Lecturers

Candel

Prof. Sébastien Candel earned his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1972 and a Docteur ès Sciences degree from the University of Paris in 1977. He has been a professor at Ecole Centrale Paris (now CentraleSupélec, University Paris-Saclay) since 1978 and a professor at Institut Universitaire de France from 2001 to 2011. His research has mainly concerned fundamental problems in combustion and aeroacoustics including turbulent combustion modeling, combustion dynamics and control, cryogenic combustion and simulation of reactive flows with a range of applications in energy and in aeronautical and space propulsion. Among many distinctions, Sébastien Candel has been the recipient of the Marcel Dassault Grand Prize of the French Academy of sciences, the Pendray Aerospace Literature award of the AIAA, the Distinguished Alumni Award of Caltech, the Silver and Zel’dovich Gold medals both from the Combustion Institute. Sébastien Candel is a member of the French Academy of sciences (has been its President in 2017 and 2018), of the French Academy of technologies and a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States.

 

Curran

Prof. Henry Curran received his PhD degree from the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) in experimental and numerical studies of combustion kinetics in 1994 and a DSc. degree by research from the National University of Ireland in October 2011. He served as a postdoctoral research scientist from 1994 to 1997 and research scientist in combustion modelling with Dr. Charles Westbrook and Dr. William Pitz from 1997 to 1999 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). In 1999, he returned to Ireland to take an appointment as a lecturer in Physical Chemistry at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology while continuing to consult with LLNL and performing collaborative research in kinetics with Prof. John Simmie at NUIG. He was appointed as an adjunct Lecturer at NUIG in 2001 and as a Lecturer in 2005. He is currently director of the Combustion Chemistry Centre at NUIG and is a member of the editorial boards of “Combustion and Flame” and the “Proceedings of the Combustion Institute”. He is a founder member of the Irish Section of the Combustion Institute, a fellow of both the Institute of Chemistry of Ireland and the Royal Society of Chemistry and a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Institution of Engineers Ireland, the American Society of Automotive Engineers and the Society of Automotive Engineers. Prof. Curran has over twenty years’ experience in developing comprehensive detailed kinetic models, thermochemical estimates, and calculating reaction rates to describe large carbon number hydrocarbons relevant to predicting real fuel behavior in energy conversion systems. He works with Rolls-Royce, Alstom, Saudi Aramco, Shell and Renault on industrially sponsored projects. His collaborative work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Princeton and Stanford Universities and Imperial College London among others has contributed significantly to the construction and validation of detailed kinetic models presently used by the combustion community to simulate large alkanes, cyclo-alkanes, and their reaction intermediates, as well as for a large range of oxygenated hydrocarbons. Prof. Curran has contributed especially to mechanistic insights and detailed kinetic modelling of low temperature and negative temperature coefficient behavior of large carbon number species. His experience in comprehensive, hierarchical model development provides much of the detailed modelling materials presently used in industry for emulating autoignition and combustion processes in energy conversion system applications.

 

Violi

Prof. Angela Violi is a Professor at the University of Michigan in the Departments of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering and Biophysics Program. She earned her B.S. degree and Ph.D., both in Chemical Engineering, from the University of Naples, Federico II, Italy. She has been Research Scientist and then a Research Assistant Professor in the Chemistry Department at the University of Utah, working in one of the five Centers created through the Department of Energy’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program, whose objective was to develop science-based tools for the numerical simulation of accidental fires and explosions. She joined the University of Michigan in 2006 as Assistant Professor and became Professor in 2015. Professor Violi’s research interests lie at the intersection of nanoscience, combustion, and biomedical science. Her research involves the study, through modeling and simulation, of nanoparticle formation and the impact of these particles on the environment and health.

 

Chen

Dr. Jacqueline H. Chen received her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1989, and is presently a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at the Combustion Research Facility of the Sandia National Laboratories. Dr. Chen’s research interests are in the areas of petascale simulations of turbulent combustion focusing on turbulence-chemistry interactions in combustion of alternative fuels for transportation and power applications. She works closely with computer scientists on time-varying visualization of petascale simulated data, topology of combustion and flow features, parallel feature detection and tracking algorithms for combustion, and co-design of combustion algorithms for future exascale computer architectures. Chen was a Principal Investigator of the Combustion Energy Frontier Research Center and is the director of the DOE Exascale Computing Project on Transforming Combustion Science and Technology Through Simulation. Dr. Chen is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Combustion Institute.

 

Sutton

Prof. Jeffrey A. Sutton is a Professor within the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State University and the director of the Turbulence and Combustion Research Laboratory . He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan in 2005 and subsequently accepted a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship within the Chemistry Division of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. In 2008, Prof. Sutton joined the faculty at Ohio State University. Prof. Sutton’s current research interests include turbulent mixing and combustion, the development and application of advanced laser diagnostics, vaporization and gas-phase mixing in high-pressure turbulent sprays, auto-ignition dynamics, particle-laden flows, and turbulent sooting flames. Prof. Sutton is an Associate Fellow of AIAA, Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, a member of the Editorial Board of Combustion and Flame, and author of more than 100 journal and conference publications. He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award, the Ohio State University College of Engineering Lumley Research award, and the Distinguished Paper award at the 31st International Symposium on Combustion.

 

Torero

Professor José L. Torero is Professor of Civil Engineering and Head of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at University College London. He works in the fields of safety, environmental remediation and sanitation where he specializes in complex environments such as developing nations, complex urban environments, novel architectures, critical infrastructure, aircraft and spacecraft. He holds a BSc from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (1989), and an MSc (1991) and PhD (1992) from the University of California, Berkeley. He received a Doctor Honoris Causa by Ghent University (Belgium) in 2016. José is a Chartered Engineer (UK), a Registered Professional Engineer in Queensland, a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK), the Royal Society of Edinburgh (UK), the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences (Australia), the Institution of Civil Engineers (UK), the Institution of Fire Engineers (UK), the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (USA), the Combustion Institute (USA) and the Royal Society of New South Wales (Australia).  José joined University College London in 2018 following appointments as Professor of Civil Engineering and Head of the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Queensland, Australia, the Landolt & Cia Chair in Innovation for a Sustainable Future at Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne, the BRE Trust/RAEng Professor of Fire Safety Engineering at The University of Edinburgh, Associate Professor at the University of Maryland and Charge de Recherche at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He has been involved in landmark designs such as the tallest timber office building in the world, the Space Shuttle hangars in Cape Canaveral and the 2011 temple for “Burning Man.” He has been part of the World Trade Center collapse investigation, the Organization of American States Human Rights investigation of the murder of 43 university students in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, the Chilean Supreme Court investigation of the inmate deaths in the San Miguel prison, and he is currently serving in the Grenfell Public Inquiry.