Georgia Tech Students Win ‘JUMP Into STEM’ for Third Consecutive Year

Posted December 16, 2020

A team of undergraduate students in School of Public Policy Assistant Professor Omar Asensio’s Data Science for Policy course has won the U.S. Department of Energy’s 2020-21 JUMP Into STEM competition.

Sarah Canastra, Hunter Hancock, and Lucas Kiefer topped the national competition in the Grid Interactive Efficient Buildings Challenge. Their project was titled “Load Shifting with Smart Water Heaters: Conservation Without the Cold Showers.”

Canastra is a second-year student in the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Hancock is a third-year computer science student, and Keifer is a fourth-year computer science student.

Their win marks the third consecutive win for Georgia Tech in the competition.

“We are thrilled by this string of successes. It is a testament to the innovative capacity of our students and the strength of our interdisciplinary approach to education and research,” Asensio said.

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).

The Georgia Tech students who won the 2019-2020 competition recently started their internships.

Catherine Moore, a fourth-year public policy major, and Taylor Sparacello, a fifth-year mechanical engineering major, are interning at Oak Ridge National Lab.

Kira O’Hare, a third-year student in ISyE, and Cade Lawson, a fourth-year economics major, completed internships at the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL). Sarah Tinsley, a fourth-year economics major, also interned at ORNL.

The School of Economics and School of Public Policy are both units of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.