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 Whitehead Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• AstraZeneca
• The National Institutes of Health

In addition, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign would have earned a three-peat this year for the Top Academic Organization based on points, so they are receiving the Winning Streak Award for 2020.

AstraZeneca saved an incredible 1.1 million kWh/year through their actions for the Freezer Challenge this year, with eight of their sites around the world participating. The Whitehead Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology saved an estimated 189,000 kWh/year, and the National Institutes of Health saved 133,000 kWh/year.

Honorable mentions in the Top Organization Category go to the University of Alabama Birmingham, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and Charles River Laboratories.

Individual laboratory winners 

• The Learning and Research Laboratory at the University of Bristol
• The Janssen Biotherapeutics (JBIO) Lab at Janssen Pharmaceuticals in La Jolla, CA
• The Laboratory of Cell Biology at the Center for Cancer Research of the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health

Honorable mentions in the Individual Lab Category are all academic labs: the BioSpecimen Processing Facility at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; the Biology Teaching Laboratories at the University of California Santa Cruz; and the Van Der Pol Lab at the University of Alabama Birmingham. These labs went above and beyond in their efforts to improve cold storage management and to reduce the environmental impact of their research.

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.