Carnegie Mellon students win contest( PITTSBURGH Carnegie Mellon Universi...)

PITTSBURGH Carnegie Mellon University graduate engineering students Shahzeen Attari, Ines Margarida Lima de Azevedo, Benjamin Flath and Constantine Samaras are first-place winners in a letter-writing competition called Tomorrows Energy Ambassadors, Managers and Scholars (TEAMS).

The contest, sponsored by Johnson Controls Inc., asked students to demonstrate their awareness of important energy and sustainability issues in a letter challenging the current field of presidential candidates to clarify their own positions on these topics. The students winning letter appears as a full-page ad today in the Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C., regional editions of USA Today.

We challenged the students at more than 200 member schools of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education to draft an open letter to the field of 2008 presidential candidates, said Clay Nesler, vice president of global energy and sustainability at Johnson Controls, a global leader in integrating technologies and products to create smart environments.

The letter from Carnegie Mellon students, in particular, demonstrates that this generation is both inspired and impatient. We congratulate them for outlining an informed and timely query to the candidates, he added.

In addition to having its letter published in USA Today, the Carnegie Mellon team will receive a $10,000 check for the schools scholarship fund from Johnson Controls. The team also will receive a $2,500 grant from Johnson Controls and will be invited guests at the 2008 Energy Efficiency Forum, June 1011 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

We were ecstatic that our team won, said Attari of Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. She is a Ph.D. candidate in engineering and public policy and civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon. Our key message is that this country needs strong lea
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