A clean-energy Whittemore Library

FSU's 2025 Campus Master Plan calls for rebuilding the Whittemore Library, one of the oldest and most energy-intensive buildings on campus. We challenged nine high-school interns to design its replacement: a fully electric library that goes beyond Massachusetts energy code by combining passive design, geothermal exchange and solar.

• Led the geothermal team, which sized the borefield and mapped where it could expand across campus
• Co-wrote the final project report with Tessa Bielak and Brigid Ohl
• Created the report's heat-pump efficiency figure (below)

In 2025 we moved from measuring heat to designing solutions. The team's plan redevelops Shoppers World as a walkable neighborhood heated and cooled by a networked geothermal field of about 792 boreholes, with a park on top of the borefield. I turned that plan into the Unreal Engine model for the CAVE.

Measuring heat where people live

With seven high-school students and three other facilitators, I studied urban heat in MetroWest environmental-justice communities. We started with a rooftop model test, then I designed the Micro-Community Temperature Monitoring System, built on an Arduino with a waterproof sensor, a real-time clock and SD-card logging. The students assembled and programmed every unit themselves.