People

Buick Davison

Email: j.davison@sheffield.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 114 22 25354
University of Sheffield staff profile

I am Buick Davison. My connection with Sheffield University goes back to 1977 when I joined the department as an undergraduate. After graduating in 1980, I worked with a local consulting engineer on a variety of structural projects.

In 1984, I returned to the University as a research assistant working with Pat Kirby and David Nethetcot on the influence of joint performance on steel frame behaviour. After completing my PhD, I joined the staff as a lecturer teaching structural design. In 1990, I left to join a consulting practice and worked on a number of exciting structural projects (grandstands, multi-storey offices, hospitals etc). 1993 saw me back in the department again!

Since then, I have continued working in the field of joint performance, mainly considering the design implications and also extending the work into behaviour of tubular columns with flow drill connections.

More recently I have become involved in the work of the Fire Research group, supervising the work of Craig English, Spryros Spyrou, Florian Block and Marwan Sarraj. On a slight tangent, I have been looking into the environmental impacts of frame materials and supervised a student who has developed an assessment tool for the embodied impacts of building frames.

Shan Shan Huang

Email: S.Huang@sheffield.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 114 22 25727
University of Sheffield staff profile

Shan-Shan Huang is a senior lecturer in the Department of Civil and Structural Engineering of the University of Sheffield. Apart from teaching Structural Engineering, she conducts research on Structural Fire Engineering. Shan-Shan explores questions such as 'What happens to structures in fire?' and 'How can we improve the current fire engineering practices, in terms of safety, efficiency and sustainability?'

Her current research focuses are:

• Sustainable concrete in fire, eg prevent explosive spalling using recycled tyre fibres.

• Fire resistance of greener building systems, eg engineered timber in fire.

• Robustness and the prevention of disproportionate progressive collapse of high-rise building structures in fire, eg steel beam to columns connection and composite slabs.

She obtained her MSc (Distinction) degree in Steel Construction in 2005 and completed her PhD "The effects of transient strain on the strength of concrete-filled columns in fire" in 2009, both from the University of Sheffield.

She then carried on working as a Post Doctoral research associate on the European collaborative project COMPFIRE (design of joints to composite columns for improved fire robustness) before taking up a lecturer post.

Giacomo Torelli

Email: g.torelli@sheffield.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 114 22 25796
University of Sheffield staff profile

I am Giacomo Torelli. I started working on, and getting excited about, the behaviour of materials at high temperatures in October 2014, when I joined the University of Manchester to study my PhD in the numerical modelling of concrete.

My PhD research focused on the formulation of a novel behaviour law for concrete subjected to transient high temperatures. Since then, I have continued working in the field of modelling the multi-physics behaviour of concrete to tackle the themes of infrastructure resilience and sustainability.

Martyn McLaggan

Email: m.s.mclaggan@sheffield.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 114 22 25783
University of Sheffield staff profile

Martyn graduated with MEng in Architectural Engineering from the University of Strathclyde and subsequently attained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in Fire Safety Engineering. His work investigated how to balance the potential energy savings of modern low carbon building materials with their inherent fire risk.

He spent two years as a research consultant and postdoctoral fellow in a position joint between Denmark and Sweden, focused on façades and how to apply research to industry.

The Grenfell Tower fire demonstrated the huge lack of understanding in the area of façade fires. As a result, Martyn worked on an audit of flammable cladding while a research fellow at the University of Queensland, Australia. As part of a state-wide project, he directed a team of researchers to develop the Cladding Materials Library, an open access material database containing quantitative data needed by practitioners and researchers.

Martyn joined the department as Lecturer in Low Carbon Design in 2021. His work is heavily interdisciplinary and combines sustainability, fire safety, structures and architecture to facilitate the design of safe sustainable structures. His interests primarily lie in enabling the usage of novel and renewable low carbon building materials, such as timber and other natural materials, advanced composites and phase change materials.

Yu Liu

Email: yliu230@sheffield.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 114 22 25729

Yu Liu joined the Structural Fire Engineering Group to pursue his PhD after obtaining his Bachelor's degree from Tongji University (2010-2014) and his Master's degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (2014-2017) in China. He is currently studying the behaviour and design of ductile steel-to-steel connections to improve the robustness of framed structures in fire.

Yifan Li

Email: yli101@sheffield.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 114 22 25729

Yifan Li is a PhD student who joined the group in 2018 after obtaining his MSc degree at University College London in 2017. He came to the UK in 2013 to study Civil Engineering at Cardiff University and obtained His BEng degree in 2016.

Outside research, Yifan is a car enthusiast (but never yet had the money to buy one), a PC gamer who plays a lot of DOTA 2. He likes all kinds of sports but eats fatty food. He is trying to be cool but getting bald, optimistic all the time and easy going.