WPI Faculty & Researchers
Dr. Albert Simeoni
Professor and WPI Site-Director
Professor Simeoni's research covers the fields of wildland fire and fire sciences. With his team, he is developing experimental, analytical, and numerical techniques to better understand fire dynamics and to predict fire and wildland fire behavior. 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 experience as a consultant in fire science in the U.S. and has spent over 10 years volunteering and working as a firefighter in France. Starting as a volunteer firefighter, he ultimately led all aspects of fire, wildland fire, and rescue operations, in the capacity of Chief of Fire Station.
Contact: asimeoni@wpi.edu
Dr. Nicholas Dembsey
Professor of Fire Protection Engineering
Dr. Dembsey’s research focuses on the building performance applications of fire dynamics, fire characteristics of materials and fire models. He is working on closing the fire performance gap in buildings; fire safety of green buildings; development of new techniques and guidance documents for practicing engineers to measure fire properties of materials; the optimization of building assemblies for fire performance, ease of manufacturing and cost effectiveness.
Contact: ndembsey@wpi.edu
Dr. Shichao Liu
Assistant Professor of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering
Dr. Liu's research focuses on the built and urban environment, occupant-building-environment interaction, and integrated design for sustainable and healthy buildings. Prof. Liu envisions his research promoting built sustainability and occupant well-being through the interface among building science, information science, public health, and social science.
Contact: sliu8@wpi.edu
Dr. Milosh Puchovsky
Professor of Practice and Associate Department Head of Fire Protection Engineering
Through his academic endeavors and professional practice, Dr. Puchovsky brings practical perspectives to students' educational experience. His teaching incorporates situations that practicing fire protection engineers face on a routine basis facilitating the functional understanding of a fire's physical behavior and impact, and the role of safety systems, regulations and product standards. His expertise lies in fire hazard analysis and the design, evaluation and performance of active and passive fire safety systems.
Contact: milosh@wpi.edu
Dr. Ali S. Rangwala
Professor of Fire Protection Engineering
Dr. Rangwala’s research addresses combustion, industrial fire protection, and explosion protection. He is also working on the development of measurement and sensing devices designed to identify the presence, velocity, and flow direction of smoke. His lab is also developing benchmark tests to better understand the physics of ignition and deflagration in dust-air premixed combustion. This research will enable scientists to study combustibility in ways that enable fire safety professionals to predict fire and explosion hazards.
Contact: rangwala@wpi.edu
Dr. James Urban
Assistant Professor of Fire Protection Engineering
Dr. Urban’s areas of active research include: characterizing ignition and fire spread mechanisms in wild/WUI fires, developing sensors and detectors for wildland and wildland-urban interface fires, coupling reduced physics sub-models to accelerate wildfire simulations, performing complementary simulations and experiments to better understand ignition and burning of wildland and manufactured materials, and developing and applying flow visualization and computer vision techniques to combustion and fire research.
Contact: jurban@wpi.edu
Dr. Carlo Pinciroli
Associate Professor of Robotics Engineering
Dr. Pinciroli is an Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator of the Robotics Engineering department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he also directs NEST Lab. The focus of Dr. Pinciroli’s research is swarm robotics. His research has been funded by NSF, NASA, US Army, Mathworks, Amazon Science, Charles River Analytics, Raytheon Technologies, and BAE Systems, among others. He is developing Buzz, a programming language specifically designed for real-world robot swarms. During his Ph.D., he designed ARGoS, which is currently the fastest general-purpose robot simulator in the literature. His recent work focuses on human-swarm interaction and multi-robot learning. He is also working on swarm robotics solutions for disaster response scenarios, such as search-and-rescue and firefighting.
Contact: cpinciroli@wpi.edu
Dr. Nima Rahbar
Professor of Engineering
Dr. Rahbar’s research activities are in mechanics, materials, and structures. At WPI, his favorite teaching aspect is working one-on-one with graduate and undergraduate students on research projects. He likes to excite students’ curiosity toward discoveries and creative scientific advancements. In this research group, they focus on the fundamental principles that control the behavior of materials in engineering and biology at multiple scales, with particular interest in the bioinspired design of materials and structures. In this field, studying biological materials leads to the design of high-performance materials and structures.
Contact: nrahbar@wpi.edu
Dr. Reza Ziazi
Assistant Research Professor of Fire Protection
Dr. Ziazi is an Assistant Research Professor with expertise in fire and fluid dynamics, as well as data science at Department of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He is also a co-principal investigator (Co-PI) proficient in data-driven quantification and modeling. His recent focus is the multi-scale physics of the interactions between fire, wind and vegetation in modeling wildfire spread and understanding the fire dynamics and their effects on emissions.
Contact: rziazi@wpi.edu
Dr. Muthu Kumaran Selvaraj
Assistant Research Professor of Fire Protection
Dr. Selvaraj is an Assistant Research Professor in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering, WPI. His research focuses on numerical modelling of multi-phase reactive flows in wildland fires and in combustion systems with emphasis on understanding the flame characteristics, plume dynamics, and its relation to emissions.
Contact: mselvaraj@wpi.edu