Jules Okonkwo, M.Eng.

Background

Jules Okonkwo grew up in Lagos and Pittsburgh, in roughly equal measure, and took the BS and M.Eng. in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014 and 2017 respectively. As an undergraduate he worked in the building-systems group of CMU’s Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics, which is housed in the Intelligent Workplace, an instrumented test-bed building on the Margaret Morrison campus quadrangle. He arrived at HVAC through sensors, in other words, rather than through air handlers; that orientation has shaped everything he has done since.

The CMU thesis

His M.Eng. thesis — Okonkwo, J., LoRaWAN Sensor Placement Heuristics in Pre-1920 Masonry Buildings: A Field Study Across the Carnegie Library Branches, CMU 2017 — documents an 18-month survey across nine of Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh’s historic branches, in which Jules instrumented every floor of every building, mapped where signal failed, where it bounced, and where it tunneled, and produced a heuristic that the practice still uses for first-pass sensor placement in pre-1920 brick. The thesis remains an unpublished CMU library-only document; we have permission to cite it. It is, in our experience, the single most useful unpublished document in cultural-heritage telemetry.

At Plenum & Reed

Sloane hired Jules in 2017 because the practice had reached the point where a senior engineer was the bottleneck on every commissioning. He started by building the in-house sensor lab on the second floor of the shop — the lab where every node we ship is now burned in for 14 days at 30 °C/65% RH against a pair of reference probes traceable to a NIST-calibrated reference. He set our standard on Conserv as the platform of record after a six-month bake-off against four other vendors in 2018, on the strength of Conserv’s preservation-specific analytics and its LoRaWAN-rather-than-Wi-Fi posture, which (he wrote in the bake-off memo) “eliminates roughly 80 percent of the failure modes that haunt Wi-Fi telemetry in old buildings.”

The manual

The in-house manual — Sensor Placement in Pre-1920 Masonry: A Field Manual, 2nd ed., 2024 — is the document every junior engineer reads before they place a node on a site. It runs 84 pages, has 31 photographs, six fold-out floor plans, and a one-page foldable card you can keep on a clipboard. It is sold to outside firms for $180; the proceeds go to the AIC Emergency Response Reserve. We have shipped 211 copies.

What he does today

Jules is the design lead on every sensor mesh the practice deploys. He runs the Wednesday-morning telemetry review, where every alert from the previous week is read into the room and either resolved, escalated, or filed for the conservator-on-staff to review. He writes our quarterly preservation-environment reports for retainer clients — reports that, in the words of one development director, are “the first time the board has understood what we’re paying you for.” He is also the firm’s LoRaWAN-licensed gateway operator and writes the gateway-uptime SLA into every retainer contract.

He lives in Friendship with his husband, who teaches in the Pitt physics department, and a Persian cat with strong opinions about chair territory. He runs the Wednesday-night pickup soccer game on the Mellon Park practice field. We are told not to ask him about the 2024 game.

Talk to Jules

For sensor-network and telemetry-only retainers, write Jules directly: jules@plenumandreed.example. He responds within 24 hours during business days.