Nuria Casquero-Modrego

Nuria Casquero-Modrego

Postdoctoral Researcher
415-314-5211

Bio

Núria is an architect/engineer from UC Berkeley and Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC). She worked on energy efficient building envelopes in the SinBerBEST Project at UC Berkeley, and was the head architect for the UC Berkeley team participating in the US DOE 2017 Solar Decathlon, where they were awarded with the 3rd Place. Her work has focused on research into innovative, sustainable, and healthy building solutions. Trained as a researcher and architect in different architectural firms and at the Building Laboratory at UPC, she earned her license in 2000. In 2002 she worked as a Research Assistant at UNESCO-Paris in the Management Of Social Transformations (MOST) program. In 2004, she co-founded TC ESTUDI Arquitectura in Barcelona, working on energy retrofitting, energy poverty, affordable housing, and public and social buildings. That year she joined the Architectural Technology Department at UPC as a professor until 2012. In 2020 she joined LBNL as a postdoctoral fellow performing research on decarbonization of homes.

Awards

Spot: Multifamily Building Efficiency Screening Tool Team -  October 31st 2023

Rapid development of the comprehensive and easy to use Multifamily Building Efficiency Screening Tool for HUD.

HUD MBEST Tool Development -  May 25th 2023

A team of BTUS researchers created the Multifamily Building Efficiency Screening Tool (MBEST) for HUD's Green and Resilient Retrofit Program (GRRP) [https://www.hud.gov/grrp/leadingedge]. The GRRP covers grants and loans of almost $5 billion of investment in multifamily housing. The tool will be used to screen multifamily buildings and understand current opportunities for energy efficiency improvements.  The tool allows building managers and owners to enter information about lighting, HVAC heating/cooling systems, domestic hot water systems, and the building envelope to come up with a building score that allows HUD to make decisions about investing in building upgrades. The key reason for this SPOT nomination is that the LBNL team worked under considerable time pressure to create the tool in just a few weeks to meet HUDs deadline for launching the program and utilized their expertise and knowledge over a broad range of multifamily building performance to make the tool both comprehensive and easy to use.