Dr CHU Tianwei, formerly a PhD student from the Department of Building Environment and Energy Engineering at PolyU, is among the department's research team that received the Philip Thomas Medal of Excellence award from the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS) for their best paper presented at the IAFSS Symposium.

Their paper is titled "Introducing an active opening strategy to mitigate large open-plan compartment fire development". The paper was presented and received the Sheldon Tieszen Student Award at the IAFSS Symposium in 2023, as one of the eight excellent papers with students as first authors. In 2025, this work was also selected as the best paper at IAFSS, and the research team was honoured as the recipient of the Philip Thomas Medal of Excellence at IAFSS 2026. The award presentation will be held at the 15th IAFSS Symposium in June in La Rochelle, France.

The winning team was led by Prof. JIANG Liming, Associate Professor in the Department of Building Environment and Energy Engineering, who served as the Chief Supervisor of the First Author and the Corresponding Author of the paper. Dr CHU was the First Author of the paper. He graduated in March 2025. Prof. Asif USMANI, Chair Professor of Building Sciences and Fire Safety Engineering from the same department, was the Third Author of the paper and the Co-Supervisor of Dr CHU. 

Founded in 1985, IAFSS organises the IAFSS Symposium every three years. The Philip Thomas Medal of Excellence is awarded to the author(s) of the best paper presented at a previous IAFSS Symposium, which is selected according to five criteria: pertinence, utility, significance, rationality and eloquence of the paper.

Chu, T., Jiang, L., & Usmani, A. (2023). Introducing an active opening strategy to mitigate large open-plan compartment fire development. Fire Safety Journal, 141, Article 103981. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.firesaf.2023.103981