BOOM location: TBA

Class: M&AE 490
Team members: Bernardo Menezes, Bryan Wolin, Jeffrey Gunther

Founded in the Spring of 2003, the Cornell University Solar Decathlon (CUSD) team is an entirely student-run, interdisciplinary organization made up of over 60 students from across five colleges, including graduate students from the architecture, engineering, and business schools. The Solar Decathlon, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, is an international competition among 19 university and college teams to research, design, fund, and construct solar-powered homes and transport them to the National Mall in Washington DC. There, teams will assemble their houses, conduct a week of public tours and compete in ten evaluated contests. The next competition will be held in October of 2007, and will be the CUSD teams chance to improve on its 2005 showing which resulted in a 2nd place finish. The goal of the solar decathlon is to change the status quo by showing that solar energy is viable today, and CUSD aims to meet and exceed that goal.