The Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) announced its winners of 2022 Global 5 Under 35 Award on August 10. Prof. WANG Yu, specially appointed from State Key Laboratory of Fire Science of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), is among the list. He is the first young scholar from universities of Chinese mainland who won the award since its establishment.

Established in 1950, SFPE was a world's leading professional organization for fire protection and fire safety engineering. It has 95 international branches, 27 student branches and over 4800 members from 72 countries. SFPE globally elects and appraises five top rising leaders under 35 each year in order to honor them for their outstanding leadership, volunteerism and professional growth in fire protection and expects them to display a commitment to helping shape the future of the industry.

The five winners this year are respectively from State Key Laboratory of Fire Science of USTC (China), Idaho National Laboratory (US), Burns & McDonnell (US), Arup Group (UK) and Massey University (New Zealand).

Ms. Beth Tubbs, president of SFPE and the chief committee member of Fire Safety Code Executive Committee of International Code Council, notified WANG for getting this award by a video call and expressed her warmly congratulations to him.

WANG got a joint Ph.D. in USTC and City University of Hong Kong, then engaged in postdoctoral research respectively in National University of Singapore and the University of Edinburgh. Coming back to State Key Laboratory of Fire Science of USTC in September 2020, he has been mainly engaging in research on fire spread in high-rise buildings and informal settlement dwellings.

To date, he has published more than 40 SCI journal papers in fire safety engineering and won a series of academic awards including President Award of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Leadership Scholarship Program of US Committee 100 (leadership organization of Chinese Americans), Best Paper Award in 11th the Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology (AOSFST), Best Presentation Award in 12th AOSFST and Best Image Award of International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS).

His pioneering research conducted in China, US, UK, Singapore and South Africa has been widely applied in the domestic or international fire safety codes development and contributed newly generated knowledge to Urban Fire Regulatory Assessment and Mitigation (Urban FRAME, World Bank) for the Low- and Middle-income Countries.

SFPE’s official website and journal Fire Protection Engineering interviewed the five winners on “how to make world-changing impact in fire protection” and gave relevant coverage.