Dr Javad Hashempour
Dr Hashempour is a senior lecturer in Fire Engineering and the Course Lead in the College of Built Environment. He completed a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts, USA, from 2016 to 2018, following the award of his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, in 2016.
After his postdoctoral fellowship, Dr Hashempour served as an Assistant Teaching Professor at WPI for one semester, before continuing his academic career as an Assistant Professor in Fire Protection Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte). He also has two years of experience as an academic in the GCC region, working at a British university’s campus offering fire safety engineering programme.
Javad is a Chartered Engineer (CEng), registered with the UK Engineering Council, and a Certified Fire and Explosion Investigator (CFEI) through the National Association of Fire Investigators (NAFI) in the USA. His involvement in fire safety engineering design and fire investigation projects across various countries has provided him with valuable international experience in the field.
His research interests cover a broad range of fire engineering topics, including Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for solving fire engineering challenges, evacuation behaviour and characteristics of vulnerable groups such as disabled individuals, the elderly, and children in different built environment contexts. He also focuses on Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fires, including protection measures and the underlying physics, the development of smart tools and methods for firefighting technologies, and the application of machine learning and remote sensing techniques to address fire engineering issues in society.
Dr Hashempour actively contributes to academic and industrial committees within the fire engineering field, and regularly provides peer review services to scientific journals related to fire safety engineering and emergency services.