Durham School team among winners in JUMP into STEM national finals

A team of Nebraska undergraduate architectural engineering students was selected as one of four winners at the sixth annual JUMP into STEM finals competition, held Jan. 25-26 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Knoxville, Tennessee.

The student teams presented 20-minute pitches addressing one of three challenges:  thermal energy storage, building envelope improvement, or carbon reduction. Judges included buildings experts from academia, national laboratories and industry.

The team from the Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction included Izzi Bryant, Maddax Frye, Ema Horner and Sophie Kudron and mentored by faculty advisors Moe Alahmad and Brandon Kreiling. Their winning presentation was titled, “Detecting, Contracting, Sealing (DCS) – the Community Envelope.” 

“It was a great opportunity to experience the process of trying to solve a problem,” said Bryant, a junior. “We were all excited to meet professional researchers and see what the work of engineering looks like. We found that a lot of professionals would love to see our project in real life, which was something we never thought about.

“I will be using this experience to make myself a better team member and to better understand how to divide and conquer a large-scale problem.”

The competition, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Building Technology Office (BTO), brought together nine teams of building science students from across the country. Students from the winning teams were awarded the opportunity spend 10 weeks as an intern at JUMP into STEM-sponsoring national laboratories – at Oak Ridge, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado, or Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington.

Frye, a senior, accept an internship and will be working at NREL this summer.