Prof. Naian Liu is the Vice Director and professor of the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He is also the chief of the Division of Wildland and Urban Fires of SKLFS. The Division develops, verifies, and utilizes experiments and models to quantify the behavior of wildland (forest, grassland and brush) fire and urban fire, and develop the means to reduce the impact of the wildland and urban fires on people, property, and the environment.

Prof. Naian Liu graduated from USTC, getting his PhD degree of thermo-physics in 2000. Then he was employed in USTC as a lecturer at SKLFS and in 2004 promoted to be an associate professor there. In 2007 he was promoted to be a professor at SKLFS of USTC. He was elected to be the Vice Director of SKLFS in 2008.

During the past decade, he has led interdisciplinary research studies on thermal decomposition of forest fuels and dynamical behaviors of extreme fire behaviors such as fire whirl, multiple fires burning, eruptive fire and spot fire at SKLFS. He has presided over one project supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (also known as the “973” Program), five projects supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, two subprojects supported by the Key Technologies R&D Program of China During the 10th Five-year Plan Period, two subprojects supported by the National Science & Technology Pillar Program in the Eleventh Five-year Plan Period, one major project supported by the National Science & Technology Pillar Program in the Twelfth Five-year Plan Period, as well as one key project supported by the Special Funds for Public Sector Forest Research. Prof. Liu entered the list of recipients supported by the “New Century Talents Supporting Program” of the Ministry of Education in 2005. Besides, Prof. Liu was also supported by the 11th Fok Ying-Tong Education Foundation for Young Teachers in the Higher Education Institutions of China.

In 2011, Prof. Naian Liu was selected to be the Principal Investigator of the Major International (Regional) Joint Research Project entitled “Research on Key Scientific Issues Concerning Wildland-Urban Interface Fire Safety”. The partners include NIST-Engineering Laboratory, Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion of Russia Academy of Science, and the Building Material Engineering Laboratory at The University of Tokyo.

In recent years, Prof. Liu Prof. Liu has authored over 90 research papers of which 45 were indexed by SCI and 48 by EI all in first-author capacity, including seven published in h-factor top journals and two cooperative books. His papers were published in international journals such as Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, Combustion and Flame, Fire Safety Journal, Fire Technology, Fire and Materials, Energy and Fuels, AIChE Journal, and Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. He is the author of 6 invited speeches of international conferences. He won the National Science and Technology Progress Award (First-class Award) in 2010, National Liangxi Forestry Science and Technology Progress Award (Second-class Award) in 2007 and 2011, and Lu Jia Xi Youth Excellence Prize of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2008.

Prof. Naian Liu is currently serving as the Member of the International FORUM of Fire Research Directors, Member of International Scale Modeling Committee, Editorial Board of Fire Science Reviews, Member of Indexing Working Group of International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS), Contributing Editor of IAFSS Newsletter, Standing Director of China Association of Public Safety Science and Technology, and Member of China National Committee for Standardization of Forest Fire Protection. In 2012, he served as the Executive Organizing Committee Chair and Technical Program Chair of the 9th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology. He is a member of the Combustion Institute and IAFSS.