I had a pleasure to have an interview with Richard Emberley, Ph.D., after he received the SFPE 5 under 35 award. He is an IMFSE Scholar and is now currently working as an Assistant Professor in Fire Protection Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at California Polytechnic State University.
Can you tell me about your background and how you got into fire engineering?
I grew up in New England in the United States and particularly in a state called New Hampshire. I was in high school, and I sort of liked construction, and I liked buildings. I liked engineering, or at least I thought I liked engineering, and then you know, as is the case where you sort of start to think about what you want to do for your career and which one to go to college, I did a tour. There was an engineering school called WPI, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which I’m assuming you’re familiar with. So I drove down with my mom, and we did a tour of the campus. Essentially in the tour they would take you around. It’s an engineering school, so there’s chemical engineering, there’s electrical engineering, and all these things. I looked at civil and all that kind of stuff and then they took us through the mechanical engineering, and they took us in this basement, and they said, “Over here is the fire lab, and that’s where we set things on fire for science”, and I was like, “Wait, what?”, that’s an engineering thing you could do, and I had never heard it. It was the first time someone had ever said that you could do the fire engineering. And so, I remember leaving we drove back home, and I remember essentially pouring into what fire protection was, and I learned that it is an engineering field that directly connects to health and safety, and everything out there, and that it was something that I was interested in.
But I had to do something else. I wanted to do fire, but that was a master’s program. I had to do another undergrad program. So, mine was a 4 + 1 year program essentially, and I had to figure it out, I remember printing out all the different brochures and stuff for engineering. I was very much interested in buildings, I had already been leaning towards civil, and so I decided to do civil engineering with a structural focus. I went there, and I could do three and a half years of undergraduate courses, even though it extended over four years. But in my 4th year, I could start taking Fire Protection courses.
In that process, I really loved my structures. I loved structures course and I have two primary mentors; one was Jonathan Barnett and the other one was my advisor, Leonard Albano. Professor Albano taught a structures and fire course, as it was a master’s level course, and I was very interested in that. When I learned that I loved structures and I liked fire, and I started taking fire courses, I realized through that course as well as through understanding of what fire dynamics meant about in a building, then understanding how it all connected together, I learned that there was this sort of niche in structural fire engineering.
So I ended up adding another degree, I actually have two masters degrees, one in civil engineering with a structural focus and then the other one in Fire Protection. I ended up doing a graduate thesis in civil engineering and it was on a structures and fire topic.
In my final year, I was looking around because I wanted to do a PhD and I wanted to get into research. I hadn’t really thought about teaching and things like that or my future, career-wise, but I really wanted to do that. I ended up, through my mentor Jonathan, connected with Jose Torero. And at that time, he had just started up the program at the University of Queensland, so I ended up getting to be a PhD student there. I officially moved to Australia in July of 2013. Officially started the PhD in October 2013. Then in three and a half years, and so at the end of 2016, I got the job here at Cal Poly and then I started officially in January 2017 here at California Polytechnic State University.
I think from understanding or learning more and more, I like fire engineering. And again, even the first time I had ever heard about fire was 2005, I think it was almost 16 years I am learning about it, and you still learn about the intricacies of what it means to do fire engineering. I think that was the thing that it attracted me first to fire, and how interconnected fire protection engineering was to every industry that’s out there. The more that I spend in it, the more I realize how important it is, and how really important it is to do proper designs.
What about your association with the IMFSE?
So when I was at UQ, UQ had a partnership with the IMFSE, where they would send one or two students in there. So, my first exposure was literally right in July, and I think it was me as a research scholar or something like that for a few months, and I’ve met a student, his name is Arnold, and he was the first one and he was doing a project on sort of in-depth conduction into timber. I got to work with him on his project and sort of helped him along and that really got me interested in sort of, again, helping. And then every year subsequent we got new students. And it just fueled my fascination because all their projects were different, right? It just makes you more excited because you’re learning things along the way, and that’s why I like advising. I think a lot of times students think, “Ah, my advisor knows everything,” when it’s like not really, they’re learning at the same time and that’s why I sort of like it.
Once I became an academic in 2017, I was then able to do where they called it a guest scholar. I think it was for three years I was the University of Edinburgh’s IMFSE scholar. I think it was 2018, 2019, and 2020. I went in winter, between January, February, March and I was the IMFSE guest scholar for them. I got to work with Rory Hadden and Angus law and Grunde Jomaas, and everybody there. So, I’ve known them for years. Because I was starting up a research program here at CalPoly. It was very nice to be able to have the IMFSE to connect and build more collaborations together. So, I was then able to send my grad student. For example, there’s a student that I met in 2018. We did a senior project together. He did independent research with me. He became my grad student, master’s degree, and I sent him twice to Edinburgh to sort of being a research scholar and then that translated with him being into a PhD student at Edinburgh, which is excellent. That’s how it sort of developed along the way. I started out as just being a PhD student in connecting with the IMFSE, but it translated into, with 7-8 years later, being an academic, to connect at different level. And again, I think what the IMFSE is doing is superb. Looking back on it would be nice to have been involved in the IMFSE when I was a student, you know, but I didn’t know about it until I came to UQ, and so I’m enjoying getting to experience it from a different side. And I’m slightly envious of what you get to do in the IMFSE, bounce around in different universities and get to see everything, to me that’s just the coolest thing. I’m trying to say, use it as much as possible because I would have loved to have done it when I was a grad student.
Do you always know that you want to work in the academia?
In terms of what I’ve wanted to do, I think just in terms of my interests, I always liked trying to understand more and more about something. So, I think that’s where I wanted to go into academia and research. I liked the research component, I liked being sort of either figuring out a problem, being presented with a problem, coming up with the problem on your own, and saying, “Well, how could I go about learning more about this?” And I think the difficult part is, the more and more you learn about problems, the more problems you see, and you try to fill those ends. You know, certain areas I just never thought I’d get into. Like right now I’m doing statistical uncertainties in fire testing and what that means, and I never would have been in the area five years or three years ago. So, I think as I do more and more research, and as I do more and more in academia, the more I like it.
Then at the very start, it seemed to me that teaching was a little bit of a means to an end. To do research, you sort of need to be in academia and to be in academia you need to teach, but I’ve always liked it. At the University of Queensland, I got to be a TA in some courses with Jose and I liked that portion of it. I liked interacting with students, I liked to be involved with a lot of advising type, whether it was an undergraduate project or master’s project, including the IMFSE students’ project. I got to be involved in that and I liked helping people learn more about it.
When I got into academia and got into this sort of teaching role, the more I realize that I liked helping people learn about the industry that I really like. Especially in terms of trying to help people. Because if you’re trying to help people do better engineering, you’re trying to help people be able to be better engineers, so that they can go out and they can make an impact on the world as well. And I like that aspect of helping somebody learn about something that they want, and you can connect that passion. Because I have the passion for it and I like to do it, and you like to do it, and well if we both like to do it, I can help you get to where you want to be. And then even in that process of trying to help, I learn more things. Because by being involved in projects and even teaching a course, you learn the subject better and that just makes you more passionate.
Like a feedback loop?
Yeah it’s a feedback loop, right? The more and more I come to work, the more and more I help people learn, the more I get excited about it, and then that just sort of translates into the next group of people. And it’s very infectious.
The award is awarded to people who displays a commitment to helping shape the future of our industry beyond just personal development or the growth/success of their employer. This is probably a bit of a rhetorical question because we know that of course as an educator and a researcher, you can influence the industry. But my question would be, in what ways do you think working in academia, as a researcher and as an educator, can shape the future of fire engineering industry?
If you think of a various aspect that you’re involved with, you know you get to do research which is, again, you sort of identifying these problems and you get to study and go delve deeper into a subject. So whether that’s trying to understand self-extinction for tall timber design, or whether that is uncertainty in fire testing, those are things that help to shape, we’ll say, current research and knowledge base, and help to understand those gaps. Because you’re connected to academia, the things that you’re learning, you can apply right in the classroom. But it’s again, as I said previously, education. And everybody does this to a certain extent. I think that’s one of the reasons why my colleagues here at Cal Poly is committed to a student that wants to go out and be a good engineer. And to be able to help them to get to that point, you’re helping shape the industry by trying to provide quality education. You’re trying to raise the competency level. You’re trying to get competent engineers that are out there so that when they go out to do designs, they are fulfilling what the profession should be doing.
I think in the education process, that’s how you shape it, in terms of helping shape students. And again 50% of my time is in fire and 50% of my time is in is in mechanical engineering, I’ve masqueraded as a mechanical engineer somehow, but you do that on every level. So even for students that never deal in fire, that you’re trying to teach the subject like heat transfer or like fluid mechanics to, you’re trying to help them develop a passion for that subject or learn how to apply it and apply it in an appropriate way. So that they understand, and they have the confidence to be able to apply that particular subject in that particular way, and to know their bounds.
One of the things in education and being an engineer is to know where your bounds lie. So that you don’t step over those bounds and then you do designs that are not appropriate. For instance, in my courses, I sort of say: look this is where your knowledge stops. Okay, I’ve given you the tools to be able to go in progress and learn more, or helped you get those tools, but you need to recognize your own limitations. I think every engineer needs to understand the limitations, not that they can’t go in, learn more and become better at it, but that they can just say, “Hey, I already know this, I can teach the theory behind an alarm system. But I’m not competent to go out in design one electrical systems and all these other things. Could I do that? Probably, but..”. So, you’re always trying to help people recognize that point, and I think that helps shape the industry, by having more and more competent engineers coming out in the field.
And being at Cal Poly is there’s a degree of… advertisement. Because I sort of started my story with the fact that I had no idea fire engineering existed and so now that I’m in the program, I am working to promote this or advertise this field. Every single time I tell students in an undergraduate mechanical engineering class that my background is in Fire Protection engineering they all go “Huh? What? That’s a thing?”. So I become an advertisement to the industry and say, look, this is a legitimate career. Because you need that turnover, right? You need people coming in the industry and we always say that we have a lack of people going into it.
I mean, I kind of don’t like the fact that it’s phrased that how I’m shaping the industry, because it’s the people that are going out into the industry that are going to be shaping it. I’m just helping them get to the point that they need to do it, and do it in a competent, professional, and ethical manner.
What are the challenges so far?
It’s really tough to describe challenges because I think it’s fun in terms of what I’m doing, and I like the interactions.
I think the challenge that are out there is to be able to try and provide the best quality education for all of the students that are out there. Because every student comes to you with a unique background in a unique way of trying to learn. And you know, sometimes you have to learn too as to how to be able to connect with that person who might be coming from a different background. Might be more of an expert in something else, and you’re trying to work with them, and so I think that’s a that’s a really challenging thing. It’s a challenge, but it’s something that we should do.
Everyone comes from a different place, whether that’s a different state, in case of the United States, but in the fact that we’re dealing with IMFSE, a different country and different culture, a different everything and they are all trying to understand fire safety on all broad levels. They also came from a different background, there are sprinkler designers, and maybe you have someone who might be from the fire brigade, or someone who already worked in risk, or someone who is working as a consultant, or even an undergrad. You have this wide background and so to meet every student where they are and then help them, that becomes a bit of a challenge. But in the end, I think it makes it better, in a way you structure the course. Of course, it becomes better because everybody is bringing their little bit of expertise into the course. And if you can help, you can sort of not want to just do it one way, you can try to provide where everyone is learning. You try to provide the points of which they can contribute, then your diversity that you have within your group of students just makes the course better and then exposes everybody to a different background, different ways of thinking about things, and in the end makes them better engineers because then they think about it. Of course, as an educator I have a direction of where I wanted to go, but you sort of try to bring people backgrounds in together and then understand how it all connects together. So I think that would be one of the bigger challenging things that, as an educator, you’re faced with. Which is why you have to continuously learn at the same time and again, that’s the reasons why I think I’ve stayed in academia.
At a very young age you have achieved many milestones, including this award. Can you share your future goals or vision about your career?
I think in terms of my career, being able to, with my colleagues here at the university, continue to provide, and continuously improve at providing quality fire protection engineering education. I mean that is our number one goal here at Cal Poly.
So again, previously, in discussing what I do, why do it and why like doing it, I think the students are in one of the biggest components to it. So, my goal would be to continuously be able to provide that education and helping students get to their career, what they career paths, what they want to do. And then if I can do that, I think I’d be very happy. I obviously want to keep researching. I want to be able to continuously learn about the industry that we’re in. When I look at different things, from a career standpoint, I think that would be very good. I can look back at my career and say that, you know, I contributed to all the various different students that are out there.
I think that’s my answer; to be able to keep providing a quality education. It’s going to require me to keep learning, understanding the industry. So that fulfils my desire for keep learning and understanding, and even in learning how to teach better. Those are all things that I like to do. It’s why I do things. And so if I can keep doing that, then that sounds great to me.
IMFSE 