Green engineer

Brett Riley, ENG ’18, has his hands-on experiences at Temple to thank for a burgeoning career in the energy field.

My biggest accomplishment at Temple was … my senior project: helping design a sustainable high tunnel (essentially an unheated greenhouse) for a local urban farm. Going into the project, my team wanted to actually build something as opposed to just creating a design—that’s why we got into engineering. We installed a rainwater catchment system to decrease the dependency on municipal water, and added a solar powered system to provide a source of power to the farm. 

My job now is … working with a startup, Airgreen, Inc., in New Castle, Delaware. We design and build commercial-sized liquid dessicant air conditioners that use about half the energy of conventional systems. I can give and do more working from the ground up with a startup versus joining an established company.

My strongest suit so far is … with energy, whether that’s with efficiency or power generation or even solar power. As the Earth’s population keeps growing and technology keeps advancing, our energy consumption will keep increasing, and we must keep up with that. 

—By Emily Kovach