Two members of the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, Assistant Professor Shichao Liu and PhD candidate Rachel Hurley, received recognition for their service and research from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) this spring. ASHRAE is an international professional society dedicated to advancing human well-being through sustainable technology for the built environment. The organization’s mission focuses on advancing the arts and sciences of heating, ventilation, air conditioning, refrigeration, and related fields. It seeks to achieve this mission in part by setting standards that help ensure people can live, work, and thrive in indoor spaces.
Shichao Liu has been recognized with a Distinguished Service Award, which is given to members of ASHRAE who have served the society faithfully and with distinction on committees or otherwise given freely of their time and talent.
Rachel Hurley is one of only 19 students worldwide selected by ASHRAE to receive the prestigious Graduate Student Grant-in-Aid for 2025–26. The award provides up to $10,000 to full-time graduate students pursuing education related to heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration technologies. Hurley is one of just two of this year’s recipients also named to the Life Members Club, an honor reserved for the top-rated applicants. The award considers academic performance and GPA, quality of thesis and relevance to ASHRAE, the advisors’ recommendation, and an overall assessment of the likelihood for future involvement within ASHRAE. The award is supported by a financial contribution from the ASHRAE Life Members Club. Hurley will use the grant for research she is conducting during the 2025–26 academic year that focuses on how building material characteristics influence volatile organic compounds from wildfire smoke when they enter an indoor environment.
The next stage of Hurley’s research will focus on the impacts of prescribed burning on indoor wildfire pollution persistence in Oregon. “You find yourself constantly asking different research questions during your PhD that may slightly fall outside of the scope of current projects, and awards such as the Grant-in-Aid enable me to pursue questions that I may not be able to otherwise,” said Hurley. “Although my primary research focuses on indoor environments in wildfire-prone areas, such as the western U.S., I am very curious about the extent of indoor wildfire smoke persistence in areas impacted by long-range smoke transport, such as here in Massachusetts. For instance, how might wildfire smoke that travels to the Northeast from fires thousands of miles away threaten our indoor air quality long term? Is this a problem we should think about? These are questions that nobody knows the answers to quite yet and I’m excited to explore.”
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