Dan Sambor has joined the Olin faculty as an assistant professor of engineering.
He was previously a postdoctoral scholar in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, where he served as a lecturer teaching courses on renewable energy systems.
Sambor was born northwest of Chicago to a family of Ukrainian immigrants; they lived on acres of rural countryside in a Sears Modern Homes Kit that was built in 1890—an upbringing that sparked in him his passion for sustainability.
I watched the urban sprawl of Chicago come closer and closer to home, and when I was in my teens the last part of the original farmland was sold to a developer to convert into compact, cookie-cutter neighborhoods,
My dad [who is an architect] and I made a very academic pitch to the mayor about creating a more sustainable space with the land, but in the end the city was more interested in making money.
Dan Sambor
Assistant Professor of Engineering
Sambor earned his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Brown University, where he spearheaded initiatives like a student garden and a composting program. He and a friend also invented a device that ground up and removed water from food scraps to facilitate better small-scale composting.
When Sambor moved on to graduate school, he pivoted his interests to civil and environmental engineering to better focus on his passion for renewable energy systems and energy efficiency.
“I came to Stanford thinking I would design new technology for solar photovoltaic modules or batteries, but renewables had already become much less expensive, so I wanted to explore how we could quickly adapt it to real applications,” says Sambor. “I shifted from technology design to the systems thinking that Stanford is known for.”
Sambor’s PhD dissertation brought him to Alaska, where he engaged with indigenous communities and University of Alaska Fairbanks working on increasing energy efficiency and renewable energy integration. He conducted energy audits in -40° temperatures to relay to stakeholders how they might best invest their precious time and grant money to improve their heating systems.
“It costs a lot of money to transport any fuel to rural areas of Alaska, so you want the system to be as efficient as possible; people also need to be comfortable in their homes, but you need to consider indoor air quality issues as well,” says Sambor. “I focused on energy optimization modeling: How do you design the right energy system for a community without losing the root need of their thermal comfort and other energy services, while also keeping long-term factors in mind?”
At Olin, Sambor is excited to continue this work in community-centered design with faculty and students who are just as passionate about the capability of engineering to make positive, lasting change for people and the planet.
“The students I met at Olin blew me away—it felt like I was talking to PhD students or colleagues,” says Sambor, who will be teaching “Design Nature” this fall. “I’m also looking forward to the College as a Living Lab initiative; my teaching philosophy at Stanford was relaying engineering principles in a way that’s evident and demonstrated in real life.”
Outside of the classroom, Sambor is an avid skier, cyclist, gardener, and backpacker. He is relocating to Massachusetts with his fiance, who is a postdoctoral scholar at Boston University, where she studies energy systems and their social impact.