- SFPE Foundation recognises seven researchers and engineers with its 2026 annual awards.
- Awards highlight achievements in fire dynamics, wildfire resilience, fire investigation and human behaviour research.
- Recipients will be honoured at the SFPE Annual Conference & Expo in Atlanta this October.
The awards celebrate achievements across a range of disciplines, from fire dynamics and engineering communication to human behaviour in fire, wildfire resilience and performance-based fire engineering.
Professor Beth Weckman of the University of Waterloo, Canada, has been awarded the Arthur B. Guise Medal in recognition of her decades-long contribution to fire safety science and engineering. Her research has focused on areas including fire dynamics, pool fires, hot surface ignition and diagnostic techniques for reacting and non-reacting flows. Her published work has been widely cited and has helped shape fire safety standards.
The Jack Bono Award for Engineering Communication has been presented to Dr Jason Floyd and Dr Jonathan Hodges of the UL Research Institutes’ Fire Safety Research Institute for their Fire Technology journal article, An Approach for Flux and Thickness Scaling of Cone Calorimeter Data for Predicting the Pyrolysis of Materials.
The Dr Guylène Proulx Scholarship has been awarded to Gülşah Ataş, a PhD candidate at RMIT University, Australia. Her research uses immersive virtual reality driving simulations to investigate how people make decisions during vehicle-based bushfire evacuations, with the aim of producing the first empirical dataset on real-time evacuation decision-making under bushfire conditions.
Student Scholar Awards have been presented to Tadele Mekuriaw Getu of Queen’s University, Canada, for research into housing vulnerability during wildfire events in a First Nations community, and Maria Binte Mannan of the University of Maryland, whose work focuses on developing quantitative, physics-based methods to improve fire investigation and fire damage assessment.
Mahadev (Dev) Rokade, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh Fire Research Centre, has received the Frederick W. Mowrer Global Scholar Award for research examining the behaviour of sustainable concrete under realistic fire exposure and its implications for performance-based fire engineering.
“The SFPE Foundation is proud to recognise the 2026 SFPE Foundation award recipients,” said Leslie Marshall, Executive Director of the SFPE Foundation. “The recipients’ work exemplifies the scientific excellence and dedication that continue to advance the fire protection and fire safety profession.”
The awards will be presented during the SFPE Annual Conference & Expo, taking place in Atlanta, Georgia, from 6–8 October 2026.
