Organizing Committee
​The Organizing Committee of the 2018 Wood Stove Design Challenge oversees the selection of finalist teams, developing and implementing the rules, fueling and testing protocol and other key issues to ensure the integrity, fairness and success of the Challenge. The Committee includes national experts and representatives of key stakeholder groups and is still in the formation stage.
The Next Generation Wood Stove Design Challenge is the brainchild of John Ackerly, and he was the principal organizer of the 2013 Wood Stove Decathlon and the 2014 Collaborative Stove Design Workshop. He founded the Alliance for Green Heat in 2009 as a consumer advocacy organization for cleaner and more efficient wood and pellet heating, believing that biomass heating can be a vital renewable energy source to replace fossil heating fuels. He earned a BA from Dartmouth College and a JD at the Washington College of Law and practiced civil rights law before heading up an international human rights organization where he opened branch offices in Amsterdam, Brussels and Berlin. John serves on several boards of directors, including the Biomass Thermal Energy Council, the Advisory Board of the Maryland Clean Energy Center and is a NFI Certified Pellet Specialist. He lives in Maryland with his wife, Nina Smith, and son.
Bio coming soon
Dr. Butcher received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1987. He is a Research Engineer at the Senior Scientist level and Head of the Energy Conversion Group at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY. His long-standing research interests include advanced concepts for building heating and cooling and the application of conventional and biofuels in stationary combustion applications. He has been a part-time lecturer at Stony Brook University since 2008 and acts as a mentor at BNL in programs for visiting engineering students.
Dr. Ciolkosz is an assistant research professor in Penn State’s Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering. He works to help Pennsylvania’s farms and related businesses develop bioenergy and improve energy efficiency. He is the extension program co-lead for Penn State’s renewable energy extension effort. He organizes Penn State’s Bioenergy Short Course Series, participates in the Mid Atlantic Biomass Energy Council as well as Pennsylvania’s State Wood Energy Team and Fuels for Schools groups, and is an active participant in the USDA Sustainable Farm Energy regional project. Research interests include biomass densification processes, thermochemical conversion, and farm energy benchmarking.
http://extension.psu.edu/directory/dec109
https://www.ress.psu.edu/
https://www.energy.extension.psu.edu
http://www.bioenergy.psu.edu
Bill Clarke serves as President of the Osprey Foundation, which seeks to empower individuals and communities in Maryland and overseas through education, health, economic opportunity and human rights in a sustainable way. He is very involved in an initiative to build clean cook stoves in Guatemala, and is also a promoter of the electric car. He and his wife also travel regularly to Cuba and Guatemala to do mission work through the Baltimore Presbytery.
Prior to creating the Osprey Foundation, Bill was a partner in the investment advisory firm Campbell & Company, starting in 1977 as one of four employees. When he retired in May 2007 as executive vice president of research, the company had grown to 140 and was the largest commodity trading advisor in the country.
​John Crouch is the Director of Public Affairs for HPBA. With 35 years’ experience in the industry since beginning as a retailer in Colorado, he has been the industry lead on several field studies in Klamath Falls, OR; Crested Butte, CO; and Libby, MT. John has organized or advised countless woodstove changeouts, beginning in Seattle in 1990, as well as the two whole-town changeouts in Crested Butte and Libby. He currently advises on changeout programs throughout both the U.S. and Canada and has worked with U.S. EPA since they began the Burn Wise program. Mr. Crouch has represented North American manufacturers at the ISO technical committee on wood heater emissions and has presented expert analysis at industry gatherings in the U. S., Canada, and Australia. He has participated in several specialty conferences around particulate matter and wood smoke with the Air and Waste Management Association.
Most recently, John helped organize the industry’s participation in the most recent review of the New Source Performance Standard (NSPS) for New Residential Wood Heaters and is currently the co-chair of the Cordwood Test Method Development Group, a joint effort of the wood heat industry, EPA, and state and local officials. John received a B.S. from California State Polytechnic University at Pomona. He resides with his family in Sacramento, California.
Dr. Philip K. Hopke has a long career of studying atmospheric chemistry and aerosol science with an emphasis on ambient particulate air pollution. Dr. Hopke is the past Chair of EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC), and has served on the EPA Science Advisory Board (SAB). Professor Hopke is a Past President of the American Association for Aerosol Research (AAAR), and was a member of the more than a dozen National Research Council committees and a past member of the NRC's Board of Environmental Studies and Toxicology. He served as a Jefferson Science Fellow at the U.S. Department of State during the 2008-09 academic year. Professor Hopke received his B.S. in Chemistry from Trinity College (Hartford) and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from Princeton University. After a post-doctoral appointment at M.I.T. and four years as an assistant professor at the State University College at Fredonia, NY, Dr. Hopke joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as a professor of environmental chemistry, and subsequently came to Clarkson in 1989. For the past 9 years, he has been actively studying wood pellet combustion systems with an emphasis on emissions and efficiency and issue related to stored wood pellets.
Mark Knaebe is a Natural Resources Specialist at the USDA Forest Service Forest Products Marketing Unit, located at the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. His work focuses on Bioenergy. Mark tests and evaluates wood gasification systems that are used to generate electricity from wood pellets. He advises on kiln heating systems and has designed wood heating systems for residential use. Currently, he is constructing a condensing wood boiler that he designed to maintain flue gasses below 212°F so that all the energy of boiling is recaptured. Mark is a frequent speaker on the many aspects of bioenergy and the advantages of converting biomass directly to thermal energy.
Ramesh Koripella has been with Sandia since 2011, working on the thermoelectric power sources R&D. Prior to joining Sandia, Ramesh spent 3 yrs at a thermoelectrics company in Southern California, where he worked on the design and development of a compact portable thermoelectric power source and a waste heat recovery thermoelectric power generator. Prior to that Ramesh spent 18 yrs leading R&D efforts at Motorola on ceramic components, micro fuel cells efforts for cell phone applications. Prior to Motorola, Ramesh is with KEMET electronics, worked on multilayer ceramic capacitors R&D. He received Ph.D in Materials Science from the Univ. of Southern California, M.Tech (Metallurgical Engineering) from IIT, Kanpur, and B.E (Metallurgy) from Andhra University, India.
Steven Law is a licensed Professional Engineer in the Province of Ontario with a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Guelph (1996). Steven began his career as a consulting engineer and progressed through several privately and publicly held firms, but for the last 7 years he has worked at the Ontario Ministry of Environment and Climate Change as the Renewable Energy Engineer within the Standards Development Branch. Beginning in 2014, Steven led a project to update the regulatory requirements for the control of air emissions from small wood fired combustors with a fuel input capacity of less than 3 megawatts. This project included a significant air emission testing and research program that was conducted at a college campus in northern Ontario. This work resulted in the development of Guideline A-14 and the inclusion of small wood fired combustors in Ontario Regulation 1/17, known as the Air Emissions EASR regulation which was published in January 2017. Most recently Steven has been invited to serve as a technical advisor for Ontario’s Wood Stove Exchange Program.
Elliott has 25 years of experience at the US Dep’t of Energy managing Federal energy R&D programs for renewable biomass energy applications and industrial energy efficiency technology development. Elliott’s more recent experience focused on providing strategic direction for biomass power, renewable heating fuel and enhanced technology for healthier cookstoves for lesser developed countries. Elliott also managed the Federal Biomass R&D Technical Advisory Committee which informs the US Government on strategic biomass energy R&D needs and applications.
Elliott is vice-chair of the DC Chapter of the Technology Transfer Society which conducts forums on regional activities and programs and also hosts an introductory class on this subject. Elliott serves on several boards and committees. Elliott maintains an interest in developing and integrating technology for application to sustainable development, wildlife and habitat conservation. Elliott resides just outside of Washington DC.
Lisa Rector is a Senior Policy Analyst at NESCAUM. For almost 20 years she has worked on a wide variety of technical and policy issues related to climate and air quality impacts including biomass, stationary source testing and permitting, and climate change. At NESCAUM, Lisa is the project manager for many biomass projects including the Thermal Biomass Roadmap, Elemental Composition of Wood Fuels, Comparative Emission Testing for ICI Boilers, Change-out Analysis, Modeling and public health impacts, Residential Wood Test Methods, and Wood Pellet Standards. Lisa also manages NESCAUM Committees focused on biomass, compliance and enforcement issues.
Norbert Senf has been building masonry heaters since 1979. He joined early efforts to write codes and standards, and was a founding member of the Masonry Heater Association of North America (MHA). As the need to measure masonry heater performance and emissions became evident, he worked through MHA to develop in-house testing expertise and build a database on PM emissions performance. He hopes that the recent development of simpler testing technology will accelerate the search for the cleanest ways to burn cordwood.
Julie Tucker serves as the National Lead for Renewable Wood Energy for the U.S. Forest Service. She has worked as an environmental engineering consultant and attorney for a diversity of clients, including Fortune 500 companies, Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Department of Justice, non-profits, and state agencies. Julie served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali, West Africa before joining the U.S. Forest Service as a Presidential Management Fellow where she has been working on renewable wood energy issues since 2005. Julie has a Bachelor of Engineering degree from Vanderbilt University and a Juris Doctor degree from North Carolina Central University.