Given that most people spend about 90% of their time indoors, physical structures and energy infrastructures play an important role in both human health and community well-being.
With a $1.7 million grant from the prestigious Wellcome Trust, a multi-institutional team led by UT is developing integrated solutions that improve indoor environmental quality, energy efficiency, and energy resilience to benefit quality of life and community prosperity.
“The challenges we’re addressing through this project are relevant here in East Tennessee and around the globe,” said John D. Tickle Professor Mingzhou Jin, director of UT’s Institute for a Secure and Sustainable Environment (ISSE) and head of the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department.
Wellcome Trust, a global charitable foundation established in 1936, supports science to solve urgent health challenges. UT is part of a cohort of institutions across the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan awarded Wellcome grants to advance health-centered changes in food systems, transport, energy, and housing.
In addition to Jin, the project team includes UT Chancellor’s Professor Leon Tolbert in the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Clemson sociology professor Chien-Fei Chen, who previously served as ISSE’s energy and environmental director; researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the University of Nebraska Medical Center; and East Tennessee research nonprofit Three3.
Together, they’re exploring multiple pathways to mitigate the compound effects of extremely high temperatures, poor air quality due to wildfires, aging energy infrastructure, and inefficiencies in buildings.
Specifically, Jin and graduate student Ziwei Liu seek to optimize HVAC (heating, ventilation, and cooling) control inside buildings.
“During heat waves, people stay indoors even more,” Jin said. At the same time, outdoor pollutants like particulate matter from wildfires can get trapped inside buildings that lack sufficient air sealing or ventilation.
People often respond to heat waves in one of two ways: by using more energy to stay cool, which incurs financial cost and strains older energy infrastructure; or by actively saving energy and thus money, which comes at a cost to productivity and quality of life.
“We’re finding the balance: strategies to keep the indoor environment healthy and productive for people while optimizing energy consumption,” Jin said.
Jin and Liu have developed a physics-based optimization model integrating thermal dynamics, indoor air quality, pollutant dispersion, and HVAC energy consumption. Using the model, they’ve benchmarked five HVAC control methods and determined which can feasibly achieve the greatest degree of balance in several different scenarios.
Meanwhile, Tolbert and postdoctoral researcher Shiyuan Fan are exploring how resilience-oriented power system planning and operation can affect communities. Older, degraded grid facilities result in lower energy resilience and slower recovery from disruption during extreme weather and natural disasters. Tolbert and Fan are investigating how microgrid implementation can increase resilience and reduce large-scale power outages.
To foster knowledge exchange, Wellcome convenes the international cohort of grantees each year. Jin and other team members recently returned from the 2025 meeting in New York City, where they shared their recent results and looked ahead to 2026 with global peers.
Author
Meghan McDonald