About
I design and build the digital tools that connect buildings, grids and the people inside them. I am a postdoctoral research associate in the Grid-interactive Controls Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). I am a contributor and developer on three projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building Technologies Office (BTO) that build grid-interactive, scalable infrastructure for small- and medium-sized commercial buildings (SMCBs). These buildings are 94% of U.S. commercial buildings and account for nearly half of commercial building energy use.
I received my Ph.D. in Architectural Sciences (Built Ecologies) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in May 2025, advised by Dr. Dennis Shelden. My dissertation developed a cross-domain interoperability framework that connects BIM, building energy modeling, building control systems, and occupant behavior. I also hold an M.S. in Architectural Engineering (Construction IT) from Yonsei University. With degrees in architecture (a five-year B.Arch from Yonsei University) and design technology (an M.S. in Architecture from RPI), I design the interfaces and visualizations of the research tools I build, such as the building energy management web interface in ORNL/TM-2026/4715 and the Comfit digital twin dashboard.
Research
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Interoperable digital twins
Design, simulation, and operations tools each keep their own description of a building, and I work on connecting them. At RPI's Center for Architecture Science and Ecology, I built prototypes of a SHACL-based IFC-to-Brick converter and an IFC4.3-to-ECS translator with industry experts from Autodesk, Solibri, and Trimble (demonstrated at the buildingSMART International IFC Implementers Meeting), and a web-based building monitoring system that brings together BIM, IoT sensors, building automation, and semantic web technologies, validated in university lab and meeting-room pilots.
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Grid-interactive efficient buildings
At ORNL I designed and developed a configuration-driven building control platform that integrates model predictive control, VOLTTRON middleware, Brick Schema semantic models, and BACnet/Modbus for vendor-agnostic deployment across heterogeneous building stock, in collaboration with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), AReCoS LLC, and the Alliance for Energy Innovation. Before the postdoc, as an ORISE graduate researcher at ORNL, I built an open-source, scalable web application prototype integrated with BOPTEST and validated it in simulation across HVAC system types.
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Human-building interaction
Building automation acts on assumptions about the people inside, so I work on representing occupants explicitly enough that those assumptions can move between tools and be tested in simulation. At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (2024, hosted by Dr. Tianzhen Hong), I improved the occupant behavior schema obXML (v1.4) used with EnergyPlus and converted the C++ obFMU simulator to Python; as a research intern at Autodesk (2023), I worked on generative design with natural ventilation simulation in EnergyPlus and am a co-inventor on two U.S. patent applications (US20250238578A1, US20250238566A1).
Selected publications
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2026
Generalizable Web User Interface for Scalable and Streamlined Deployment of Building Energy Management Systems in Small and Medium-Sized Commercial Buildings Technical Report ORNL/TM-2026/4715, Oak Ridge National Laboratory DOIPDF
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2026
Low-Cost, Customizable Heating and Cooling Management for Small and Medium-Sized Medical Office Buildings: Design and Laboratory Validation Technical Report ORNL/TM-2026/4854, Oak Ridge National Laboratory DOIPDF
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2026
Extending the Supervisory Controller Kit for Small and Medium-Sized Commercial Buildings to Small and Medium Industrial Facilities: A Literature-Based Feasibility Assessment Technical Report ORNL/TM-2026/4735, Oak Ridge National Laboratory DOIPDF
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2026
Simulation-Based Validation of an Open-Source, Scalable Framework for Building Energy Management in Small and Medium-Sized Commercial Buildings Proceedings of SimBuild 2026, IBPSA-USA DOIPDF
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2025
Enhancing Occupant Behavior Representation for Interoperability between Building Information Modeling and Building Energy Modeling Building Simulation 18(9), 2435-2458 DOI
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2025
Towards High-Performance Buildings for Thermal Resilience and Health Energy and Buildings 347, 116367 DOI
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2024
A Framework of ifcJSON-Based Digital Twin Platform for Monitoring Building Environment Using BIM, IoT, and Semantic Web Technologies Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computing in Civil and Building Engineering (ICCCBE), Montreal, pp. 39-53 DOI
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2024
Sustainability Through Optimal Design of Buildings for Natural Ventilation Using Updated Comfort and Occupancy Models Proceedings of SimBuild 2024, IBPSA-USA DOIPDF
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2023
A Framework for Monitoring and Identifying Indoor Air Pollutants Based on BIM with IoT Sensors CAAD Futures 2023, pp. 518-531 DOI
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2021
Framework for Technical Specifications of 3D Concrete Printers Automation in Construction 127, 103732 DOI
The full list is on Google Scholar and in my CV.
Software
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ORBIT (ORNL Building Interactive Toolkit)
An open-source, scalable software platform for building energy management in small and medium-sized commercial buildings. Built on PNNL's VOLTTRON middleware and AEMS framework, it connects devices over BACnet and Modbus, provides a configuration-driven web application for monitoring and supervisory control, and generates each building's configuration files from a single YAML or Brick Schema model.
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gb-obXML Converter
A command-line tool that translates gbXML to obXML, so occupant behavior models can enter BIM-to-BEM simulation workflows.
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Comfit
A prototype digital twin dashboard that visualizes IoT sensor data on a BIM model in real time.
codedemo
Service
- Session chair, IBPSA-USA SimBuild 2024 and 2026
- Member, IBPSA-USA Research Committee
- Peer reviewer for 10+ journals