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 

• University of Alabama Birmingham
• AstraZeneca
• The National Institutes of Health
• The Children’s Hospital at Westmead

​After having earned the top Academic Organization award for the fourth year in a row, we have awarded The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign our Winning Streak Award for 2021. They saved over 300,000 kWh over the past year through their efforts.

Honorable mentions to organizations go to Merck (known as MSD outside the U.S.), the University of Southern Denmark, and the Royal College of Pathologists Australasia, all of whom gave the competition their all, achieving some incredible energy savings in the process. Great work!

For the first time in 2021, we are awarding multiple Lab Awards per research sector, recognizing small, medium, and large labs (by number of lab members), as well as biorepositories/core facilities.

Individual laboratory winners 

• Research Materials Management Lab in Discovery Technologies at Amgen Thousand Oaks, CA, USA
• Bioscience Lab at Domainex, Saffron Walden, United Kingdom
• Immunology Biology Lab, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, La Jolla, CA, USA
• Endocrinology Laboratory at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, NSW, Australia
• Hemostasis Reference Laboratory, Hamilton, Canada
• MTS Cryo Stores UK Limited, Nottingham, United Kingdom
• Health Microbiology Laboratory, Research Center for Biology, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Indonesia
• The Laboratory of Cell Biology of the National Cancer Institute at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
• Immunoassay Biomarker Core Laboratory, School of Medicine, University of Dundee, United Kingdom
• Van Der Pol Lab at the University of Alabama Birmingham, AL, USA
• Lab+, Coventry University, Coventry, United Kingdom
• BioSpecimen Processing Facility at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, NC, USA

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.