Congratulations to Center for Environmental Energy Engineering (CEEE) graduate research assistants Aditya Ramnarayan and Dana Kang on each being awarded an ASHRAE Graduate Student Grant-in-Aid Award for academic year 2025-26. Only 20 students worldwide are recognized with the $10,000 scholarship, which is funded by ASHRAE, an international society of professionals in the field of heating, refrigerating and air-conditioning. The scholarships are awarded to exemplary graduate students pursuing research in the areas of heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration (HVAC&R). Both CEEE awardees are students in the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD).

Ramnarayan is a fourth-year Ph.D. student with CEEE’s Advanced Heat Exchangers and Process Intensification Consortium; his advisor is Michael Ohadi. Ramnarayan’s research focuses on applying machine learning to energy efficiency enhancement, carbon compliance and decarbonization of commercial buildings. He served as president of the ASHRAE UMD Student Branch in 2023-24.

Kang is a master’s student with CEEE’s Consortium for Energy Efficiency and Heat Pumps; her advisor is Yunho Hwang. Kang’s research focuses on developing a heat pump system that can operate efficiently under cold climate conditions, using refrigerants with low global warming potential. She was recently elected as president of the ASHRAE UMD Student Branch for 2025-26.

To help further the students’ research, ASHRAE will award scholarship winners an additional $1,500 honorarium if they author and present a paper at an ASHRAE annual or winter conference or have a paper published in the ASHRAE journal Science and Technology for the Built Environment.