MARK MODERA

The oil crises of the 1970s were what convinced Mark Modera that environmental science was worth pursuing. "As an undergraduate I designed windmills," he says of his search for "a way to do practical good in the near term." When he applied for a job at Berkeley Lab as a UC Berkeley graduate student, "the energy-efficiency research people were the most interesting," and his career path was set. When he noticed that the duct system was missing from most models of air flow through buildings, he set out to correct the omission. The result could end up saving more energy than windmills can generate.