A new Sustainability, Energy and Engineering (SEE) Group has been formed in the University of Delaware’s Facilities, Real Estate and Auxiliary Services (FREAS) division, effective Jan. 18.

The new unit will focus on meeting the University’s sustainability goals via projects that will reduce energy consumption, implementing a new Capital Renewal program that focuses on reducing the University’s deferred maintenance backlog and providing engineering guidelines and reviews for capital projects, according to Peter Krawchyk, vice president of FREAS.

Ted Socha has been named the director of SEE and will report directly to Krawchyk. Socha, who joined UD in August 2016, has more than 20 years of leadership experience in operations management, process reliability engineering and quality assurance. He started his career as an equipment engineer and progressed through multiple roles of increasing responsibility in maintenance, operations and engineering. He has managed teams and departments ranging in size from four to 309 employees.

Socha’s previous employment includes working for the Chrysler Corp. from 1994-2008, where he ended his employment at the Newark Assembly Plant, now the home of the UD Science, Technology and Advance Research (STAR) campus. In 2008, he moved on to E.I. du Pont de Nemours as a maintenance area manager before becoming the site mechanical integrity and quality assurance leader, seeing the Chambers Works site through the spinoff of the Chemours Co. in 2015.

He has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Dayton.