Elizabeth Weckman Snippet A

Elizabeth Weckman describes two of her projects, her PhD work that used lasers to investigate the velocities and temperatures in a burning pan of liquid, and work with the Waterloo Fire Department to develop improved training for fire fighters. Her PhD experiments have been used in recent years as benchmark data by international research teams developing computer codes to predict fire responses. The training director of the Waterloo Fire Department became aware of her work after watching a dramatic short video showing her experiments. This led initially to collaborative work to improve training of fire fighters and subsequently to funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation program for the $5.6 million University of Waterloo Fire Research Lab that has the capability of creating a two-storey house fire at full scale.