Photo caption: University of Canterbury Emeritus Professor Charley Fleischmann.
Emeritus Professor Fleischmann has retired from Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC) after leading the fire engineering programme in the Department of Civil and Natural Resources Engineering for 30 years, developing it into an internationally well-known and respected degree.
The 65-year-old grew up in Washington, the United States, and worked as a volunteer firefighter in the late 1970s before studying fire engineering at the University of Maryland and then achieving a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
“Who else gets paid to play with matches, is the way I approach it,” he says laughing. “I used to build model cars so I could blow them up with firecrackers, and I still have an interest in fires, but my focus now is very much on human safety.”
He was given the title of Emeritus Professor earlier this year in recognition of his contributions to teaching and research at UC and he says out of everything he has achieved in his career this work has been a personal highlight.
“I’m really proud that I’ve helped build a well-established and robust programme in fire engineering that’s respected here and internationally. And I’m proud of the graduates that we’ve produced, because they’re the people who will carry on improving building fire safety in New Zealand and internationally.”
When he started teaching at UC in 1994 the fire engineering programme was in its very early stages. “In those early days our lab was very small, and we could only experiment with fires in something the size of a sofa, but now it’s big enough to burn a small room or a small automobile as part of our fire safety experiments,” Emeritus Professor Fleischmann says.
“The vast majority of our graduates get involved in the building industry, particularly fire safety engineering in large buildings such as convention centres, airports, hospitals and multi-storey buildings. Some of them are working internationally and many others are here in New Zealand.”
His UC role involves working closely with Fire and Emergency New Zealand, and he says the goal of fire engineering is to support the work of firefighters by preventing and controlling fires, or at the very least, ensuring tools such as alarms and sprinkler systems help people get out of a building safely when there is a fire.
“Ideally you want people to be standing on the street corner when the fire service arrives, rather than having to rely on them to do the rescue,” he says.
Although officially retired, Emeritus Professor Fleischmann continues to work at UC part-time, supervising PhD students and mentoring other staff, while also working for the Washington-based UL Fire Safety Research Institute as a principal research engineer.
In 2011 Professor Fleischmann was awarded the Arthur B Guise Medal from the international Society of Fire Protection Engineers, an honour that acknowledges his pioneering work in fire protection engineering. He also played a major role in the development of fire safety requirements in the New Zealand Building Code.
In recognition of his innovative and effective teaching techniques, he was awarded the UC Teaching Award in 2010 and the Ako Aotearoa National Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award in 2014, one of the country’s most prestigious teaching accolades.
Emeritus Professor Fleischmann led the fire engineering programme in UC’s Department of Civil and Natural Resources Engineering for 30 years.
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities
