CEEE Students Win ASHRAE Scholarships

Congratulations to University of Maryland (UMD) graduate engineering students Mylena Menezes, Aditya Ramnarayan and Brian O'Malley on each receiving the ASHRAE National Capital Chapter UMD Endowed Scholarship. The scholarships were awarded at the April meeting of the National Capital Chapter (NCC) of ASHRAE in recognition of the students’ dedication to developing the next generation of heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration (HVAC&R) technologies, their outstanding academic achievements, and their involvement in the UMD ASHRAE chapter. ASHRAE is an international society of heating, refrigerating and air-conditioning professionals.

All three scholarship winners are Ph.D. students in the UMD Department of Mechanical Engineering and work as graduate research assistants for the UMD Center for Environmental Energy Engineering (CEEE).

Menezes, a third-year Ph.D. student, is the current president of the UMD ASHRAE student chapter and is a member of CEEE’s Modeling and Optimization Consortium. Her research focuses on developing a computationally affordable solver for performance evaluation and design optimization of phase change material-embedded heat exchangers for integration in thermal energy storage systems.

Ramnarayan served as president of the ASHRAE student chapter in 2023-24. He is a fourth-year Ph.D. student with CEEE’s Advanced Heat Exchangers and Process Intensification Consortium, where his research focuses on energy audits, energy efficiency, decarbonization, and machine and deep learning for energy efficiency enhancement and carbon compliance.

O’Malley is a fourth-year doctoral student with CEEE’s Modeling and Optimization Consortium. His research focuses on the modeling and optimization of next-generation heat exchangers under adverse conditions. He will serve as membership chair of the UMD ASHRAE student chapter for the 2025-26 academic year.

Held in College Park, Maryland, the April NCC ASHRAE meeting celebrated UMD student contributions to the HVAC&R field. The three scholarship winners, along with seven other CEEE graduate students, presented their research on developing the next generation of sustainable HVAC&R technologies, updating industry attendees on the latest findings.

ASHRAE student members also elected their chapter’s officers for the next term, which begins in June. Dana Kang will serve as president and Tamoy Seabourne as vice president. Both are graduate research assistants with CEEE’s Energy Efficiency and Heat Pumps Consortium.

Published April 23, 2025