The Fume Hoods Project, aimed at reducing energy waste from fume hoods, exemplifies the power of student innovation when given the environment to create.
By Jasmine Simpson
What comes to mind when you see the word “science”? You probably pictured a lab with a scientist in a lab coat and safety goggles. It’s a classic image, and for good reason: labs are where groundbreaking discoveries happen every day. At Penn, there are more than 750 labs spread across upwards of 30 buildings, reflecting the immense scale and impact of research on campus.
These labs can account for over 60% of a major research university’s energy consumption, driven in large part by equipment like fume hoods, each of which can use as much power as 3.5 average U.S. households annually.
This sparked a collaborative conversation between Lorena Grundy, a practice assistant professor in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), and Alisha Ramirez, Penn Sustainability’s Sustainable Labs Manager, about real-world projects that needed support. This led to the incorporation of a fume hood-focused project in the spring 2025 pilot of Grundy’s project-based course Engineering Sustainability (ENGR 5020), open to both graduate and upper-level undergraduate students. The course provides students with the opportunity to reason through sustainability challenges and find realistic solutions. (In addition to fume hood efficiency, last year’s projects ranged from exploring carbon capture technologies to promoting recycling in Greek housing. This year’s new projects include testing heat-reflective coatings for asphalt, designing water recycling systems for lab condensers, and investigating sustainability in the Penn Dental School.)
Grundy’s philosophy as an educator is that “You learn through doing and are [most] motivated to learn the topic when you care about what it’s being applied to.” Such thinking has driven her to develop a unique course focused entirely on innovation. Exams and lectures are replaced with project scoping, stakeholder check-ins, and developing comfort in navigating an unsolved problem and creatively deconstructing it, because, as Grundy reasoned, “that’s what the real world asks of you.”
In partnership with the Penn Sustainability Office and Office of Environmental Health and Radiation Safety, the Green Labs Program’s Fume Hoods Project has transformed ENGR 5020 coursework into an ongoing student project that works with real labs, real people, and real constraints to address the sustainability of fume hoods.
Reducing waste at the lab bench
Fume hoods are designed to protect researchers by acting as a physical barrier and providing an airflow replacement system when working with hazardous materials. As researchers work inside the hood, hazardous fumes are contained and funneled through an exhaust. Ideally, the “door” of the hood, called a sash, is open just enough for researchers to put their arms in and do their work as these systems move large volumes of air from inside to outside the building at a fast rate. Historically, labs relied on wasteful constant air volume (CAV) systems that maintained the same rate of air flow during active and inactive periods. Nowadays, most fume hoods use more sustainable variable air volume (VAV) systems, which control airflow based on the height of the sash. The higher the sash, the higher the rate of airflow, and the harder a building’s HVAC system must work.
It’s like a ventilation system inside in your room: The wider your door is left open, the more air the system must exhaust, meaning it will have to work harder and thus use more energy. By leaving the sash of a fume hood wider, the hood will similarly consume more energy – potentially up to 30-50% of a lab building’s total HVAC load.
When Seito Sanford (ChE’25), Louis Tu (GEng’26), and Nicole Zhao (ChE’25 and GEE’25) took on the Fume Hood project, their first priority was familiarizing themselves with the problem. Under the guidance of Ramirez and Kyle Tice, Lab Safety Specialist at Environmental Health Radiation Safety (EHRS), the students accessed a database of campus fume hoods to gain an understanding of the energy-saving potential, gaps in data reliability, and current lab practices and trainings related to their use. One project goal emerged through this research: increasing awareness of fume hood operations. “When you’re thinking about sustainability, nobody’s really thinking about fume hoods,” Zhao reflected. “It’s definitely not something that crosses your mind at first.”
To assess the impact of open hoods, the group partnered with Sustainabli, a Baltimore-based technology startup that designs products to reduce energy consumption and enhance lab safety. Their primary product, Sashimi, monitors lab fume hood usage in real time and provides software to track data.
Getting buy-in and coordinating access with lab managers and faculty was the next step. Zhao recalled how they expected labs to “ghost” them and were surprised by how many people were receptive and said yes. In all, they were able to connect with four labs with the help of Grundy: the Winey Lab, Madl Lab, Tsourkas Lab, and the Osuji Lab. With a grant from Penn Sustainability’s Green Fund, the group was able to purchase enough sensors to install one on each of the 12 fume hoods located across the four labs.
Once installed, it was time to collect data. Sanford, Tu, and Zhao split data collection into two stages: pre-intervention (March to April) and post-intervention (April to May). The idea was to see if introducing light-touch interventions – stickers and mini-reports – could influence daily lab behavior.
Catalyzing behavior change
Taking inspiration from other universities, the group designed colorful, eye-catching “Shut the Sash” stickers to place on the glass of the fume hoods. The group also created and emailed labs weekly mini-reports, highlighting when and how often a hood was open. Following these interventions, the group analyzed the data and produced graphs to illustrate trends before and after the light-touch interventions. While one lab demonstrated a concerted effort to close the sash, two labs continued to display stagnant elevated sash heights and the last had a mixture of both behaviors. Though limited, the data helped identify exemplary behaviors, such as closing the sash immediately after use, and opportunities for improvement, including leaving the sash open for days at a time. Such results were summarized in a final presentation and research paper for the class and the participating lab partners.
Naturally, the project had its limitations, including time constraints. One idea the team hoped to build on was the campus wide “Shut the Sash” Challenge, first sponsored by Penn Green Labs during Climate Week 2024, in which laboratories competed to earn points and prizes by self-reporting how often their fume hoods were open. Instead of relying on observations, however, the ultimate goal is to measure labs’ energy use and reductions. While the Fume Hood Project did lead to new changes to the challenge (i.e., in-lab visits), Grundy sees an opportunity for another group of students to further the “Shut the Sash” Challenge: Now that the first team has gathered lessons and data, the next team can build upon that foundation.
This year’s group also identified device issues and occasional trouble with data reliability. “There was a big sort of asterisk connected to the data,” Zhao reflected. “But that’s honestly okay. The point of the project was to introduce awareness and get the labs thinking, ‘You know, we actually should shut the sash!’”
The student-led Fume Hoods project did not “solve” lab energy use in one semester, and it wasn’t supposed to. Instead, it showed that students can walk into complex, real-world problems – with competing stakeholders, data flaws, and all – and still produce something meaningful that can turn into a greater solution in the future.
“Students are incredible and can tackle harder problems than they think they can solve,” Grundy says. “It’s been fun having experiences where I can give a student a project and they leave realizing they are more capable and have more skills that they thought.”
Zhao echoed this. “It was really cool that we could actually commit to a project that has real-world implications,” she says. In addition to just gaining general knowledge about fume hoods, she noted her heightened awareness of sustainable practices everywhere she went, because at the end of the day, “it’s part of our daily lives.”
In a world full of overwhelming problems to tackle, it’s more important now than ever to focus on what you can do, because sometimes the biggest gains come from the smallest actions.
If you’re part of a lab, commit to lowering energy use and fostering lab sustainability by joining the Penn Green Lab’s “Shut the Sash” campaigns. If you’re a student interested in sustainable innovation, enroll in experiential learning (or campus-as-a-living-lab) classes like Grundy’s!