Two former Grand Challenges (GC) students, Hunter Hancock and Lucas Kiefer, alongside team member, Sarah Canastra, have won the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2020-21 JUMP Into STEM competition – Georgia Tech’s third consecutive win for the title. 

The team worked together to develop a project titled, “Load Shifting with Smart Water Heaters: Conservation Without the Cold Showers,” which won the national competition in the Grid Interactive Efficient Buildings Challenge. Our former GC students took note of how the LEAD program helped them achieve winning results during JUMP into STEM. 

“I think the biggest carryover from GC was the ability to spend longer on the problem than the solution,” said Hancock. “Our final solution in this project is unconventional, utilizing water heaters as preinstalled ‘batteries’ to offset energy consumption in homes, but it came from a deep exploration of the problem space and an openness to strange ideas. When we first proposed the solution, it was phrased as a, ‘wouldn't it be crazy if we could do it this way?’ Being open to that process of uncertainty helps tremendously and is at the very core of the GC curriculum.”

The students were all undergraduate students in School of Public Policy Assistant Professor Omar Asensio’s Data Science for Policy course. Hancock is a third-year computer science student, and Keifer is a fourth-year computer science student. Their team member, Canastra, is a second-year student in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

In all, six cross-disciplinary Georgia Tech teams were among the 48 teams and more than 1,000 students from 29 colleges and universities in this year’s competition. JUMP into STEM (“JUMP” stands for Join the discussion, Unveil innovation, Make connections, and Promote tech-to-market) is an online building science competition sponsored by the Energy Department. It is open to undergraduate and graduate students at U.S. colleges and universities. Winners of the competition receive a paid summer internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) or the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).