Visiting Assistant Professor in Fire Protection, Oklahoma State University (OSU)

see the application website

The candidate selected for this position must demonstrate a strong commitment and potential to excel at teaching in the Fire Protection and Safety Engineering Technology program within College of Engineering, Architecture and Technology. The position will require teaching undergraduate level classes that may include topics such as Fire Safety Hazard Recognition, Hazardous Materials Incident Management, Senior Design, Loss Control, Safety Management, Human Factors or other classes as specified by the Head of Engineering Technology. A full-time appointment involves teaching three or four 3-credit hour courses, or equivalent, per semester.
The successful applicant will enhance the existing faculty teaching portfolio in terms of technical expertise and professional practice. Responsibilities include development, planning and implementation of a high quality curriculum. This includes development of learning materials, preparing lectures and laboratory assignments, and maintaining records to monitor student progress, achievement and attendance. Providing a rigorous ongoing assessment process for all courses is required. Classroom delivery is expected to incorporate principles of active-learning. This position is expected to establish office hours and effectively manage graduate teaching assistants and/or undergraduate graders. The ability to accelerate development of student written and oral communication skills is essential. The desired candidate should possess strong interpersonal skills with the ability to motivate and inspire students while maintaining the highest standards in a very challenging curriculum.
Other desirable skills or interests include, but are not limited to, service as the advisor to a student organization, undergraduate student advising, and participation on departmental, college or university committees.

IAFSS Workshop: Agenda 2030 for a Fire Safe World

The IAFSS will be holding a workshop on the afternoon of Tuesday, 11 September, just ahead of the ESFSS in Nancy, France.

Although great strides have been made in reducing the negative impacts of fire over the past few decades, the global impact of fire remains staggering. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates global burn deaths to 180,000 annually, the vast majority of these in low and middle-income countries. Within Europe, more than 3,500 people are killed annually. The losses in the USA are similar. In most developed countries the cost of fire damage is estimated to be at least 1% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In the USA, alone the total cost of fire has been estimated at US$328.5 billion. Global loss due to wildand fire is presently greater than at any time in the past. SwissRe has reported that the combined insurance losses from all wildfires worldwide in 2017 were US$14 billion, the highest ever in a single year. According to Allianz, fires and explosions in the built environment accounted for 59% of 1,807 business interruption claims globally from 2010-2014, resulting in billions of US dollars in loss.

Something must be done to facilitate substantial reduction in these losses. To better characterize the problems and develop solutions, fire safety science and engineering research needs to be integrated into societally-transformative risk mitigation and resiliency initiatives. Grand societal challenges such as changing demographics (an aging and diversely able society), rapid urbanization, the need to be more sustainable, the need to slow climate change, and the need to develop more resilient communities all have fire safety implications. Yet fire safety is rarely thought of as part of the solution to these challenges.

We would like your help in raising the profile of the benefits of fire safety science and engineering research in helping to solve critical societal challenges facing the world. We therefore invite you to participate in the IAFSS Workshop, Agenda 2030 for a Fire Safe World, on the afternoon of Tuesday, September 11, to begin work on this challenge. We have prepared a short White Paper that you should read in advance of the Workshop, which provides additional detail on the challenges and objectives moving forward.

If you accept this challenge and invitation to participate, you will be tasked with helping to draft text that can be used with key research funding entities, governmental agencies, and NGOs worldwide to facilitate funding to advance a fire safe world. Participation will be limited to the first 50 registrants. Please register only if you want to actively help develop a research strategy, talking points, and potentially white papers, which will be used to facilitate the generation of directed funding towards fire safety science research to address emerging societal challenges. Your participation will not require you to sign a joint statement on research needs although this will be encouraged as one possible outcome of the Workshop.

Registration for the workshop can be done here and register for ESFSS here. The tentative workshop agenda is below.

Tentative Workshop Agenda, 13:00-17:00, Tuesday, 11 September 2018

13:00-14:00    Introductory presentations to frame the challenges

14:00-16:00    Break-out groups to work on strategies to address future challenges

16:00-17:00    Reporting, consensus development, and framing steps forward

As we get closer to the date of the Workshop, additional information will be posted, and registrants may receive additional information by email. Thank you for your interest in this important initiative, and we look forward to seeing you in Nancy in September!

Combustion Scientist for Spacecraft Fire Experiment

The Saffire Experiment (Spacecraft Fire Experiment) conducts ground-based and in-space experiments that will reduce the likelihood of a fire on an exploration spacecraft or habitat and, if one should occur, reduce its impact on the vehicle, mission, and crew. The objective of the Saffire project is to conduct a large-scale material flammability test in extended low gravity. The important phenomena related to material flammability in spacecraft fire safety are dominated by the low-gravity forced convective flow environment. Personnel with experience in conducting these types of experiments are essential to design successful ground-based and flight experiments.

See detailed information in USRA website

Position Summary:

The Scientist I will support the design, development, and testing of the large-scale material flammability experiments, with specific emphasis on Li-ion batteries and their failure modes. The Scientist I will work closely with the Saffire engineering team to design the experiments and characterize/calibrate the experiment instrumentation including radiometers, cameras, and anemometers. The Scientist I will collect and analyze data from the experiments and prepare research results for publication.”

Required Qualifications:

  • Master’s or Doctoral degree in Combustion Science.
  • Master’s degree with 5 years of experience or Ph.D. with 1 year of experience in combustion science and Li-ion battery technology.

Professor in Fire Safety Engineering with focus on fire-related environmental protection and fire chemistry, Lund University, Sweden

Lund University, LTH,
Lund University was founded in 1666 and is repeatedly ranked among the world’s top 100 universities. The University has 40 000 students and 7 400 staff based in Lund, Helsingborg and Malmö. We are united in our efforts to understand, explain and improve our world and the human condition.

LTH forms the Faculty of Engineering at Lund University, with approximately 9 000 students. The research carried out at LTH is of a high international standard and we are continuously developing our teaching methods and adapting our courses to current needs.

Subject description
The subject contains overall aspects of Fire Safety Engineering with respect to general performance based design addressing safety of life, property protection, continuity of operation and the protection of the environment but with a clear focus on environmental and chemical aspect of fires. The research includes environmental impact of fires e.g. pollution of ground water by extinguishing water, analysis of fire retardants and spread of fire gases in the environment. The research also includes the analysis of the production of gases with different measuring techniques e.g. FTIR. Finally, the research shall also focus on the detailed chemistry of fires connected to pyrolysis of materials.

Work duties
The work duties include:

  • Research within the subject area
  • Teaching in the first, second and third cycles of studies
  • Supervision of degree projects and doctoral students
  • Actively seeking external research funding
  • Collaboration with industry and wider society
  • Administration related to the work duties listed above
  • Management duties within the division.

Qualification requirements

Appointment as a professor requires that the applicant has:

  • Demonstrated research expertise in the subject.
  • Demonstrated teaching expertise.
  • Completed at least five weeks of training in higher education teaching and learning, or acquired equivalent knowledge by other means, unless there are valid reasons.

Additional requirements:

  • Very good oral and written proficiency in English.
  • Leadership experience
  • Experience in international collaboration
  • Proven ability to attract external funding in the subject area of environmental and chemistry research.

Assessment criteria

When assessing the applicants, special importance will be given to research and teaching expertise within the subject, with greater importance to research.

For appointments to professor, the following shall form the assessment criteria:

  • A very good national and international standing as a researcher.
  • The requirement for international experience shall be assessed with consideration to the character and traditions of the subject.
  • A very high level of teaching skill, including a very good ability to conduct, develop and lead teaching and other educational activities on different levels and using a variety of teaching methods.
  • A good ability to supervise doctoral students to achieve a PhD.
  • A good ability to collaborate with wider society and communicate his or her activities.
  • A good general ability to lead and develop activities.

Other qualifications:

  • Knowledge of the Swedish language

Consideration will also be given to good collaborative skills, drive and independence, and how the applicant’s experience and skills complement and strengthen ongoing research, first and second cycle education and innovation within the department, and how they stand to contribute to its future development.

Instructions on how to apply

Applications shall be written in English. Please draw up the application in accordance with LTH’s Academic qualifications portfolio – see link below. Upload the application as PDF-files in the recruitment system. Read more here

Lund University welcomes applicants with diverse backgrounds and experiences. We regard gender equality and diversity as a strength and an asset. We kindly decline all sales and marketing contacts.

Read more and apply here.

 

Large Outdoor Fires and the Built Environment: Objectives and Goals of Permanent IAFSS Working Group

Authors:
Samuel L. Manzello, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), USA
Sara McAllister, U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, USA
Sayaka Suzuki,National Research Institute of Fire and Disaster (NRIFD), Japan

To sign up: https://goo.gl/forms/0TMW2SbWi7mmHYIv1)

Demonstrated Need for Permanent Working Group

Large outdoor fires present a risk to the built environment. Examples often in the international media reports are wildfires that spread into communities, referred to as Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fires. WUI fires have destroyed communities throughout the world and are a growing problem in fire safety science. Other examples are large urban fires, including those that have occurred after earthquakes.
Over the past several decades, fire safety science research has spent a great deal of effort to understand fire dynamics within buildings. Research into large outdoor fires, and how to potentially mitigate the loss of structures in such fires, lags behind other areas of fire safety science research1. Fire spread in large outdoor fires is incredibly complex, involving the interaction of topography, weather, and fuels. At the same time, common characteristics between fire spread in WUI fires and urban fires have not been fully exploited. Once a wildland fire reaches a community and ignites structures, structure-structure fire spread can occur under similar mechanisms as in urban fire spread.
On June 11, 2017, a workshop, sponsored by the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS), was held. Seven panelists from around the world presented regional overviews of the large outdoor fire problem related to the built environment in their respective regions. Presentations explored common characteristics between these fires and were arranged as: European View, Asian View, North American View, South American View, and Oceania View.

A significant discussion outcome of the workshop was the desire of the participants to make this topic a permanent working group under the umbrella of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). So far, this has been done for only one other topic, the Measurement and Computation of Fire Phenomena (MaCFP) working group2, supporting modeling, a far more well-characterized and studied topic in fire safety science.

Due to structure and organization of the workshop, it was apparent that large outdoor fires and the built environment encompass far more than only wildfires, and the working group will address problems with key phenomenological shared characteristics relevant to both urban fires, and wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires. Overall, the workshop was considered a fruitful endeavor and clearly highlighted that much needs to be done in this research area, as it is far behind the well-studied topics that have been around in fire safety science for decades. Many next generation researchers attended and were encouraged to work in this area, as research impact is possible.
A manuscript has been submitted to the official journal of the IAFSS to delineate the key findings of the workshop in fine detail, and form the basis for an international research needs roadmap for this topic. One unique aspect of the paper is that it will also include an African perspective, as this was not presented at the workshop. The interested reader may find all the presentations delivered at the workshop, as well as other details, in an open access report3.

Objectives and Goals

Here, the objectives and goals of the permanent working group are delineated. It is proposed that the group consists of three subgroups focused on the topics of: Ignition Resistant Communities (IRC), Emergency Management and Evacuation (EME), and Large Outdoor Firefighting (LOFF). The IRC subgroup will be focused on developing the scientific basis for new standard testing methodologies indicative of large outdoor fire exposures, including the development of necessary testing methodologies to characterize wildland fuel treatments adjacent to communities. The EME subgroup will be focused on developing the scientific basis for effective emergency management strategies for communities exposed to large outdoor fires. The LOFF subgroup will provide a review of various tactics that are used, as well as the various personal protective equipment (PPE), and suggest pathways for research community engagement, including environmental issues in suppressing these fires.

We strongly welcome your participation in this activity and hope you will join us for the kickoff meeting at the Asia-Oceania IAFSS meeting in Taiwan occurring October 21-25, 2018.

Proposed Subleader Topic
Elsa Pastor (Spain) Ignition Resistant Communities
Enrico Ronchi (Sweden) Emergency Management and Evacuation
Raphaele Blanchi (Australia) Large Outdoor Firefighting

Second Announcement and Call for Papers – 3rd ESFSS

The 3rd European Symposium on Fire Safety Science will be held on September 12-14, 2018 at the University of Lorraine, in Nancy, France.

Following the conference held in Cyprus (2015), the 3rd ESFSS, will be the third edition of a series of symposia organized in Europe, with the participation of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). The aim is to gather researchers from and beyond Europe to have exchanges and discussions about fire safety science.

The submission site is now open. You may submit your paper on the submission platform: https://esfss2018.sciencesconf.org/ The submission deadline for papers (6 pages) is March 15, 2018. More information on the the Symposia webpage.

PhD positions in hydrogen safety at Ulster University

Three topics of doctoral studies in hydrogen safety are just published at Ulster University website:

The studies are funded via Vice-Chancellor Research Award (PhD fellowship is “not less than £14,553” per annum not subject to tax). The funding is competitive by submission of a research proposal within a topic followed by a phone interview in due course.

You are welcome to contact supervisors to discuss your proposal.

The application deadline is 19 February 2018.

If you hold the PhD degree we would be grateful if you pass this message to those who might be interested in hydrogen safety research at Ulster.

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow on Fire Modelling at National University of Singapore

The Computational Combustion and Energy (CCE) Group in Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore (NUS) is seeking for a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow to conduct cutting-edge research in the area of turbulent combustion modelling.

The research will be supervised by Prof. Huangwei Zhang. The appointment runs for three years starting on April 1st, 2018. Salary ranges from S$60,000 – S$65,000 per annum.

The ideal candidate should meet the following requirements:

Background:

PhD in Applied Mathematics, Mechanical or Aerospace Engineering, completed within the last three years or soon to be completed.

Prerequisites:

Fluid mechanics, Combustion, Chemical kinetics, Computational fluid dynamics, Heat and mass transfer

Desired Skills:

– Experience in Fortran/C/C++ programming, HPC cluster usage, MPI-based parallel code development

– Experience in OpenFOAM or other open source or commercial CFD packages

– Experience in advanced turbulent combustion models

The general research topic for this position will be turbulent fire modelling. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) with Conditional Moment Closure (CMC) will be applied for predicting the turbulent flow fields and closing chemical source terms, respectively. This project is aimed at developing theoretical models and parallelized predictive solver for turbulent fire problems, based on high-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) algorithms and advanced combustion models. With this, scientific problems related to fire (e.g. radiation, smoke dynamics and water spray for fire suppression) will be investigated numerically, based on the bench-marking experimental cases and also practical fire problems. The research will mainly rely on the parallel clusters from National Supercomputing Centre Singapore (NSCC).

To apply, email your request with detailed CV and also information of four references to Dr. Huangwei Zhang (mpezhu@nus.edu.sg).

Call For Papers: 11th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology (11th AOSFST)

The 11th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology (11th AOSFST) will be held on October 21-25, 2018 in Taipei, Taiwan.

The AOSFST has been held periodically about 3-year interval at the midterm of the IAFSS international symposia. The two most recent Asia-Oceania symposia were held successfully in Hefei, China and Tsukuba, Japan in 2012 and 2015, respectively.

The 11th AOSFST will include presentations of peer-reviewed papers, keynote lectures by fire researchers invited from the world, poster sessions for a variety of topics, technical tour and some exciting events. In addition to the technical sessions, numerous social activities are planned, which will provide opportunities to informally meet with colleagues and friends. There will be a rich array of activities available in the companion program and there is much to see in TAIWAN. We heartily invite your participation, not only from Asia-Oceania region but also from any regions in the world.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through EasyChair system. The submission due for full papers will be on December 31, 2017. And poster abstracts should be submitted to poster@aosfst2018.com until April 30, 2018.

For your convenience, the submission schedule (for oral presentations) is briefly given as follows:

October 1, 2017 Submission site open

Dec 31, 2017 Deadline for submission of paper manuscripts

April 1, 2018 Notification of review results to authors

May 31, 2018 Deadline for final version

June 30, 2018 Notification of final acceptance and symposium program

Oct 21-25, 2018 Symposium at Tsukuba

For more information see Call for Papers or visit the Symposium website where you can find Author instructions and paper template.

 

If you have any questions you are also welcome to contact us

11th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology

contact@aosfst2018.com

Call for Papers – The 3rd European Symposium on Fire Safety Science (Nancy, France 12-14 September 2018

 

The 3rd European Symposium on Fire Safety Science will be held on September 12-14, 2018 at the University of Lorraine, in Nancy, France.

Following the conference held in Cyprus (2015), the 3rd ESFSS, will be the third edition of a series of symposia organized in Europe, with the participation of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS). The aim is to gather researchers from and beyond Europe to have exchanges and discussions about fire safety science.

The program will have oral and poster sessions for the presentation of fully peer-reviewed papers over the three days, including invited lectures from world’s top fire science researchers.

The 3rd ESFSS will be hosted by the LEMTA, a French laboratory affiliated to the University of Lorraine and the CNRS in Nancy, with the support of the GDR Feux – the French Research Group on Fire.

Researchers, and Practitioners, are invited to submit contributions related to one of the following themes:

  • Material behavior in fire
  • Fire dynamics, structure in fires
  • Wildland fires
  • Fire suppression
  • Evacuation and Human behavior

Special topic: during the conference a special tribute will be also paid to Margaret Law for her work dedicated to fire safety and fire engineering.

Authors are invited to submit short papers (6-pages) that fits within one of the themes.

Papers will be peer-reviewed and accepted communications will be presented either through oral presentations or poster sessions.

Important note: the themes will be interpreted in a broad manner, so authors are encouraged to submit their work, even if it does not fit perfectly into one of the themes.

‘Work in progress’ submissions are particularly encouraged.

Awards

Awards for the best paper, the best poster and the best presentation will be provided.

Publication

All accepted papers, either for oral or poster presentation, will be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series, an open journal with fast publication process, referenced in Scopus and Web of Science.

In addition, a selection of the best papers will be done, based on the recommendations of the reviewers and with a final decision made by the Symposium Co-chairs.

Authors of selected papers will be asked, if interested, to extend their paper before submission for a special issue in Fire Safety Journal.

Important Dates

  • Paper due: March 15th 2018
  • Notification of acceptance: April 15th 2018
  • Revised Paper submission due: May 15th 2018
  • 2nd ESFSS conference: June 16th to 18th 2018

Cost of Participation

The cost of participation to the 3rd ESFSS is 400 Euros for IAFSS members, 500 Euros for non IAFSS members and 300 Euros for students.

This includes the conference registration, the proceedings, the publication costs in the open journal JPCS, buffet lunches, coffee breaks,the welcome reception and the Conference Gala Dinner.

Paper Submission

The website for paper submission will be available January 15th, 2018. Papers must be submitted no later than March 15th, 2018.

More information in the symposium 3rd ESFSS flyer.

We hope to welcome you in Nancy next september!!

Pascal Boulet, for the organizing committee