• B.S., Engineering (Mechanical), Hope College, 2009
• Ph.D., Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder, 2014

Journal Articles

Gregory Pavlak, Jacob C. Seiler and James Freihaut, 2025, "Energy dispatch optimization at Controlled Environment Agriculture sites with CHP: How energy utilization, storage, and market exports impact operational costs", Energy Conversion and Management, 332, pp. 119743

Gregory Pavlak, Yanxiao Feng, Neda Ghaeili, Ying-Ling Jao, Esther A. Obonyo and Julian Wang, 2025, "Exploring an occupant-involved closed-loop wearable sensing system and online tuning for individualized thermal preference", Energy and Built Environment

Gregory Pavlak, Farzad Hashemi, Gerald Mills, Ute Poerschke, Lisa D Iulo and Loukas N Kalisperis, 2024, "A novel parametric workflow for simulating urban heat island effects on residential building energy use: Coupling local climate zones with the urban weather generator a case study of seven U.S. cities", Sustainable Cities and Society, 110, pp. 105568

Gregory Pavlak, Laura Hinkle, Leland Curtis and Nathan Brown, 2024, "Implementing dynamic subset sensitivity analysis for early design datasets", Automation in Construction

Gregory Pavlak, Fatih Topak, Mehmet Koray Pekeriçli, Julian Wang and Farrokh Jazizadeh, 2023, "Collective comfort optimization in multi-occupancy environments by leveraging personal comfort models and thermal distribution patterns", Building and Environment, 239, (July), pp. 110401

Gregory Pavlak and Lily Li, 2023, "Analyzing harmony and discord among optimal building controllers responding to energy, cost, and carbon reduction objectives", ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities, pp. 011002

Gregory Pavlak and Amin Sepehri, 2023, "Evaluating optimal control of active insulation and HVAC systems in residential buildings", Energy and Buildings, 281, pp. 112728

Gregory Pavlak and Min Gyung Yu, 2023, "Risk-aware sizing and transactive control of building portfolios with thermal energy storage", Applied Energy, 332, pp. 120474

Gregory Pavlak, Abdullah Almasad, Soundar R Tirupatikumara and Thamer Alquthami, 2023, "Site suitability analysis for implementing solar PV power plants using GIS and fuzzy MCDM based approach", Solar Energy, 249, pp. 642-650

Gregory Pavlak and Min Gyung Yu, 2022, "Quantifying the value of stochastic supervisory controller for building thermal energy storage aggregators in two-settlement grid markets", Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities, 3, (3), pp. 031002

Gregory Pavlak, Amy Allen, Gregor Henze, Kyri Baker and Michael Murphy, 2022, "An optimization framework for the network design of advanced district thermal energy systems", Energy Conversion and Management, 266, (2022), pp. 115839

Gregory Pavlak, Min Gyung Yu and Vinayak Shanbhag, 2022, "Uncertainty-aware optimal dispatch of building thermal storage portfolios via smoothed variance-reduced accelerated gradient methods", Journal of Energy Storage, pp. 104405

Gregory Pavlak, Shadi M Abdel Haleem and William P Bahnfleth, 2022, "Model-based testbed for uncertainty quantification in building control systems with advanced sequences of operation", Journal of Architectural Engineering, pp. 04022007

Gregory Pavlak and Min Yu, 2022, "Extracting interpretable building control rules from multi-objective model predictive control data sets", Energy, pp. 122691

Gregory Pavlak, Shadi M Abdel Haleem and William P Bahnfleth, 2021, "Impact of control loop performance on energy use, air quality, and thermal comfort in building systems with advanced sequences of operation", Automation in Construction, 130, pp. 103837

Gregory Pavlak and Min Yu, 2021, "Assessing the performance of uncertainty-aware transactive controls for building thermal energy storage systems", Applied Energy, 282, Part B, pp. 116103

Gregory Pavlak, Amy Allen, Gregor P Henze and Kyri Baker, 2020, "Evaluation of low-exergy heating and cooling systems and topology optimization for deep energy savings at the urban district level", Energy Conversion and Management, 222, pp. 113106

Gregory Pavlak, Siddharth Swaminathan and James Freihaut, 2020, "Sizing and dispatch of an islanded microgrid with energy flexible buildings", Applied Energy, 276, pp. 115355

Gregory Pavlak, Shadi M. Abdel Haleem and William P Bahnfleth, 2020, "Performance of advanced control sequences in handling uncertainty in energy use and indoor environmental quality using uncertainty and sensitivity analysis for control components", Energy and Buildings, 225, pp. 110308

Gregory Pavlak, Christina Turley, Margarite Jacoby and Gregor Henze, 2020, "Development and evaluation of occupancy-aware HVAC control for residential building energy efficiency and occupant comfort", Energies, pp. 5396

Gregory Pavlak, Hyeunguk Ahn, Donghyun Rim and James Freihaut, 2019, "Uncertainty analysis of energy and economic performances of hybrid solar photovoltaic and combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP+PV) systems using a Monte-Carlo method", Applied Energy, 255, pp. 113753

Gregory Pavlak, Gregor P. Henze, Adam I. Hirsch, Anthony R. Florita and Robert H. Dodier, 2016, "Experimental verification of an energy consumption signal tool for operational decision support in an office building", Automation in Construction, 72, pp. 75-92

Gregory Pavlak, Gregor P. Henze and Vincent J. Cushing, 2015, "Evaluating synergistic effect of optimally controlling commercial building thermal mass portfolios", Energy, 84, pp. 161-176

Gregor P. Henze, Gregory Pavlak, Anthony R. Florita, Robert H. Dodier and Adam I. Hirsch, 2015, "An energy signal tool for decision support in building energy systems", Applied Energy, 138, pp. 51-70

Gregory Pavlak, Gregor P. Henze and Vincent J. Cushing, 2014, "Optimizing commercial building participation in energy and ancillary service markets", Energy and Buildings, 81, pp. 115-126

Gregory Pavlak, Anthony R. Florita, Gregor P. Henze and Balaji Rajagopalan, 2014, "Comparison of traditional and Bayesian calibration techniques for gray-box modeling", Journal of Architectural Engineering, 20, (2), pp. 04013011

Conference Proceedings

Gregory Pavlak, Saba Modaresi, Vipul Sachdeva, Yuqing Hu and Nathan Brown, 2025, "Evaluating Zoning Granularity in Graph Convolutional Networks for Predicting Energy and Structural Performance", SIGraDi 2025

Gregory Pavlak, Islam Gharaibeh and Rahman Azari, 2025, "A review of modular construction role in reducing buildings' environmental impacts", ARCC 2025 International Conference

Gregory Pavlak, Fatih Topak, Mehmet Koray Pekeriçli and Julian Wang, 2023, "Analysis of thermal distribution patterns in multi-occupancy environments", pp. 8

Gregory Pavlak and Sam Mottahedi, 2022, "Constrained differentiable cross-entropy method for safe model-based reinforcement learning", ACM BuildSys 2022, pp. 9

Gregory Pavlak, Behzad Rizi, Mohammad Heidarinejad, Vincent Cushing and William Hederman, 2022, "Evaluating the performance of chiller plant efficiency using random forest model: a high-rise building case study", 2022 Building Performance Analysis Conference and SimBuild, pp. 234-242

Gregory Pavlak, Laura Hinkle, Nathan Bro andn, Leland , 2022, "Dynamic subset sensitivity analysis for design exploration", ANNSim 2022, pp. 12

Gregory Pavlak and Amin Sepehri, 2022, "Joint optimization of HVAC and active insulation control strategies in residential buildings", 2022 ASHRAE Annual Conference - Toronto, pp. 8

Gregory Pavlak, Amy Allen, Gregor Henze and Kyri Baker, 2021, "Demonstration of the value of network topology optimization for advanced district thermal energy systems", SDEWES2021, pp. 1-18

Gregory Pavlak and Xinyi Li, 2021, "Pattern analysis of dynamic grid incentives and the implications on optimal control of building thermal energy storage", 2020ne High Performance Buildings Conference, pp. 10

Gregory Pavlak and Min Yu, 2021, "Assessing the value of uncertainty-aware transactive control framework for commercial and residential buildings", International High Performance Buildings Conference, pp. 10

Gregory Pavlak, Amy Allen, Gregor Henze, Kyri Baker and Michael Murphy, 2021, "Evaluation of topology optimization to achieve energy savings at the urban district level", pp. 10

Gregory Pavlak, Chrissa Turley, Gregor Henze and Margarite Jacoby, 2020, "Development and evaluation of occupancy-aware model predictive control for residential building energy efficiency and occupant comfort", IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 588, pp. 022043

Gregory Pavlak, Amy Allen, Gregor Henze, Kyri Baker, Nicholas Long and Yangyang Fu, 2020, "A topology optimization framework to facilitate adoption of advanced district thermal energy systems", IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science, 588, pp. 022054

Gregory Pavlak, Lily Li and Donghyun Rim, 2020, "A review on current passive house performance and potentials in different climate zones", Indoor Air 2020, pp. 2

Gregory Pavlak and Min Gyung Yu, 2020, "Two-stage stochastic planning for control of building thermal energy storage portfolios with transactive controls", 2020 American Control Conference, pp. 2339-2344

Gregory Pavlak, Amy Allen, Gregor Henze and Kyri Baker, 2019, "Analysis of HVAC systems for deep energy savings at the urban district level", 14th Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water, and Environment Systems, pp. 1-28

Gregory Pavlak, Javad Khazaei, Brandon Lee and Mohamed Elsenbaty, 2018, "A novel application of modular multi-level converters for partially shaded PV systems", IEEE Texas Power and Energy Conference, pp. 1-6

Gregory Pavlak, Anthony R. Florita, Gregor P. Henze and Balaji Rajagopalan, 2013, "Probabilistic identification of inverse building model parameters", American Society of Civil Engineers, pp. 255-264

• May 2019 - April 2021, "Uncertainty-Aware Transactive Building Controls," (Sponsor: Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment).

• January 2020 - December 2021, "STTR: Phase II: Peer-to-Peer Energy Transactions with Advanced Demand Flexibility for Increasing Solar Energy Utilization," (Sponsor: QCoefficient, Inc. ^).

• August 2018 - May 2019, "STTR: Peer-to-Peer Energy Transactions with Advanced Demand Flexibility for Increasing Solar Energy Utilization," (Sponsor: QCoefficient, Inc. ^).

• Distinguished Service Award, ASHRAE, June 2025

• Gifford H. Albright Career Development Professor, Penn State, January 2023

• Best Paper Award: SimAUD 2022, Society for Modeling & Simulation International, July 2022

• 2022 IBPSA-USA Emerging Contributor Award, International Building Performance Simulation Association-USA, September 2022

• Best Paper Award: AEI 2013, Architectural Engineering Institute, April 2013

Service to Penn State:

• Committee Work, Co-Chairperson, Council Co-Chair, College of Engineering Sustainability Council, August 2022 - May 2025

• Committee Work, Representative, Architectural Engineering Department Representative, College of Engineering Research Computing Committee, February 2018 - August 2019

Service to External Organizations:

• Participation in or Service to Professional and Learned Societies, Other, Smart Grid Subcommittee Chair, Technical Committee 7.5 - Smart Building Systems, ASHRAE, July 2022

• Participation in or Service to Professional and Learned Societies, Other, Handbook Subcommittee Chair, Technical Committee 7.5 - Smart Building Systems, ASHRAE, July 2021 - June 2024

• Participation in or Service to Professional and Learned Societies, Other, Provisional Corresponding Member, Technical Committee 1.4 - Control Theory and Application, ASHRAE, January 2018

• Participation in or Service to Professional and Learned Societies, Other, Handbook Subcommittee Co-Chair, Technical Committee 7.5 - Smart Building Systems, ASHRAE, July 2018 - June 2021