Alyssa Wingenfield

What does it take to get young engineers engaged in the HVAC profession? For one young engineer, it took a modest ASHRAE scholarship, participation in ASHRAE’s student design competition and attendance at ASHRAE meetings to devote her professional life to HVAC engineering.

In 2004, Alyssa Wingenfield began pursuing a degree in architectural engineering at Pennsylvania State University. During her junior year of a five year program in 2006, Alyssa joined the ASHRAE student branch at Penn State. At the time, she was trying to decide between pursuing a career as an HVAC engineer or working in construction management.

In January of 2007, she attended her first ASHRAE meeting, the winter meeting in Dallas. The following year, Alyssa applied for and received the $3,000 Henry Adams scholarship. She also participated in the 2008 ASHRAE Design Competition team for Penn State, taking first place in the System Design Category and second place in the System Selection Category.

By that time, Alyssa was hooked on a career in HVAC. Since graduation, she has worked for Smart Watt Energy and is involved in business development and engineering for multi-measure building energy efficiency projects. She is a member of the Central Pennsylvania ASHRAE chapter and served as the first female president of her chapter in 2010. Today, Alyssa is active in the Young Engineers in ASHRAE program to help recruit and retain top notch engineers in the HVAC profession.

The New Faces of Engineering recognition program, introduced by ASHRAE, is a coalition of engineering societies, major corporations and government agencies. The recipients of the New Faces of Engineering program are engineers under the age of 30 who have already made a contribution to their field of engineering.

In 2015, Alyssa was ASHRAE’s recipient of the New Faces of Engineering award. One of Alyssa’s areas of interest is energy efficiency for the commercial, industrial and institutional sector. Alyssa’s research on biomass boilers has been published in the Journal of Energy Engineering. She has assisted schools, municipalities and other organizations to secure millions of dollars of grans to renewable technology installations. Her work has led to over $40 million in self-funded energy programs across Pennsylvania’s K-12 schools. All of these accomplishments by the age of 28!!

So where do you fit in? Donors to the ASHRAE Foundation provide the kind of scholarship support that helped pay for Alyssa’s education. Annual support for RP helps underwrite the Young Engineers in ASHRAE program that attracts and retains young engineers in the HVAC&R profession