passion for sustainability and desire for making a positive impact to the society through research,” he said. “As a graduate research assistant, Julia works to develop open-source models for the design and operation of grid-interactive energy efficient district energy systems. The district energy system proposed in Julia’s IBUILD research is a much-needed innovative solution for future electrification and decarbonization.”