From Matt Gumm, February 2019:

I’ve been involved with ASHRAE since the free pizza times at ISU with Dr. Maxwell. My ME402 final design group was me, Doug Stephenson and Joel Bartlett. Doug got us jobs with a mechanical firm doing valve tagging for a large project on campus. I am a past winner of the coveted ASHRAE student scholarship, so I’m kind of a big deal in case you didn’t already know that. If you’re reading this you probably did though.

My mechanical path was set by a young Brad Perkins, when as ConE underclassmen we were sitting in the lobby of Town Engineering and he said, more or less, “you’re too geeky to be a general contractor, why don’t you go into mechanical design?” If only I would have known all of the awesome mechanical glory waiting for me, I would have went into computer science.

I’ve worked for Lint, Pulley, Waldinger, BBSAE, Wells Fargo, Frontline Bioenergy, RDG, ESG, AGE, Sebesta Blomberg (who succumbed to the acronymic rage and became NV5) and now I’m a sales engineer for Setpoint. I enjoyed re-doing the heating/cooling loads for Wells Fargo arena for Mike Lipp, Revit modeling a central plant with three chillers, 21 pumps, two boilers and two AHUs, calibrating an energy model for a beleaguered geothermal heat pump job (boy to see our GLD graph line up with the trending; man, it gave you goosebumps), conceptual design for 1500°F waste heat boilers and cow poop digesters (just the waste heat, the cow poop wasn’t 1500°, that would be silly), a water cooled chiller job that starts Monday mornings at partial load and -10° on the frozen taiga of NE Iowa, the list goes on and on. It’s pretty amazing what I’m capable of, just ask me, and if you ask me what my favorite line to sell is, well, it’s my own special line of… what was I saying?

I am a member of ASHRAE (joined in ’97 as a student member but my bio might not say that since I let my membership lapse while in the industrial market), past historian and president, VP, treasurer, secretary, BOG at large, TEGA chair and Dinner Mint Coordinator (my favorite position thank you Zaug) of the Central Iowa ASHRAE chapter, a current committee member of the ASHRAE Iowa Education Committee and member of the ’09 and ‘18 Des Moines CRC committees.

My favorite part of my ASHRAE Iowa chapter presidency was being the unquestioned leader of the powerful cabal that runs the HVAC business around here. It was a rush but I’m glad I got out.

I once cross-country skied to an ASHRAE meeting when it was held at the North End Diner (when there was a North End Diner.) That was pretty awesome, the highlight of a great ASHRAE career so far.