I am proud to have worked with team alumni Bronwyn Chorlton on our book, Advancing Women in Engineering: Deciphering Key Factors in Training, Retention and Support. The book has been published by Springer and is now available. This work is a compilation of various studies our team has undertaken in the past six years. From High…
We had a very successful attendance at the Structures in Fire conference in Coimbra, Portugal. Mark Green and John Gales successfully bid for the next SIF conference to be held in Canada. The conference will be held at Dr. Gales' alma mater Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario) with some events also planned in Toronto. We will…
Really great to see all the really interesting CSA student scholarship projects across the country! Team member and scholarship recipient Chloe Jeanneret presents in this video of her research thesis work on steel connections in fire and our goals to develop Canadian steel standards for fire design. We will be announcing a large grant next…
Yesterday team members (Bronwyn Chorlton and Neir Mazur) and collaborators (Jennifer Ellingham) presented their research with their second organized workshop. This one was on “Gender Differences in Graduate Engineering Student Experiences”. Team members have been investigating the leaky pipeline and following their study of industry, and undergraduate experiences last year, now they considered those experiences…
The more conferences I go to that are themed around women in science and engineering, the more hopeful I become that engineers are ready to tackle problems of diversity and inclusion head on. The Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) annual conference took place this year on January 26th and 27th in Toronto. It is…
This past month I had the pleasure of representing the Lassonde Institute of Fire Engineering at the 15th International Wildland Fire Safety Summit and 5th Human Dimensions Conference in Asheville, North Carolina. Organized by the International Association of Wildland Fire (IAWF), the conference was a glowing success despite the unexpected snowstorm that threw a wrench…
As we are about to begin the summer term at York University, we have a number of news items and scholarship announcements to share. We have had significant investment in our student's research this week with over 50K in scholarships awarded to team members. Our undergraduate research team won four NSERC USRA awards (10 now…
A lot will be said in the coming months, if not years regarding the fire seen at Grenfell. The few things Id say, is that cladding fires are not the only challenge we face in the community of fire engineering. Tunnels, Developing countries, Wild fires, New building materials, Risk based methodologies, etc., and I can…
Fire strategies and design must account for and incorporate this human behavior. Human behavior is complex and multi-faceted and requires a reduction in uncertainties. If the designed building can show a validated and verifiable fire strategy that takes into account a level of predictable human behavior, the possibilities for improved performance based fire design in…
There is no question when you travel through Toronto you look to the sky and imagine the possibilities for iconic structures and you do see first hand the structural revolution occurring there. And more so, if your aware, you ask what this means for Canadian fire engineering design. Buildings are becoming very complex. In Toronto alone,…
YorkU Fire Research Team 