Prof. Gregor P. Henze holds a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder (Building Systems Engineering Program, 1995), with a focus on controls, optimization, and energy conservation in buildings. He received the Diplom-Ingenieur (Dipl.-Ing.) and undergraduate degree in energy and process engineering from the Technical University of Berlin (1989 and 1992) and the M.S. in mechanical engineering from Oregon State University (1991). From 1996 to 1999, Prof. Henze worked in the energy services industry at Johnson Controls, a manufacturer of building automation systems. As the engineering manager, he established a business unit for energy savings performance contracting in Germany. 

In 1999, he joined the University of Nebraska - Lincoln as an assistant and later as an associate professor and founding member of the architectural engineering program in the Peter Kiewit Institute in Omaha, Nebraska. In 2008, he joined the University of Colorado’s Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering Boulder as a full professor, where his teaching focuses on the building energy systems side of architectural engineering, i.e., thermal environmental engineering, building mechanical systems design, building control and automation systems, data science for building engineering applications, and sustainable building design.

His research emphasizes model predictive control and reinforcement learning control of building energy systems and building thermal mass, model-based benchmarking of building operational performance, whole-building fault detection and diagnosis, control strategies for mixed-mode buildings that incorporate both natural and mechanical ventilation, uncertainty quantification of occupant behavior and its impact, energy analytics and decision analysis as well as the integration of building energy system operations with the electric grid system.

Prof. Henze is a professional mechanical engineer, certified high-performance building design professional (HBDP), member of ASHRAE, editorial board member for Journal Building Peformance Simulation, former associate editor for ASCE Journal of Architectural Engineering and for IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS), Associate Director of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, joint professor at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as well as co-founder and chief scientist of QCoefficient, Inc. He holds the Charles Victor Schelke Chair at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Colorado.

He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, four of which have received best paper awards, and received one patent with two others pending. Gregor Henze received the 2011 Colorado Cleantech Industry Association's Research and Commercialization Award, holds the endowed C.V. Schelke chair, and is co-founder and chief scientist for QCoefficient, Inc. founded in 2008. During 2005 and 2006, Prof. Henze spent his sabbatical at Siemens Building Technologies in Zug (Switzerland) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Freiburg (Germany) conducting research on high-performance building design and control. Prof. Henze organized several conferences on model predictive control in buildings and intelligent building operations, 2011 in Montreal, 2013 in Boulder, 2015 in Sevilla, Spain, and 2016 and 2018 at Purdue University, and again in Boulder in 2019.

From 2014 to 2015, Prof. Henze was on sabbatical in Sevilla, Spain at the Universidad de Sevilla and the Joint Research Center of the European Commission working on building-to-grid integration and long-term global energy forecasting. From 2021 to 2022, he is a senior researcher at the Eurac Research Institute for Renewable Energy and the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Science, Technology, and Innovation at CSIRO in Newcastle, Australia for 2022.