Meet our researchers
Learn more about the UNSW Bushfire research team.

- Leadership
- Researchers
- PhD students
Jason Sharples
Professor, Director UNSW Bushfire
My research focuses on the mathematical, statistical and computational modelling of environmental processes, especially those related to bushfire and climate. My specific research interests include understanding how bushfires interact with the atmosphere and how this fire-atmosphere coupling produces atypical and dangerous forms of fire propagation. In addition, I investigate critical fire weather events such as heatwaves, mountain winds and frontal systems and their association with particularly bad fire outbreaks, such as the 2019-20 'Black Summer' fires. Extreme fires behave in fundamentally different ways to the majority of fires that burn under more benign conditions - our research is improving our understanding of these phenomena, thus allowing us to better anticipate their occurrence and predict their subsequent behaviour. This is of key importance as climate change increases the frequency of these destructive events.
As part of my research I also engage with various fire management and emergency service agencies, and government institutions such as the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO. My main objective is to provide better understanding of bushfires and related environmental processes, with the aim of improving firefighter and community safety, and environmental sustainability.
Dr Duncan Sutherland
Senior Lecturer, Deputy Director UNSW Bushfire
The focus of my research is the use of computational fluid dynamics to better understand fundamental processes that drive fire behaviour. My recent research has been on understanding the motion of near ground embers, heat transfer mechanisms in surface fires, and how a surface fire transitions to a crown fire. Further interests include modelling fire spread and the risk to the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI).
We aim to develop a fundamental understanding of the hazard. The idealised simulations must be then translated to into a measure of risk in real-world fires. For example: where and under what conditions can we expect an ember storm to impact an urban area? With an answer to this question, we can start building resilient communities.
Suburban developments that are resilient to extreme fires must be designed with the risk of fire as a primary consideration. Currently, standards based on only the radiant heat from a fire are used to regulate construction in Australia. However, embers, not radiant heat, is the primary cause of house destruction. Research on ember transport and where it will occur, can then be applied to design more resilient housing developments that expand the WUI.
Dr Difei Deng
UNSW Canberra School of Science
The primary focus of my bushfire research is atmosphere-bushfire interaction. By using state-of-the-art modelling, my research contributes to advancing the understanding of bushfire & climate risks. This approach helps us comprehend how atmospheric processes have influenced bushfires in the past and project their impact in a warming future. Gaining insights into the structure of bushfires and having confidence in future changes will significantly improve bushfire management and support communities.
Professor Harvinder Sidhu
Deputy Rector, UNSW Canberra
The primary focus of my bushfire research is on advancing the understanding of combustion processes and their interaction with environmental factors, such as terrain and fuel properties, to improve the prediction and management of bushfire risks. This research contributes significantly to enhancing the safety of both fire management personnel and communities by developing models that predict complex fire behaviours, such as eruptive fire spread, which are not well understood in current fire spread models. By leveraging a combination of analytical, numerical, and experimental methods, my research delves into fundamental mechanisms like heat transfer and combustion instabilities. It addresses critical factors that influence fire behaviour, including fuel properties, ambient conditions, and terrain, to better predict the onset of hazardous fire conditions. This work informs the development of more accurate fire spread models, equipping fire managers with valuable tools to mitigate risks during operations.
In a broader sense, this research aids communities by contributing to improved bushfire management strategies, leading to better preparedness and response in fire-prone areas. Additionally, this research extends into related areas, such as improving thermal protection for firefighting personnel and understanding spontaneous combustion in materials like compost, contributing to both safety and environmental sustainability.
Professor Jason Evans
UNSW Climate Change Research Centre, Science
My research aims to understand how bushfire risk, development and spread change in a changing climate. My research combines climate modelling and projections, with fire spread models and observations, to improve our understanding how the fire, land and atmosphere interact and effect each other. This is particularly important in the development and spread of fire generated thunderstorm events. This research will allow communities and bushfire management to plan for future changes due to climate change. In addition, better understanding of fire generated thunderstorm events, which are amongst the most extreme bushfire events, will improve our planning for and response to these events.
Dr Katie Moon
UNSW Canberra School of Business
I aim to understand how individual households, formal community groups and place-based communities can form communities-of-practice, or ClimatePods, to improve disaster preparedness and resilience at the local level. My research aims to understand the subjective experiences and needs of disaster-affected communities to support the development of flexible, inclusive, accessible, empowering, and adaptive preparedness strategies that foster long-term community resilience. My research seeks to fill the gap between individual community needs and regional and state-based responses. Resilience of local communities is imperative in the Anthropocene, and so developing methods to understand place-based needs and plans is crucial in enabling 'shared responsibility'.
Dr Maryam Ghodrat
UNSW Canberra School of Engineering & Technology
My research significantly contributes to advancing the understanding of bushfire and climate risks through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modelling with a focus on the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI).
CFD modelling allows us to simulate and analyse the complex interactions between fire behaviour, atmospheric conditions, and terrain. By creating detailed simulations, we can study how fires propagate under various scenarios, including different wind speeds, vegetation types, and topographical features. This helps us understand the dynamics of fire spread and its potential impacts on both natural and built environments. In particular, my research focuses on the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), where urban areas meet wildlands. This interface is critical because it represents a high-risk zone where the dynamics of bushfire behavior can directly affect human structures and communities. By using CFD models, we can simulate fire scenarios specific to the WUI, analyze how fires interact with buildings, and identify vulnerable areas. This provides valuable insights into how to design effective mitigation strategies, such as optimal building materials, landscaping practices, and emergency response plans.
I expect my research to make a significant difference in bushfire management and community resilience in several keyways:
- Enhanced Predictive Accuracy: By leveraging Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling, my research provides a more precise understanding of fire behavior under varying conditions. This improved accuracy in predicting fire spread and intensity allows for better forecasting and early warning systems, giving communities more time to prepare and respond effectively.
- Informed Risk Assessment: Focusing on the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI), my research identifies critical vulnerabilities where urban areas meet wildlands. By pinpointing high-risk zones and understanding how fires interact with structures, we can develop targeted risk assessments that guide land use planning and building regulations. This helps in designing safer communities and reducing potential damage.
- Optimized Mitigation Strategies: The insights gained from CFD simulations enable us to test and refine various mitigation strategies, such as fire-resistant building materials, defensible space landscaping, and effective emergency response plans. These strategies are tailored to specific scenarios and conditions, making them more effective in preventing and managing bushfires.
- Community Engagement and Preparedness: My research aims to provide actionable information that can be used to educate and engage communities in bushfire preparedness. By translating complex data into practical guidelines and tools, we empower residents to make informed decisions about their safety and resilience.
Dr Methma Rajamuni
UNSW Canberra School of Science
My research focuses on Ember storms in the wildland-urban interspace and the spread of bushfires through embers. Ember storm is a poorly understood phenomenon that can occur during extreme bushfire events, where thousands of burning embers are carried by the wind, potentially igniting new spot fires in previously unaffected areas. Ember storms have been identified as the main cause of house and building losses in the wildland-urban interface during bushfire events. As population growth continues, more houses are being built closer to wildland, expanding the wildland-urban interface. Despite this expansion, current recommendations for suburban development need to consider the risks associated with ember storms adequately. To address this gap, I investigate the factors influencing the movement of embers from wildlands to urban areas using high-fidelity computer numerical simulations. This research aims to provide insights into how the asset protection zone—the clearing between the wildland and the suburban development—can be strategically designed to mitigate both ember hazards and radiant heat damage to structures.
My research aims to develop design solutions to mitigate ember hazards in residential areas within the wildland-urban interface. The findings will provide strategies for more effective passive bushfire management in these areas, ultimately enhancing the resilience of communities living in bushfire-prone regions.
Rick McRae
Adjunct Professor, UNSW Canberra School of Science
My research goal is making sense of observations of new phenomena in bushfires, and in wildfires globally. Climate change is continually providing new challenges, and my background makes me perhaps uniquely qualified to identify emerging risks. By exploring how extreme wildfires evolve, and their drivers, my research shows that it is complex interactions due to climate change that are causing a much faster rise in these fires than has typically been predicted. Complex climate-driven chains can be followed to analyse the initial drivers and provide better forecasts. By pushing new items onto the Australian bushfire risk register fire crews and local communities can be taught new skills for bushfire safety and risk reduction. These include pyro-tornadogenesis, Vorticity-driven Lateral Spread of various kinds, Blow-Up Fire Events, river drying events, foehn-effect fires, and pyroCbs of various kinds.
Samsung Lim
Associate Professor, UNSW School of Civil & Environmental Engineering
My bushfire research focuses on hotspot analysis, correlation between bushfires and climate change, burned area detection, predictive modelling, evacuation planning. Accurate assessment of bushfire-affected areas for immediate response and control. Forecasting for prevention and preparedness. Effective evacuation planning. The bushfire management can be systematically improved by accurately identifying bushfire prone areas which are constantly changing over time due to climate change, urban development, dynamic weather, people mobility, etc.
Sisi Zlatanova
SHARP Professor, UNSW Arts, Design, Architecture
My bushfire research primarily focuses on 1. Monitoring, 3D modeling and visualisation of areas affected or threatened by bushfire. 2. Information management and early warning for support of responders and protection and evacuation of communities
We are developing advanced 3D processing (voxel-based) algorithms, 3D data models and AI methods to provide more accurate estimates of fire prediction models and more advanced 3D data fusion approaches to support near-real-time decision making.
We aim increase in reliability, efficiency and performance of current bushfire prediction models and allow for flexible, user-oriented (AI-supported) mechanisms to analyse 3D data and perform emergency response procedures.
Dr Susanne Thurow
UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research
My research focuses on reimagining how we represent and engage with climate phenomena is one of my key research interests. I investigate the emergent capabilities of digital aesthetics applied to interactive immersive visualisation to address shortcomings identified in current representational paradigms across the arts and sciences.
My work is twofold in that I develop conceptual frameworks that account for the constitutive dynamic interconnections between humans and wider ecologies; and, secondly, I explore how these may be translated into performative visual languages that expand our capabilities for appraising processes playing out in extreme fires.
In its association with the ARC-funded iFire Laureate project (FL200100004; led by Prof. Dennis Del Favero), my work contributes to the development of an immersive visualisation system that translates fire data into cinematic scenarios displayable within a 360-degree interactive 3D environment. This can be used for various purposes, e.g. to recreate defining aspects of historical fires or to extrapolate plausible future events based on scientific modelling to enhance situational awareness among users (incl. emergency service personnel or community stakeholders).
Dr Qihan Wang
UNSW Civil & Environmental Engineering
My bushfire research focuses on structural reliability analysis and design optimization under the wildfire attack; proposal of design curves for engineering structures under wildfire. My research mainly investigates the structural damage behavior under wildfire risks with the goal of developing design curves for engineering structures across various wildfire scenarios. This research fulfils the gap between engineering structure under wildfire risks and the design and management strategies. The main aim is to achieve more resilient structural designs and management strategies that can effectively withstand wildfire impacts. The expectation from my research is to propose design curves for engineering structures across various wildfire scenarios, develope advanced structural safety assessment framework for engineering structures, and optimize the structural design to achieve better resilience to wildfire risks.
Dr Zlatko Jovanoski
UNSW Canberra School of Science
The primary focus of my research is on understanding how ecological systems are affected by catastrophic events, particularly bushfires. By combining deterministic and stochastic modeling techniques, my work seeks to more accurately simulate the complex dynamics of bushfire spread. This research aims to uncover how bushfires interact with various environmental factors—especially those altered by climate change—and how these interactions influence ecosystem resilience, fire behavior, and associated risks. My research contributes to advancing the understanding of bushfire and climate risks by integrating both deterministic and stochastic modeling approaches to capture the complexity of wildfire dynamics under changing environmental conditions. By using stochastic differential equations to model fire spread, I account for the inherently unpredictable nature of wildfires, which are influenced by a wide range of variables such as temperature, wind patterns, fuel load, and moisture levels. This approach allows for more realistic simulations of how fires behave under various scenarios, including those driven by climate change. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for developing more accurate predictions of wildfire behavior and risk under future climate conditions. This helps inform management strategies that can mitigate the impact of bushfires, such as optimizing fuel reduction programs and improving early warning systems. Additionally, my work contributes to a broader understanding of how ecosystems respond to fire regimes that are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change, enabling better decision-making in both conservation and land management practices.
Ali Edalatinejad
PhD Candidate, UNSW Canberra School of Science
My research focuses on understanding how vegetation moisture content affects the flammability of bushfire fuels. By investigating this relationship, we can gain deeper insights into the early development of bushfires and assess their potential to escalate into large, hazardous events.
This work advances our understanding of bushfire and climate risks by analysing how varying moisture levels in vegetation influence bushfire behaviour. This knowledge is crucial for predicting fire dynamics under different climate conditions, improving fire management strategies, and reducing the overall risk of catastrophic bushfires.
I expect my research to significantly enhance bushfire management by providing more accurate predictions of fire behaviour, especially in the critical early stages of ignition. By deepening our understanding of how moisture content in vegetation affects flammability, my work aims to inform more precise and timely fire management strategies. This can lead to better-prepared communities, reducing the risk of devastating bushfires and helping to safeguard lives, property, and ecosystems.
Caleb Wilson
PhD Candidate, UNSW Canberra School of Science
My primary focus is understanding the meteorological drivers of pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) in Australia. PyroCb are fire-generated thunderstorms. They form due to a balance of favourable fire weather conditions near the surface and favourable conditions for elevated thunderstorms in the mid-troposphere. PyroCb pose significant risks to firefighters, emergency personnel, and the general public, often intensifying already dangerous situations. PyroCb evenst have become increasingly common in Australia, with most occurring in the last 15 years.
My research centres on two main areas:
- Gaining a generalized understanding of the atmospheric environments associated with pyroCb development across southeast Australia and how those conditions compare to the atmospheric conditions associated with large non-pyroCb-producing fires.
- Using the Weather Research & Forecasting Model to perform case studies of specific pyroCb events, focusing on event-specific phenomena--such as trough passages that can significantly alter the atmospheric profile near large fires and greatly enhance the probability of pyroCb initiation.
I aim for my research to aid fire weather event forecasters, both in for medium-term (day-to-day) and short-term (hour-by-hour) pyroCb prediction. Knowing what trends to look for in an atmospheric profile beforehand, combined with knowing specific fire event details (also VERY important), can offer a much stronger ability to accurately forecast/anticipate pyroCb initiation. Also, I am hopeful my research of case studies may allow for a better understanding of what happened in those cases (from an atmospheric perspective), and that it may offer shed light on possible factors that contribute not only to pyroCb initiation but also to maintaining pyroCb after they form.
Chanaru Pramud Lakshan
PhD Candidate, UNSW Canberra School of Science
My primary research focus is investigating the effect of aerodynamic characteristics on ember trajectory in long-range ember transport. By analysing how factors such as drag, lift, and rotational forces influence ember flight, study provides insights into the dynamics of embers within fire plumes. Understanding these aerodynamic characteristics is crucial for predicting ember movement and potential fire spread over long distances. The findings will improve fire behaviour models, ultimately aiding in more effective bushfire management strategies.
My research primarily focuses on numerical simulations to capture the detailed aerodynamic characteristics of ember particles capable of long-distance travel. Previous studies on long-range ember transport have often relied on several assumptions, such as neglecting the rotational effects, assuming zero lift force, and disregarding combustion effects. My work aims to provide more accurate simulations of ember trajectories using the Lagrangian method. Furthermore, this study can be developed potentially to enhance predictive models of ember transport. This enhanced understanding will enable emergency services to implement more effective management strategies, ensuring timely evacuations and optimized allocation of resources.
Frank Wu
PhD Candidate, UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering
The primary focus of my bushfire research is on wildfire simulation. By understanding how fire spread is influenced by changes in environmental variables, this research aims to enhance current fire simulation models. This could lead to significant improvements in predicting and managing wildfires.
Nusrat Mehnaz
PhD Candidate, UNSW Canberra School of Science
My research primarily focuses on risk assessment of bushfires in wildland-urban interface (WUI) in Australia. Bushfires pose significant threats to areas where settlements exist near wildland vegetation, known as wildland-urban interface or WUI. The WUI regions are a prime focus in bushfire management since they are a major site of ignition. The fires generated in the WUI have the potential to cause economic, social, and environmental damage as well as loss of lives. With change in climatic conditions and increase in bushfire frequency and intensity, the communities living the WUI areas are becoming more vulnerable to bushfires. This project aims to conduct an integrated risk assessment of bushfires at WUI in Australia through spatially characterizing and mapping the WUI across Australia and using fire simulation and demographics in WUI areas to quantify the risks. By pushing new items onto the Australian bushfire risk register fire crews and local communities can be taught new skills for bushfire safety and risk reduction. These include: pyro-tornadogenesis, Vorticity-driven Lateral Spread of various kinds, Blow-Up Fire Events, river drying events, foehn-effect fires, and pyroCbs of various kinds.
Wenyuan Ma
PhD Candidate, UNSW Canberra School of Science
My research primarily focuses on understanding the geographical patterns of pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) occurrence. My research advances the understanding of bushfire and climate risks in several ways: (1) It helps to better identify the key drivers of pyroCb occurrence and their impact mechanisms, quantifies the relative contributions of these drivers, and explores how these drivers and their impacts vary geographically at a large scale; (2) By quantifying pyroCb risk and developing predictive models, it enhances our ability to forecast the longer-term likelihood of pyroCb occurrences; (3) It deepens our understanding of the temporal and spatial patterns of pyroCb occurrences in Australia. I expect my research to offer valuable insights into the drivers of pyroCb development, enabling fire management agencies to better predict high-risk periods and regions for pyroCb occurrences. This will improve resource allocation and preparedness strategies, ultimately reducing the impact of severe bushfires. Additionally, understanding how pyroCb occurrence patterns may change under future climate projections will help communities adapt to evolving fire conditions, increasing their resilience and reducing vulnerability to extreme fire events.
William Swedosh
PhD Candidate, UNSW Canberra School of Science
My research focuses on investigating dynamic wildfire behaviour and associated models, particularly the quantification of local rate of spread and how it relates to crown fires and the crossing of disruptions. My work will improve the understanding and implementation of dynamic wildfire models such as crown fires and disruption crossing in operational simulators. My work will improve the understanding and implementation of dynamic wildfire models in operational simulators. This will allow fire and land managers to better predict wildfire spread and risk in their communities.