A Virginia Tech student team from the School of Architecture + Design and the Myers-Lawson School of Construction (MSLOC) was awarded second place in the Elementary Schools Contest in the U.S. Dept. of Energy's 2018 Race to Zero Student Design Competition.

Team members included Teresa Hamm (Graduate Architecture), Zach Gould (MSLOC BioBuild), Stephanie Burcham (Graduate Architecture), Karthik Vegesna (Construction Engineering and Management), Ashit Harod (Construction Engineering and Management), and Justin Gravatt (Building Construction), with rendering work by David Martin (Undergraduate Architecture). The team was coached by Dr. Georg Reichard (MSLOC) and Dr. Elizabeth Grant (Architecture). Forty teams, representing 34 collegiate institutions, competed to design cost-effective, zero energy buildings. The final stage of the annual competition took place on April 20–22, 2018 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado.