This month’s Employee Spotlight is…
Hilary Grimes-Casey
Building Performance Consulting Manager
1. Where did you grow up? Where do you reside now?
I grew up in Alexandria Bay, NY, which is known for being a vacation town in the 1000 Islands region (that turns into a ghost town come October), and currently live in Manlius, NY south of Syracuse.
2. What did you want to be when you grew up (when you were a child)?
A jockey. I was already too tall at 5 when I declared my future vocation. National Velvet was probably a big influence.
3. What guided you into the energy efficiency industry?
I went to graduate school in the late 90’s in a sustainability-oriented research fellowship program. I fought the energy part of it long and hard (I thought I wanted to work on product design) but it was inevitable. I did post-graduate research on the light-duty vehicle market role in sustainable transportation, and that led to my first job in energy efficiency consulting.
4. What does a day in your life at PSD look like?
I have been primarily working on “field studies” intended to assess the accuracy of PSD building energy modeling tools with real building data, so my day looks like a lot of scrolling through model input files in text editors, analysis of data in Excel, and writing up results.
5. Our company has five core values (Integrity, Passion, Collaboration, Vision, and Making an Impact). Which of these values resonates most with you and the work you do at PSD?
The value that resonates most is probably collaboration – I work with energy modeling scripts and software but don’t have the skills to write and edit those scripts; I need to communicate and visually represent large quantities of data but don’t have the skills in the software tools that can do that efficiently. Fortunately, others at PSD do have those skills, and I am always learning something from them when I come asking for help.
6. What do you do when you aren’t at work? Do you have any interesting hobbies?
I’m usually trying to keep two teenagers alive and headed in the right direction, but if I get free time I’m reading or hopefully doing something crafty. My husband, kids and I have also spent a lot of free summer time in the last 10 years renovating our camp in the 1000 Islands.
7. Do you have any pets?
We have a very easy-going male golden retriever named Odin and an overweight geriatric cat named Ginger.
8. What is your favorite holiday?
Memorial Day, because it is the start of the summer season, and a long holiday weekend after a substantial drought of federal holidays!
9. Favorite travel destination? Or dream travel destination?
Favorite travel destination is the 1000 Islands; dream travel destination is Vietnam.
10. Favorite musician/genre?
Probably Stevie Nicks, and generally whatever was playing on my pink radio-cassette player in the late 80’s/early 90’s.
11. What’s the top item on your bucket list? Have you checked anything cool or fun off?
Writing a novel is still on my bucket list, which is otherwise pretty tame.
12. What is an interesting thing about yourself that people may not know?
I don’t know how interesting it is: I prefer to sew my clothes. My favorite thing to make is pants. Yes I could hem yours, but I won’t love doing it. I draw the line at sewing underwear.
Thank you, Hilary! We appreciate you taking the time to do this and are excited to have people get to know a little more about you!
