Michael Woodrow

• From: Lots of different places
• Qualifications: MEng Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Edinburgh
• Supervisors: Prof. Jose Torero & Dr. Luke Bisby
• Postgraduate study: Started 2009

PhD Project:

Effective Education in Fire Safety Engineering

I'm going to make students think.

Architects are designing increasingly complex buildings and are pushing fire safety codes to (and sometimes past) their limits. What is required is a complete overhaul of the codes...but this will take years, involving thousands of PhD students doing hours of tests. But these new, unique and possibly unsafe buildings are already being built. So until the codes can be fixed, the industry will require graduates who can think and problem solve independently instead of following prescriptive design codes.

I'm looking at effective education techniques to try and design a method of teaching fire engineering that will produce graduates capable of performance-based design.

Previous projects

Integrated method for the provision of potable water using the rights-based approach

Selected Publications

EWB Research Conference 2009

See also our page on the Edinburgh Research Archive.