Welcome to Texas A&M Building Energy And HVAC & R Research Group!
Buildings consumed 40% of the energy and represented 40% of the carbon emissions in the United States. This is more than any other sector of the U.S. economy, including transportation and industry. Enhancing building efficiency represents one of the easiest, most immediate, and most cost-effective ways to reduce energy consumption while keeping buildings sustainable and healthy. Dr. Zheng O’Neill and her research group are doing something about that by exploring fundamental challenges and emerging technologies for smart and healthy buildings.
For prospective students who are interested in the Ph.D. positions, please check this flyer for details.
News
Apr. 2025. Dr. Tianzhen Hong, Senior Scientist and Deputy Director for Research of the Building Technology and Urban Systems Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, visited our lab.
Nov. 2024. Masafumi Hashimoto (SVP of Controls), Keitaro Hoshika (Director, NARDC), Tatsuya Makino (Director, NARDC), Shuji Furui (Director, DSV), and engineers from Daikin visited our lab.
Nov. 2024. We sincerely thank Haichen Xu from the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, for her one-month visit to our team from October 2024 to November 2024.
Oct. 2024. Congrats! Yuhang Zhang received the Best Student Paper Award of the American MODELICA 2024 Conference.
Aug. 2024. Welcome Habiba Hussein Ghoneim, Zixuan Qi, and Ruizhi Song to join our group as PhD students!
Jul. 2024. Congrats! Johnathan Maxwell successfully defended his M.S. Thesis, entitled “Exploration of Residential Water heating modeling and load shifting via model predictive control”!
Jun. 2024. Welcome Stefanos Theodoros Aristodemou to join our group as a summer intern!
Jun. 2024. Welcome Hunter Simon and David Ventura to join our group as Master students!
Jun. 2024. We are thrilled to welcome the Daikin team to our lab for an exclusive tour and collaboration session.
May 2024. Congrats! Nathaniel Smith won First Place in the Student Poster Competition at the 1st International Workshop on Building and Simulation (BAS 2024).
May 2024. Congrats! Youngsik Choi received the 2024 ASHRAE Graduate Student Grant-In-Aid Award.
Mar. 2024. Congrats! Thomas Firsich successfully defended his M.S. Thesis, entitled “Developing the Texas A&M Smart and Connected Homes Testbed (TAMSCHT)”.
Sep. 2023. Dr. Jian Zhang, Group Leader for the Building Simulation & Design Group (BS&DG) at PNNL, and Dr. Yan Chen, team lead in the BS&DG group at PNNL visited our lab.
Aug. 2023. A new grant from NSF: ECO-CBET: GOALI: Condensing water from the air for building dehumidification and decarbonization using thermo-responsive desiccants.
Aug. 2023. A new grant from NSF: An Integrated Approach to Modeling, Decision-Making and Control for Energy Efficient Manufacturing.
Aug. 2023. Welcome Hang Guan to join our group as a PhD student!
Aug. 2023. Welcome Johnathan Maxwell to join our group as a Master student!
Aug. 2023. Dr. O’Neill and graduate students (Caleb Calfa and Nathaniel Smith) visited Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan for an NSF-sponsored program on the Leadership Development Built Environment Development.
Jul. 2023. Daikin Comfort Technologies North America team visited our lab.
Jul. 2023. Congrats! Nathaniel Smith received the Linda Latham Scholarship from American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE)
Jun. 2023. Congrats! Fan Feng successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Dynamic Building Envelope with Phase Change Material (PCM) and Multi-layered Fenestration Using Model Predictive Controls”. Fan will work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Jun. 2023. Congrats! Guowen Li received Texas A&M Energy Institute’s Graduate Fellowship
Jun. 2023. New grant from DOE IEDO: Decarbonizing Industrial Food Drying with Energy-Efficient Desiccant-Wheel Heat Pump System
May 2023. Congrats! Guowen Li received the 2023 ASHRAE Graduate Student Grant-In-Aid Award.
May 2023. Congrats! Blake Smith-Cortez successfully defended his M.S. Thesis, entitled “Demonstrations of Geofencing Occupancy-Based Control in Smart and Connected Homes”. Blake will work as an engineer at Boeing.
Apr. 2023. Congrats! Thomas Firsich won the Best Poster Presentation Award at the 2023 American Society of Thermal and Fluids Engineers (ASTFE) Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference.
Mar. 2023. Congrats! Tao Yang successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Investigations on Benefits of Energy, Cost, and Comfort for Residential HVAC Systems with Adaptive Model-Predictive Control”. Tao will work as a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Mar. 2023. Congrats! Mengyuan Chu successfully defended her Master’s thesis, entitled “A Maximum-impact Adversary Design for Network-based Control Systems in Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings”. Mengyuan Chu won the Best Student Paper (Master’s Level) at the 2023 ASHRAE Winter Conference in Atlanta, Georgia.
Feb. 2023. Congrats! Our team (Thomas Firsich, Youngsik Choi, and Blake Smith-Cortez) is selected as one winner for An AI for IoT Information (AI3) Prize Competition
Jan. 2023. Welcome Nathaniel Smith to join our group as a M.S. student.
Nov. 2022. Receive a new DOE grant through Slipstream on “ Demonstration of a VOLTTRON-based Platform to Enable Rapid Energy Restoration at Castañer in Puerto Rico.”
Nov. 2022. Congrats! Xing Lu, Fan Feng, Zhihong Pang, and Tao Yang received the Best Research Paper Award 2021 for their paper, entitled “ Extracting typical occupancy schedules from social media (TOSSM) and its integration with building energy modeling”, published in Building Simulation journal. The Best Research Paper Award recognizes the creative contribution and the potential broad impact of the research work presented, and the paper is prominent among the 115 research papers published in Building Simulation journal throughout 2021.
Sep. 2022. Congrats! Thomas Firsich received the Best Oral Presentation Award at the 2022 Texas A&M Energy Conference in College Station, TX. His presentation is entitled “ Development of a Modelica Model for the Texas A&M Smart and Connected Homes Testbed.”
Aug. 2022. New grant from NSF: PIRE: Building Decarbonization via AI-empowered District Heat Pump Systems.
Aug. 2022. Zhihong Pang successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “ Development, Quantification, and Demonstration of Occupant-Centric Controls for Smart and Healthy Buildings.” Congratulations to Zhihong! Zhihong will join Louisiana State University as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2022.
Aug. 2022. We will host a 1.5-day NSF IN2WIBE workshop on September 29-30, 2022, at USC in Los Angeles, with a focus on the future of work with an emphasis on physical and virtual workspaces and the ways to bridge them. We are pleased to have Dr. Shawn Roll (University of Southern California), Dr. Malcolm Cutchin (Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences), Dr. Melissa Park (McGill University), and Dr. Roger Smith (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee) on our panel. For more information please see this flyer.
Jun. 2022. Welcome Youngsik Choi to join our group as a Ph.D. student.
Jun. 2022. Thomas Firsich won the Best Poster and Presentation Award, and Caleb Calfa won the Best Student Paper (Doctoral Level) at the 2022 ASHRAE Annual Conference in Toronto, Canada.
Jun. 2022. New grant (led by University of Pennsylvania) from DOE ARPA-E HESITA Program: High-performance Whole Building Design With 3D-printed Carbon–Absorbing Funicular Structures.
Jun. 2022. New grant from DOE AMO: Efficient Drying Processes of High-Quality Wood through Intelligent Desiccant Assisted Heat Pump System Innovations.
Mar. 2022. Xing Lu successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “ Development and Evaluation of High-Performance HVAC Control Sequences for Variable Air Volume (VAV) System.” Congratulations to Xing! Xing will work as a research engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Feb. 2022. The 2nd IN2WIBE Panel is to be held on February 3rd. We are pleased to have Dr. Carol Menassa (University of Michigan), Dr. Christina Rosan (Temple University), and Dr. Leah Schinasi (Drexel University) on our panel. For more information please see this flyer.
Oct. 2021. A new grant from ASHRAE: “ 1865-TRP: Optimizing Supply Air Temperature Control for Dedicated Outdoor Air Systems.”
Sep. 2021. Zhihong Pang and Xing Lu received the Best Student Paper Award at the 17th International Conference of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA) in Bruges, Belgium. Their paper is entitled “ A Smart CO2-Based Ventilation Control Framework to Minimize the Infection Risk of COVID-19 In Public Buildings.” This biennial building simulation conference had over 460 papers presented.
Aug. 2021. Dr. O’Neill has been named a Fellow of The International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA).
Jul. 2021. Dr. O’Neill has been named a Fellow of The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).
May. 2021. With the support from TEES SEED Grants for Infrastructure, we are exploiting Increasing Texas Residential Building Resilience under Extreme Weather Conditions.
Apr. 2021. The Inaugural Seminar/Panel of IN2WIBE featuring ESTHER M. STERNBERG M.D. was held online on April 29th. Check this wonderful presentation out via YouTube.
Mar. 2021. Check the wonderful presentations in our 1st workshop of IN2WIBE (Link) out. Thanks to our guest speakers Drs. Esther M. Sternberg (Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine), Andrew K. Persily (National Institute of Standards and Technology), Jie Zhao (Delos), and Joseph G. Allen (Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health).
Feb. 2021. The 1st workshop of IN2WIBE is to be held online on March 11th and 12th 2021. More details are in this flyer.
Dec. 2020. Dr. Zheng O’Neill received the Texas A&M Engineering Genesis Award for Multidisciplinary Research.
Nov. 2020. The paper entitled “Ten questions concerning occupant health in buildings during normal operations and extreme events including the COVID-19 pandemic” by the IN2WIBE team has been published on Building and Environment. Check the link for more details.
Jul. 2020. The web page for our DOE Securing Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings (GEB) through Cyber Defense and Resilient System (CYDRES) was launched.
Jul. 2020. Texas A&M Today featured our DOE Securing Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings (GEB) through Cyber Defense and Resilient System (CYDRES) on their daily news. Click for the article.
Apr. 2020. With the support from the NSF AccelNet IN2WIBE (An International Network of Networks for Well-being in the Built Environment) team, we have developed a survey to study How Work from Home Affects Well-being During COVID-19. Please consider providing your valuable inputs and helping us to understand how occupants’ well-being in residential buildings has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Apr. 2020. A new grant from NSF: RAPID: Smart Ventilation Control May Reduce Infection Risk for COVID-19 in Public Buildings (NSF# 2029690).
Feb. 2020. A new grant from the DOE Building Technologies Office: Securing Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings (GEB) through Cyber Defense and Resilient System (CYDRES).
Feb. 2020. New grant (led by Drexel University) from DOE Building Technologies Office: Hardware-in-the-loop Laboratory Performance Verification of Flexible Building Equipment in a Typical Commercial Building.
Jan. 2020. Dr. Zheng O’Neill and her research group joined the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University!
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