Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon 2015, an international competition held every two years, where 20 collegiate teams are invited from around the world to design, build, operate, and market an ultra-efficient home. The competition challenges teams to develop a sustainable project that performs well in 10 individual contests, ranging from Architecture and Engineering excellence to Market Appeal
and Energy Balance. Through their efforts on GRoW Buffalo over the last two years, almost 200 students and faculty from 13 different departments across 5 separate schools from 2 universities have come together to develop a comprehensive proposal to represent Buffalo on an international stage. Through this extremely rare opportunity, the students are able to work in a highly collaborative and vastly interdisciplinary fashion to gain real world experience through a common objective, all before they graduate. In this manner, GRoW Buffalo serves as an ideal model to bridge the gap between research-based academia and practice-based industry.
