Rate My Professor Andres Valencia

Andres Valencia is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Civil and Natural Resources Engineering at the University of Canterbury, serving as Director of Studies for Fire Engineering. He obtained his BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Ecole Nationale d’Ingénieurs de Metz in France and the Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira in Colombia, an MS in Thermal Sciences from the Université de Lorraine in France, and a PhD in Combustion and Fire Science from the Université de Rouen in France. Following his doctoral studies, he held a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering before joining the University of Canterbury.

Valencia's academic interests center on fire safety engineering, including wildland-urban interface fires, fire-atmosphere interactions, wildfire behavior, suppression systems such as sprinklers, prescribed burns, fire dynamics, and dual applications in agricultural irrigation. His publications include "A review of thermal exposure and fire spread mechanisms in large outdoor fires and the built environment" (2023), "Atmospheric turbulent structures and fire sweeps during shrub fires and implications for flaming zone behaviour" (2023), "Turbulent thermal image velocimetry at the immediate fire and atmospheric interface" (2021), "Mapping fireline intensity and flame height of prescribed gorse wildland fires" (2023), "Influence of fuel structure on gorse fire behaviour" (2023), "A fire safety engineering approach to improving community resilience to the impacts of wildfire" (2025), and "Informal settlement fires in Colombia" (2025). He leads research projects on topics like overpressure events in combustible compartments, water-based fire suppression performance, wildland fire modelling, and an AI-powered machine learning tool for wildfire danger prediction to support evacuations and resource allocation. Valencia teaches courses such as Fire Dynamics (ENFE602) and Fire Engineering (ENGR403), and supervises PhD students in fire engineering research.