“We are a startup company who has the drive and big vision characteristic of tech enterprises, but we are equally a social impact enterprise organization. We’re very passionate about solving global issues.”

~Dr. Shantonio Birch,

This newsletter features Dr. Shantonio Birch, Mechanical Engineering PhD and founder / CEO of ThermoVerse.

Shantonio is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan College of Engineering (PhD), who passed up several lucrative job offers to start his own company. Among his many awards and accolades, he is a GEM Fellow, a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and a Rackham Merit Fellow. A self-described Tech Founder, Globe Trotter, and Islander, Shantonio has lived in or visited many countries around the world. In fact, in graduate school he would travel to a new country every semester.

What do you do?

I’m the CEO and founder of ThermoVerse, and we’re developing a new way to distribute heat within a building from its walls. There’s a lot of heat that gets thrown out through the walls that never gets repurposed for heating and cooling, so what we’re trying to do is create an envelope system. It’s a built-in thermal management system which could basically capture heat energy that would otherwise be lost and repurpose it to be more energy efficient.

How did you start doing what you do and what do you hope you to accomplish?

My story starts with coral reefs back in Jamaica, where I grew up. I saw that the corals were bleaching due to high sea temperatures and carbon dioxide being absorbed by the water, acidifying the ocean.

With ThermoVerse, I’m trying to prevent the human equivalent of a mass coral bleaching catastrophe, which we’re already experiencing in the form of heat waves. Coral reefs are somewhat lucky, because they have the huge thermal mass of water to act as a cooler, but here on land we don’t have any heat that gets trapped. It’s like living in a huge greenhouse which is constantly getting warmer. Unfortunately, if you see the CDC trend, we’re going to be experiencing a lot more heat-related stress and incidents which lead to health issues like heat strokes. If we do nothing to address this issue, we’re going to be strained to the equivalent of coral reefs, which are being bleached past the point of no return.