Rich Brown is an academic researcher at the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE) at UC Berkeley, where he works on the Oakland EcoBlock project, which is developing and demonstrating neighborhood-scale approaches to decarbonizing existing building stock. His research interests span a broad range of topics related to the development and demonstration of technologies to reduce building energy use, including grid-interactive buildings; intelligent management of distributed energy resources, particularly through networked systems of sensors and controls; and direct current (DC) power distribution in buildings.
He comes to CIEE and CITRIS and the Banatao Institute after over 30 years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he led a variety of research projects on energy in buildings.
Brown holds a master’s degree from the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree in engineering and management systems from Princeton University.