• Congratulations to Nan for receiving the 2021 UB SEAS Dean’s Graduate Achievement Award. The award honors exceptional graduate students who have distinguished themselves through excellence in research and related technical presentations/publications.

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• Congratulations to Dr. Amir Sarreshtehdari for successfully defending his Ph.D. dissertation in May 2021. The title of his Ph.D. dissertation is “The impact of fire following earthquake on urban environment considering the seismic performance of infrastructure networks.”

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• Congratulations to Dr. Ramla Qureshi for successfully defending her Ph.D. dissertation in December 2020. The title of her Ph.D. dissertation is "Evaluation of steel columns under fire: Real-time hybrid fire testing and reliability assessment."

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• Our group had five papers in the 2020 Structures in Fire Conference, hosted by the University of Queensland. Nan presented our research on “damage assessment framework for tunnel structures under fire”. Ramla presented our work on “evaluating fire induced failure probability of steel columns designed based on US prescriptive standards” and “real-time hybrid simulation to capture column buckling in a steel frame under fire.” Ramla received the best student paper award and the best student presentation award.

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• Amir’s paper on “Emergency response time for post-earthquake fires,” is published in the Journal of Earthquake Engineering: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13632469.2020.1802369

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• Our research group will collaborate with the University of Nevada Reno, University of California Los Angeles, National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Desert Research Institute in Nevada to develop a data-driven urban fire spread model and evaluate risk of wildfire in wildland urban interface communities:​ https://www.unr.edu/nevada-today/news/2020/leap-hi-wildfire-grant

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• Our paper on “Quantifying uncertainties in the temperature-time evolution of railway tunnel fires” has been published in Fire Technology: 

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• NFPA awarded the Research Foundation Medal to our project "Digitized fuel load survey methodology using machine vision": https://community.nfpa.org/community/nfpa-today/blog/2020/06/18/nfpa-award-winners-work-to-enhance-fire-and-life-safety-in-a-variety-of-ways

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• Our group published two papers on a new surveying methodology for fuel load density in buildings:​

      Paper 1 (methodology): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-020-00989-9

      Paper 2 (application): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-020-00990-2

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• Our paper on “Probabilistic models for temperature dependent strength of steel and concrete” has been published in the Journal of Structural Engineering: https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%29ST.1943-541X.0002621 

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• FPE eXTRA Issue 51 features an article, by Negar and our collaborator Dr. Thomas Gernay from Johns Hopkins University, on "A digitized surveying method using machine vision to collect fuel load data in buildings": 

 

• The February edition of CAIT-UTC Region II newsletter includes an article on UTC’s tunnel fire project: https://cait.rutgers.edu/fire-engineering-expert-recognized-by-american-institute-of-steel-construction/

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• As part of the Fire Protection Research Foundation and  the National Fire Protection Association webinars, Negar and Dr. Thomas Gernay from Johns Hopkins University will give a webinar on a new surveying methodology for fuel load density in buildings: https://www.nfpa.org/Training-and-Events/By-type/Webinars/Fuel-Load-Survey-Methodology-in-Buildings

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• Our paper on “Recommendations for performance-based fire design of composite steel buildings using computational analysis” has been published in the Journal of Constructional Steel Research:

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• Negar received the AISC 2020 Early Career Faculty Award: 

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• Nan attended the 2019 IABSE Congress in New York City and presented her research on “Design fire scenarios for railway tunnel fires.” The project is a collaboration with Professor Anthony Tessari of UB.

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• Ramla received the American Association of University Women (AAUW) International Doctoral Fellowship for academic year 2019-2020.

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• Our paper on “Examining the need for active boundary conditions in structural fire testing”  is published in the Journal of Structural Fire Engineering: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JSFE-12-2018-0042/full/html

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• Negar, Amir, and our collaborator Dr. Moharrami Gargari from WSP attended the 2019 EMI conference in Caltech, California. Negar co-organized two sessions on “Earthquake resilience and cascading effects and emerging topics” and “New developments in Structural Fire Engineering.” Amir presented on his research  work about fire following earthquake at community level. Dr. Moharrami Gargari presented our research on building level fragility for functionality of a non-structural component. Negar presented results of an ongoing collaborative research on performance of tessellated structural architectural systems.

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• Gauhar Nurlybekova, undergraduate student from Kazakhstan, joined our research group for Summer of 2019, as part of our exchange student program with Kazakhstan.

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• Esther Saula, UB undergraduate student, joined our research group for Summer of 2019, as part of the LSAMP Summer Research Internship Program.

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• Jonathan Mann, UB undergraduate student, joined our research group for Summer of 2019, as part of the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.

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• Ramla presented her research on uncertainty quantification in material properties at elevated temperatures at the third International Fire Safety Symposium in Ottawa, Canada.

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• Fernando presented his research results on fire spread in wildland urban interface communities at the 2019 International Fire Behavior and Fuels Control conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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• Negar attended the 2019 Structures Congress in Orlando, Florida, as the recipient of the SEI Young Professional Scholarship. Negar attended the ASCE Fire Protection committee in Orlando and gave two presentations on tunnel fire research and teaching structural fire engineering.