José Luis Torero (born in Lima, Peru) is a professor in fire safety engineering at the University of Edinburgh. He is Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) since 2010[1] and The Royal Society of Edinburgh (UK) since 2008.[2] He holds the BRE/RAE Chair in Fire Safety Engineering and is the head of the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering.[3]
He is co-Chair of Fire Safety at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat since 2009.[4]
He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Fire Safety Journal [5] and editorial board member of the journals Fire Technology,[6] and Progress in Energy and Combustion Science.[7]
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Torero has contributed mainly to the fields of combustion and fire sciences.[8] His research work is in fire dynamics, flame spread, smouldering, combustion in microgravity, smoke detection, protection and suppression systems, and professional education in fire safety engineering. Since moving to Edinburgh in 2001 he has developed expertise in the behaviour of structures in fire and the use of combustion to remediate contaminated land.[9]
He has received several awards that include the Tam Dalyell science prize (2010),[10] Lord Ezra Award by the Combustion Engineering Association (2009),[11] the Arthur B. Guise Medal from the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (2008), Bodycote Warrington Fire Research Prize (2007), FM Global Award at the 5th Fire and Explosions Hazard International Seminar (2007), William M. Carey (2001) and Harry C. Bigglestone (2001) best paper awards, the Lilly-Center for Teaching Excellence (1996) and E. Robert Kent (1998) Outstanding Teaching awards and honorary membership to the Salamander Fire Protection Engineering Society.
Torero has served as a consultant to numerous organisations around the world.[12] He has been an invited researcher at NIST, at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Bremen, the Catholic University of Santiago (Chile), the Instituto Nacional de Tecnica Aeroespacial (INTA, Spain), and the Universities of Poitiers, Bourges, Ecole de Mines de Saint Etienne and Aix-Marseille (France) .
Torero joined the University of Edinburgh as a Reader in Fire Dynamics in 2001, from the University of Maryland where he was an Associate Professor at the Department of Fire Protection Engineering and an Affiliate Associate Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering.
Previously he was Chargé de Recherche at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He obtained his PhD in 1992 from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied smouldering combustion and fire safety. He had graduated with a BSc in Mechanical Engineering from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.