Award categories for the Freezer Challenge

While every participating lab is a winner for helping save an incredible amount of energy, we are proud to honor the below labs for their significant contribution to the Freezer Challenge.

kwh/day savings is not the only determinant of whether a lab or organization receives a top award or honorable mention. Many actions in the Freezer Challenge do not equate to energy savings – normalized points is the first factor looked at, then kwh/day saved.

Note: Winning Streak Awards are given to previous year’s winners that exceeded their energy savings from last year. 

Organizational winners 

• The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
• Charles River Laboratories, Mattawan
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign saved an estimated 160,000 kWh/year, Charles River Laboratories, Mattawan saved an estimated 423,000 kWh/year, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saved an estimated 300,000 kWh/year.

Honorable mention goes to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Charles River Laboratories, Leiden, and the National Institutes of Health.

Individual laboratory winners 

• The Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s Tissue Bank, Imperial College London
• The Biology/Automated Strain Engineering Lab, Amyris, Inc.
• IRAT and CCB Labs from the Division of Laboratory Sciences, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Honorable mention in the individual lab category goes to the Ming Lab, Department of Plant Biology, managed by Julie Nguyen at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, The Janssen Immunology Biology Lab at La Jolla, California, led by Steven Nguyen, Scientist, Immunology Therapeutic Area, Janssen Research & Development LLC, and The Laboratory Research & Reference Branch in the Division of STD Prevention from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  These labs went above and beyond in their efforts to improve cold storage management and to reduce the environmental impact of their labs.

Of all the participating labs, the  UNC BioSpecimen Processing Facility_Basta, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the RRC UI Health Biorepository discarded the most samples.

Congratulations once again to all the winner’s of this year’s competition, and to the thousands of labs and scientists that participated this year.