CEEE Director Vikrant Aute Receives Distinguished Service Award

Congratulations to CEEE Director and Research Professor Vikrant Aute on receiving the Dave Tree Distinguished Service Award at the 2026 Herrick Conferences at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Aute leads the UMD Center for Environmental Energy Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

The award recognizes Dr. Aute’s exceptional service to Herrick’s three international conferences, spanning compressor engineering, refrigeration and air-conditioning, and high performance buildings.

For more than three decades, CEEE researchers have supported the biennial Herrick Conferences, presenting over 100 papers on research that is building a more energy-efficient and sustainable future. That body of work spans novel cooling and heating technologies, vapor-compression and not-in-kind systems, innovative heat exchangers and compressors, thermal energy storage, system architectures, and field testing.

“Attending the Herrick Conferences is a tradition for many of us,” Aute says. “I look forward to joining these conferences to meet fellow colleagues and student researchers, and learn the state of the art in HVAC&R.”

See a listing of CEEE’s conference papers.

Published July 31, 2026