SPEAKERS

Katharina Kohse-Höinghaus is a Senior Professor of Physical Chemistry at Bielefeld University, Germany. She was trained as a chemist with a doctoral thesis in atmospheric chemistry and performed her habilitation in engineering. Research periods, guest and honorary professorships brought her to institutions in Europe, the USA and Asia. Her research combines aspects of chemistry, physics and engineering to study high-temperature processes.

Kohse-Höinghaus has been honored with prestigious awards and lectureships, including the German Cross of the Order of Merit, the Giulio Natta Medal in Chemical Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano and awards for international scientific cooperation issued by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the People’s Republic of China. She is a Fellow of the international Combustion Institute and received its Alfred C. Egerton Gold Medal in 2018. The German Bunsen Society of Physical Chemistry honored her with its Walther Nernst Medal in 2020.

Kohse-Höinghaus is a member of six academies, including the National Academies of Sciences, Leopoldina, and of Engineering, acatech, as well as the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences. She has served as the President of the Bunsen Society and of the Combustion Institute, an umbrella organization of 35 national and regional academic societies. Also, she has been a member of the German Council of Sciences and the Humanities, the International Advisory Board of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Senates of the German Research Foundation and the Helmholtz Association and served in further academic functions. She is also a pioneer of hands-on science activities for schools.

Dr. Carlos Fernandez-Pello is a Distinguished Professor of the Graduate School in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He received degrees of Doctor Aeronautical Engineer from the University of Madrid, Spain, and a Ph.D. in Engineering Sciences from the University of California, San Diego.  He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, and a Research Faculty at Princeton University. He joined the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980, where he teaches and conducts research in thermal sciences with emphasis in combustion. He held the Maynard Chair Professorship in Mechanical Engineering, and was also Associate Dean of the Graduate Division, where he supervised several units related to university wide graduate studies. He is a member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain, a Fellow of the Combustion Institute and of the ASME International.He is an Honorary Dr. of Engineering from the Universidad Nacional San Marcos, Peru. He has been an Invited Visiting Professor at universities and research laboratories in Japan, China, Italy, France, and Australia. His recent research emphasizes material flammability in earth and spacecraft environments, and wildland fire spotting. Through his career he has studied ignition, smoldering and flaming, micro-scale combustion, external effects on flames, and solar energy storage. His research is, or has been funded, by NASA, NSF, NIST, DARPA, DOE and ARO. He is co-author of the book “Fundamental of Combustion Processes” and of five book chapters. He has over 270 publications in peer reviewed journals and over 300 hundred non-reviewed papers.

Dr. Fengshan Liu received his Bachelor degree in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 1986 and PhD degree from The University of Sheffield in Chemical Engineering in 1990. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Leeds University, he joined the Queen’s University in Canada as a Research Assistant Professor from 1992 to 1996 at the Centre for Advanced Gas Combustion Technology. He joined the National Research Council Canada in 1996 and has remained at NRC.

Dr. Liu has conducted research in modeling radiative heat transfer, modeling soot formation in hydrocarbon flames, development and modelling of the laser-induced incandescence technique for soot diagnostics. Dr. Liu holds two patents in the LII technique. His recent research focused on measurements of black carbon emitted from combustion systems, radiative properties of soot particles and other ultrafine fractal aggregates, and modeling soot formation in laminar coflow inverse diffusion flames. Dr. Liu is an Associate Editor of Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, a Board member of the Combustion Institute Canadian Section, and a Fellow of The Combustion Institute.

Albert Simeoni is a professor and the Department Head of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He received his education in France, obtaining a Bachelor Degree in Physics from the University of Corsica (1994), a Master Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Aix-Marseille (1996), and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Corsica (2000). He is an expert in wildland fire and fire science. He has experience in developing experimental, analytical, and numerical techniques to better understand fire dynamics and to predict fire and wildland fire behavior and impact. Before joining WPI, he held academic leadership positions in fire research in the UK (university of Edinburgh) and in France (university of Corsica). He has also experience as a consultant in fire science in the US and has spent over 10 years volunteering as a firefighter in France, eventually becoming Fire Captain and chief of a small Fire Station.

Elsa Pastor, PhD, Associate Professor at the Chemical Engineering Department of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech and research scientist at the Center for Technological Risk Studies at UPC. She develops teaching and research activities in diverse fields related to wildfire management and technological risk analysis. Over the last 20 years, she has studied several aspects of fire behavior and dynamics by a multidisciplinary approach, combining both experimental and modeling techniques in a wide range of scenarios. She has profited from diverse fire environments (i.e. wildfires, wildfire research burning campaigns, outdoor large-scale industrial testing fields, compartment fires, laboratory set-ups, etc.) to observe monitor and analyze flames and their effect to different types of assets and ecosystems. She has been the leader of the European Project WUIVIEW (wuiview.org), aimed at designing, setting-up and operating a virtual workbench service for the analysis of fire risk in the surroundings of buildings at the wildland-urban interface. She is currently leading the research project WUICOM – BCN Fire resilient communities of Barcelona aimed at developing and implementing a holistic approach to analyse risk at Barcelona metropolitan area due to WUI fires, accounting for infrastructural, societal and ecosystems vulnerabilities.

After coordinating for several years FM Global’s research activities in the area of explosions, Dr. Tamanini moved in 2004 to the Consulting Research Scientist position and eventually to Sr. Research Fellow.  In his current role, he provides support to the Manager of Research, and to the entire scientific and engineering staff, on issues spanning all research topics of interest to FM Global.  They include: fire testing; material flammability; CFD modeling of fires and explosions; impact of natural hazards (wind, flood, earthquake) on property; risk assessment; equipment reliability; and material damage. Since April 2021 he has been the Acting Director for the Equipment, Cyber and Material Science Area.

In addition, Dr. Tamanini has contributed original work in several technical areas:

• extinguishment of fires by water sprays;
• computer modeling of turbulent buoyancy‑controlled flames;
• measurements of the flammability properties of materials;
• large‑scale experiments on the combustion behavior of hydrogen releases into confined volumes;
• definition of the reactivity characteristics of silane;
• vent sizing requirements for explosions in layered vapor/air mixtures;
• protection requirements for storage of cellulose nitrate film; and
• various other problems of dust and gas explosions.

Franco started working at Factory Mutual Research in 1974 after receiving a Ph.D. in applied physics from Harvard University.  He also holds MS degrees from the California Institute of Technology and the Politecnico of Torino in Italy.  He has served as the Chairman of the Eastern States Section of the Combustion Institute, is the 1996 recipient of the Bill Doyle award of the AIChE, and has published numerous refereed papers and technical reports.

Arnaud Trouvé is Professor in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland in College Park, USA. He joined the Faculty in 2001 with a Ph.D. (1989) and Engineering Degree (1985) from École Centrale of Paris, France, and with previous experience as a combustion research engineer. Professor Trouvé’s research interests include fire modeling and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD); application of data assimilation to fire and combustion; and physical modeling of combustion- and fire-related phenomena, including compartment fires, wildland fires and explosions. Professor Trouvé is a Fellow of the Combustion Institute and the recipient of the 2017 FORUM Sjölin Award. He has served on the editorial boards of the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, Combustion and Flame, and Fire Technology, and is currentlyon the editorial boards of Combustion Theory and Modelling and the Fire Safety Journal. Professor Trouvé is also a past Chair of the US Eastern States Section of the Combustion Institute (ESSCI) and a past Member of the Executive Board of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). He is a co-Chair of a recent initiative endorsed by IAFSS and called the “IAFSS Working Group on Measurement and Computation of Fire Phenomena” (the MaCFP Working Group) and a leading figure in a new network of leading higher-education institutions and research programs in fire safety engineering called the International Fire Safety Consortium (IFSC).

I joined EM2C laboratory in 1990 and have developed many atmospheric and under pressurized environment experiments. I have also introduced many diagnostics among the team working on:

• Laser-Induced Fluorescence
• Radicals measurement OH*, CH*, C2*…
• High sample measures by spontaneous emission on PLIF OH/ PLIF PAH
• Particule Imagine Velocimetry (LDV, PIV), low frequency and High speed
• Laser-induced Incandescence (LII)
• Temperature measurements by Phosphor Thermometry
• Back lighting

I have participated to the driving of many doctoral students.

I have also actively participated to international conferences: ASME, Combustion Symposium, Gordon Conference on « Laser diagnostics », ECM.