Pardee House Seminar on Energy Efficiency in Urban Housing, Sept 17

The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future is pleased to announce a Pardee House Seminar titled “The Future of Urban Housing: Enhancing Energy Efficiency.” The seminar will be held at the Pardee House, 67 Bay State Road, on Wednesday, September 17, 2014 from 12-1:30p.m. (lunch will be available starting at 11:30a.m.). Seating is limited and advance registration is required by Friday, September 12. Click here to register.

Pardee Research Fellow Enrique Silva (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy) will moderate the session. Featured speakers will be Boston University professors Robert K. Kaufmann (Earth & Environment) and Michael Gevelber (Mechanical Engineering). Silva, Kaufmann, and Gevelber work together on the Madison Park Housing Energy Efficiency research project at BU.

Speakers’ Biographies

Enrique Silva is an expert in comparative urbanization, metropolitan governance, and the institutionalization of planning practices in North and South America. He is also actively involved in efforts to promote the development of urban growth management and planning institutions in post-earthquake Haiti. Silva is currently the Senior Research Associate for Latin America and the Caribbean at the Cambridge-based Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. He is responsible for overseeing the Lincoln Institute’s research portfolio on urban development and land use planning for Latin America and the Caribbean. Prior to joining the Lincoln Institute, Silva was Assistant Professor of City Planning at Boston University. Silva has also worked as a planner and environmental development consultant in the Greater Boston Area and was the Program Assistant for the Democratic Governance Program for the Ford Foundation’s Santiago, Chile Office.

Robert K. Kaufmann is a Professor in the Department of Earth & Environment at Boston University. He is also a co-founder of First Fuel Software, a Lexington-based company founded in 2009 that that helps utilities and government agencies deliver scalable energy efficiency across their commercial building portfolios. He has written three books, several book chapters, and more than 90 peer review papers on topics that include world oil markets, global climate change, land-use change, the global carbon cycle, and ecological economics. These papers have appeared in a variety of academic journals, including Science, Nature, and Proceedings National Academy of Sciences and have been cited more than 3,000 times. Research results and interviews with Kaufmann have appeared on CBS and NBC news programs, The National Geographic, Readers Digest, and nearly 100 newspapers including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Michael Gevelber is an Associate Professor in Boston University’s Mechanical Engineering Department.  He has an undergraduate degree in Physics with honors from Brown University and a Masters and Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Mechanical Engineering, focusing on controls. He is a co-founder of Aeolus Building Efficiency Inc., which won the energy efficiency track of MIT’s Clean Energy Contest 2013. Professor Gevelber serves on the Boston University Sustainability Committee, co-chairs the university’s energy working group, and serves on the city of Newton’s Energy Commission. His engineering research focuses on developing enhanced materials processing capabilities though modeling, sensor development, and integrated system and control design, as well as building energy use. In terms of energy, his research focuses on optimizing commercial building HVAC systems, as well as analyzing energy efficiency in residential homes, urban housing, and commercial buildings.