Civil Engineering and Herrick Labs PhD student Sichen Lu is a recipient of the prestigious ASHRAE Grant-in-Aid Award for 2024-2025. This $10,000 award is given to outstanding graduate students performing research in the High Performance Buildings or HVAC&R fields.

Lu is advised by Prof. Thanos Tzempelikos. Her research is focused on daylighting and human-centered building operation and indoor environmental quality assessment. The objective of this work is to employ smart non-intrusive sensing and deep learning techniques, such as conditional generative adversarial networks, to enable human-preference-based environmental control in buildings.

The goal of the ASHRAE Grant-In-Aid program is to encourage outstanding graduate students to become involved in research relevant to ASHRAE and establish careers that include active engagement and continued contributions to Society activities in the Buildings and HVAC&R fields. The evaluation criteria include academic performance, quality and significance of the student’s research, and overall assessment of the likelihood for future involvement within ASHRAE.