Plenary / invited Speakers
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The Howard W. Emmons Invited Plenary LectureshipDavid Purser, UK |
Prof. David Purser CBE, BSc, PhD, Dip RCPath
Prof. David Purser’s work covers all aspects of fire hazard development, escape behaviour and their interactions. He started working in this area during the 1970s, when the large increase in fire injuries and deaths at that time led him to study the effects of toxic smoke and heat on people and their behaviour during fires. His research into escape behaviour, fire dynamics, combustion chemistry and fire effluent toxicity is applied to hazard assessment models, international standards and incident investigations. He has studied hazard development and effects on occupants in fire incidents, serving as an expert witness for cases including the Dupont plaza hotel fire (Puerto Rico, 1986), the inquiry into Mont Blanc Tunnel fire (Mont Blanc, 1999), the Rosepark care home fire (Glasgow, 2006) and the Grenfell Tower fire (2017). He has served on fire safety and fire engineering standards committiees at BSI and internationally since 1980, participating in leading the revision of BS 7974:2019 Application of fire safety engineering principles to the design of buildings, and also participates in ongoing research and technical advice to Government in relation to revisions of the Building Regulations. Formerly a director at the UK Building Research Establishment, He continues consulting as Hartford Environmental Research and is Visiting Professor in fire chemistry and toxicity at the University of Central Lancashire. In 2013 he was awarded the Institution of Fire Engineers Rasbash Medal for outstanding contribution to the advancement of knowledge in fire behaviour, and in 2015 he was appointed CBE for services to fire safety.
Invited Plenary Speakers
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Yuki Akizuki, University of Toyama, Japan “Evacuation Route Design based on Visibility for Reducing Evacuation Delays” |
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Naian Liu, University of Science and Technology of China, China “Wildland Surface Fire Spread: Behavior and Mechanism Transformation” |
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Eulalia Planas, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain “Fires at the Wildland-Industrial Interface: Is There an Emerging Problem?” |
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Stanislav Stoliarov, University of Maryland, USA “Pyrolysis Model Parameterization and Fire Growth Prediction: The State of the Art” |
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Jennifer Wen, University of Surrey, UK “Fire Modelling: the Success, the Challenges, and the Dilemma” |
Yuki Akizuki
Dr. Yuki Akizuki is a professor of University of Toyama. After spending five years in the lighting research and development laboratory of Matsushita Electric Works (now Panasonic), she received her Ph.D. degree from Nara Women’s University in 2003. She joined Disaster Prevention Research Institute of Kyoto University in 2003 and studied with Prof. Takeyoshi Tanaka. She got the second doctoral degree of engineering from Kyoto University in 2012. She has especially performed the studies aimed at developing a method for evaluating the visibility of evacuation guide signs and the illumination39f evacuation routes. Her studies have contributed to the planning of evacuation routes for smooth evacuation of evacuees in the event of a fire and other disasters.
Naian Liu
Prof. Naian Liu is Professor and Director of the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). His research area is focused on wildland fire dynamics, including the topics of extreme fire behavior, wildfire spread, pyrolysis, and material flammability. He has authored over 180 peer-reviewed papers and 16 invited speeches. His contributions have been revolutionizing the theoretical and experimental descriptions of wildland extreme fire behaviors. This work has been published in over 70 journals and proceedings papers. Among these, 32 papers have been published in Proc. Combust. Inst. and Combust. Flame, and also 16 keynote lectures have focused specifically on this topic. He was elected as a Fellow of The Combustion Institute in 2018. Prof. Liu serves in many international organizations, journals, and conferences of the fire safety community. He is or ever held the Chairman of the Chinese Section of the Combustion Institute, Vice President of Asia-Oceania Association for Fire Science and Technology, Member of Board of Director of International Association for Fire Safety Science, Member of Board of Director of the Combustion Institute, Member of the International Forum of Fire Research Directors, Member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Wildland Fire (2014-2018), Associate Editor of Fire Safety Journal (2013-2015), Associate Editor of International Journal of Wildland Fire (2016-), and Associate Editor of Fire Technology (2016-). Recently, he served as the Program Scientific Co-chair of the 13th IAFSS Symposium and has been serving as the Symposium Planning Committee Co-Chair of the 14th IAFSS Symposium.
Eulalia Planas
Eulàlia Planas is a Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Head of the Centre for Technological Risk Studies and UPC Coordinator of the International Master of Science in Fire Safety Engineering. She graduated in Industrial Engineering in 1993 and obtained the PhD in Chemical Engineering at UPC in 1996. She became associate professor at UPC in 2002 and professor in 2022. Her main research lines are the study of hydrocarbon pool-fires and jet-fires; the mathematical modelling of major accidents; risk analysis of process plants and in the transportation of hazardous materials; and the study of wildfires. In the field of wildfire research, she has developed infrared image processing systems to quantify fire progression (rate of spread, fire intensity, and flame geometry) and aerial fire attack effectiveness. She has also worked on providing systems to deliver fire behaviour forecasts for decision-making, based on data assimilation and inverse modelling. Currently she also works on the study of the wildland-urban and wildland-industrial interface, developing methodologies based on CFD modelling to study the effects of burning fuels on structures, relying on performance-based criteria to assess building vulnerability and sheltering capacity. Prof. Planas is also involved extensively on experimental fire research.
Stanislav Stoliarov
Stanislav I. Stoliarov received M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the Mendeleev Institute of Chemical Technology (Moscow, Russia) and Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the Catholic University of America (Washington, DC, USA). For his Ph.D., Stoliarov performed experimental and computational studies of fundamental mechanisms of reactions involving radicals important in combustion and evolution of planetary atmospheres. Before joining the Fire Protection Engineering Department of the University of Maryland in 2010, Stoliarov spent 8 years working as a researcher for the Ultra Fire Resistant Materials Research Program conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration. At the Federal Aviation Administration, Stoliarov developed computational tools for the modeling of polymer pyrolysis, including MD_REACT and ThermaKin. Stoliarov also made significant contributions to the development of the Microscale Combustion Calorimetry (a new ASTM standard for the measurement of material flammability). At Maryland, Stoliarov teaches a range of upper level undergraduate and graduate classes on the topics of fire dynamics, material flammability and fire modeling. His research group is engaged in a broad spectrum of activities focused on development of experimental and computational approaches to the analysis of flammability of polymeric and composite solids and fire safety of electrical devices. Stoliarov authored close to 100 peer-reviewed publications and over 150 conference presentations and proceedings.
Jennifer Wen
Jennifer Wen joined the School of Mechanical Engineering Sciences, University of Surrey as Professor in Energy Resilience in January 2023; and is currently in the process of launching a new research centre in Surry. Prior to this, she was Professor at University of Warwick for nearly 10 years, where she established and led Warwick FIRE, a multidisciplinary research laboratory for both fundamental and applied research in fire, explosions and other safety related reactive and non-reactive flows. Jennifer also held positions at Computational Dynamics Limited (founding vendor of STAR-CCM), British Gas plc, South Bank University and Kingston University London, where she was full professor since 2000 and Head of Research for Engineering from 1999-2012.
Jennifer is a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. She is Vice-Chairman of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) and Chair the IAFSS Research Sub-Committee. She is a Steering Committee Member of the British Section of the Combustion Institute, UK Explosion Liaison Group, member and Sub-Task Leader for the European Hydrogen Safety Panel (EHSP), established by the Clean Hydrogen Joint Undertaking of the European Commission. Jennifer currently sits on the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute.
Jennifer’s research covers a wide range of topics including fire dynamics, flame spread, façade fires, battery fires, glazing behaviour in fires, and gas explosions. Her expertise is primarily in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling of fire and explosions. She has applied fundamental combustion science to study a wide range of fire scenarios including liquid pool and gas burner fires, single and multi-phase jet fires, flame spread over solid and liquid fuels, façade fires as well as fires in buildings and tunnels. Her expertise further extends to fire and explosion safety in emerging energy technologies, especially hydrogen and batteries.
