Dr. Guangdong Zhu has been a senior researcher since 2010 and, lately, the group manager of Thermal Energy Systems, at the then National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), now the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR). The Thermal Energy Systems group is focused on thermal energy storage, solar thermal, geothermal technologies and renewable energy hybridization. Dr. Zhu is now leading one major consortium focusing on subsurface: Underground Thermal Energy Storage Collaboration (UTES Collab). UTES Collab aims to accelerate commercial adoptions of UTES technologies through research, development and demonstration. In particular, Cold UTES was proposed and analyzed for reducing data center peak cooling load as non-water-consumption, seasonal-scale storage in the past year. He is an ASME fellow, the associate editor of the ASME Solar Energy Engineering since 2023, and the ASME Journal of Energy Resources Technology between 2019 – 2022. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed journal/conference papers and given invited presentations at various research institutes. His research findings were also recognized by multiple high-impact media such as Wall Street Journal. Dr. Zhu obtained his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of New Mexico in 2006.