Student presenters and faculty mentors in Colorado The Miami University team of students were awarded second place in the Small Multifamily category of the 2017 U.S. Department of Energy Race to Zero Student Design Competition. The multi-disciplinary team included eleven students from majors including architecture, interior design, mechanical engineering and experience design. The team presented their project on April 22-23 in Golden, Colorado. Only five out the eleven team members went to Colorado to present the project and competed against nine other teams in their same category.

The Race to Zero is an annual competition, open to students and faculty from any interested collegiate institution. The competition is based upon a real-world scenario where a builder is developing a new high performance home product line or needs to update an existing product line (house plan) to a high-performance house design. The competition encourages students to work with builders, developers, community leaders, and other industry partners to meet stringent design requirements and create marketable, affordable concepts. 

The winning Miami team developed an off-campus 40-unit residential building for Miami graduate and nontraditional students. Their project, called “LoHi” stands for Low Energy and High Performance design. 

The students who participated were: 

• Lynn Belhumeur: B.A. Architecture, minors in Art & Architecture History and Management and Leadership (presented)
• Diana Suarez: B.A. Architecture, co-major in Sustainability, minor in Urban Design (presented) 
• Lyka Williams: B.A. Architecture, co-major in Sustainability, minor in Urban Design (presented)
• Kevin Bechard: B.A. Architecture, minor in Sculpture (presented)
• XiaoLun Chen: B.A. Interior Design, minor in German
• Emily Oneschuk: B.S. Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, co-major in Russian, minor in Naval Science (presented) 
• Scott Heckert: B.S. Engineering Management
• Jack O’Brien: B.S. Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering
• Yashodhan Mandke: M.F.A. (Experience Design)
• Jeremy Long: M.F.A. (Experience Design)
• Yi-Fan Chen: M.F.A. (Experience Design)