The Department of Building Environment and Energy Engineering (BEEE) of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) is delighted to announce that BEEE PhD student Yifei Ding has won the prestigious Sheldon Tieszen Student Award for the excellence of research paper presented in the 15th International symposium on fire safety science (IAFSS 2026, top conference of the field).
The award was presented by the Chairman of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) and are sponsored by the International FORUM of Fire Research Directors (https://iafss.org/awards/sheldon-tieszen-student-awards/). The International Symposium on Fire Safety Science, a triennial event organized by the IAFSS since 1985, is widely recognized as the most important academic gathering in the field of fire safety science. The Sheldon Tieszen Student Awards were established to recognize the excellence in an IAFSS symposium paper in fire safety science by a student making a significant contribution to that paper. Each Sheldon Tieszen Student Award consists of a plaque and a cash payment.
The award-winning research paper is titled ‘Coupling Computer-Vision House Field Load Estimation with Fire Spread Simulation in the Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI)’, which introduces a novel WUI fire spread risk evaluation strategy considering houses’ discrepancy. This research was advised by Professor Xinyan Huang (his chief supervisor) with the help from Professor Negar Elhami-Khorasani (University at Buffalo) and Professor Thomas Gernay (Johns Hopkins). The research was based on PolyU’s recent investigations on WUI fire risk modelling, and proudly supported by the PolyU International Collaborative Research Fellowship (ICRF).
Congratulations to Yifei Ding on this remarkable milestone! To learn more about this study, you can access the full publication via https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2026.104713.
