Anna Morton Rivera is a Building Performance Specialist at dbHMS who has spent her career modeling and designing high performance systems. She started her career as an energy modeler at dbHMS, and then transitioned to systems design. In 2016, Anna moved to San Antonio and started an engineering firm focused on energy data analytics. In 2021 she re-joined dbHMS to head their Texas office. Anna is an avid OpenStudio and R user, and has full-stack web development experience.
How long have you been a member of IBPSA-USA?
My first ibpsa meeting was the kickoff for starting the ChiBPSA chapter way back in maybe 2011 or 2012.
Why did you join IBPSA-USA?
I joined because I wanted meet other modelers and get better at modeling!
What’s your favorite part of being a member of IBPSA-USA?
Talking with other professionals. Often times they have a great approach to a problem I’m struggling to solve. I attended a Mixa event last year where someone shared an OpenStudio measure that did exactly what I was needing.
Can you describe the volunteer work you do with IBPSA-USA?
I co-chair the BDE data models working group. We work on schemas to make it easier to programmatically share modeling information. Basically I get to hangout with some really smart folks every two weeks and talk about how to make my job easier 🙂. We are currently doing research on the overlaps between modeling outputs required for different energy code, utility incentive, and certification programs with the goal of creating a schema that would eliminate a lot of the copy pasting required to report modeling results.
How did you get involved with this volunteer work?
Good question! I started sitting in on the calls cause I was interested in standardizing model data exchange.
To someone who is interested in participating in IBPSA-USA, do you have any words of encouragement?
Go for it! I feel out of my depth sometimes, but folks are happy to explain things and provide context. That’s one of the cool things about IBPSA is that it includes a really nice mix of practitioners researchers and developers.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to enter the field of building performance simulation?
Please do! We need you! - that’s not really advice, I think start with an internship. Try tinkering with open source software like OpenStudio. Any data science or programming experience is also super helpful.
Fun fact that people probably don’t know about you!
I play the banjo (not very well)!
