From Rural Maharashtra to Global Skylines: The Making of a Building-Automation Engineer

Long before Pradip Thorat's name appeared on control-system drawings for a medical research centre in Doha or a courthouse retrofit in Los Angeles County, Thorat was working on a very different problem: clean-cooking technology for rural households in Maharashtra.

That contrast, between the mechanical rooms of some of the world's most demanding buildings and the dust of rural Maharashtra, where his career began, is the through-line of Thorat's professional life. It is also, in many ways, the story of how a technical education at Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Technological University in Lonere led to work that now spans three continents.

Before he was configuring controllers for hospitals or research campuses, Thorat was working in rural Maharashtra, developing wood-gasifier cookstoves and testing indoor air pollution as part of a household energy programme for rural and semi-urban communities. That early work put clean-cooking technology directly into the hands of households that needed it, at a fraction of the cost of imported alternatives.

Building an industrial career, one system at a time

Thorat's path into building automation developed layer by layer. In 2006, a stint as a design engineer at Praj Refrigeration Industries, where he modelled flake-ice evaporators and shell-and-tube heat exchangers, gave him his first real exposure to industrial-scale thermal systems. It was during his time at Johnson Controls (India), from 2007 to 2015, that his career in controls properly took shape. Joining as an engineer and rising to Assistant Manager over eight years, he moved from pre-bid HVAC estimation to full DDC-level system design, network architecture and site commissioning. That work took him to projects including the Doha Convention Center and Tower, Sidra Medical and Research Centre, and commissions at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai.

That trajectory continued at Honeywell Automation from 2016 to 2022. As Lead Engineer, Thorat took ownership of complete HVAC and BAS designs for clients including Syserco in Fremont, California, and Honeywell-Novar in Bentonville, Arkansas, covering everything from panel layouts and safety interlocks to controller programming and close-out documentation. His projects spanned a Tacoma aquarium, a Nashville VA chiller plant, an Army depot in Pennsylvania, and Walmart's grocery refrigeration systems in Arkansas.

In 2022, Thorat joined Next Level HVAC Energy Management System in Los Angeles, California, as Senior Control Engineer, leading retrofit projects for California courthouses, Caltech's Ginsburg Center, and West Los Angeles College through early 2026. Since April 2026, as Senior Controls Specialist at NRG Controls, he has led BAS design and control-schematic development across education, healthcare and government facilities, helping shape the engineering standards now used by the wider team.

Buildings that already exist

A pattern runs through much of Thorat's later work. Rather than replacing ageing control systems wholesale, he has repeatedly designed retrofits that reuse existing field devices, wiring and panel enclosures wherever they remain serviceable, replacing only what has genuinely reached the end of its useful life. It is not a dramatic idea, but it is a consistent one, echoing an instinct evident in his earliest rural projects: to work with what a community or building already has rather than assume that everything old must be replaced.

“Every time I walk into an old mechanical room, I don't see an outdated building. I see an opportunity,” Thorat has said. “Tearing it down and starting over is rarely the sustainable choice. My job is to make what already exists smarter.”

Credentials that follow the work

Over time, that philosophy has been formalised in a body of published work. In August 2026, Thorat published Building Automation System: Design, Integration and Practice (Shshwat Publication), a book distilling lessons from a career spent designing and integrating BAS platforms from Siemens, Honeywell and Distech across some of the country's most demanding retrofit sites.

Alongside the book is a steady stream of technical papers: on strengthening cybersecurity and interoperability in building automation systems using BACnet/SC; optimising BAS control strategies to mitigate respiratory infection risk in the wake of COVID-19; applying AI-powered fault detection and energy optimisation to air-handling units; and retrofitting cold-climate elementary schools toward net-zero energy. His conference presentations include one exploring an AI-driven microbiome-control framework for next-generation LEED buildings. Together, these papers span the core challenges shaping the BMS industry today: security, health, energy efficiency, and decarbonisation.

That research output sits alongside formal recognition from three of the field's most selective bodies. Thorat holds Fellowship of the Institution of Engineers (India), a grade reserved for engineers with a decade or more of distinguished professional experience and demonstrated leadership. He also holds Senior Membership of the IEEE, awarded on the basis of sustained professional achievement and peer evaluation. He further strengthened his portfolio by earning a LEED Green Associate credential from the U.S. Green Building Council, reflecting current expertise in sustainable design and green building standards. Together, the credentials and publications tell the same story from two perspectives: one measured by peers, the other by the ideas Thorat has chosen to put in writing.

A full-circle engineer

It would be easy to read Thorat's career as two unconnected chapters: a rural-development phase followed by a global-engineering one. A more accurate reading, however, is that both were shaped by the same underlying instinct: to design for people and systems as they actually are, whether that meant a biomass gasifier in a Maharashtra village or a chiller system in a Walmart.

“True engineering excellence in the modern era isn't just about making systems run,” Thorat has said. “It's about anticipating how those systems will scale, defend themselves against operational failure, and reduce environmental load over a multi-decade life cycle.”

For an engineer whose career began with smoke measurements in rural kitchens, that is not an abstract principle. It is, quite literally, where he started. His expertise spans rural energy and major infrastructure retrofits. This broad background makes his published guidelines a trusted reference for engineers. As the industry faces the challenge of modernising old systems without replacing them entirely, his multi-disciplinary experience is uniquely valuable.