Rate My Professor Jennifer Wen

Professor Jennifer X. Wen is Professor and Chair in Energy Resilience in the School of Mechanical Engineering Sciences at the University of Surrey, a position she assumed in January 2023. She also serves as Head of the Fire and Explosion Modelling Group and Programme Lead for Energy and Environment at the Institute for Sustainability. Her academic background includes a BEng in Mechanical Engineering from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1984, a PhD in heat transfer from Queen Mary College, University of London in 1990, a Certificate in Management Studies from Oxford Brookes University in 1993, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education from London South Bank University in 1994. Prior to Surrey, Wen was Professor at the University of Warwick for nearly ten years, where she established and led Warwick FIRE, a multidisciplinary research laboratory dedicated to fire, explosions, and safety-related reactive and non-reactive flows. Earlier, she held the position of Full Professor at Kingston University London since 2000 and served as Head of Research for Engineering there from 1999 to 2012. Her early career included roles at Computational Dynamics Limited, British Gas plc, and South Bank University.

Wen specializes in advanced computational fluid dynamics modelling and simulation for fire dynamics, explosion safety, hydrogen safety in gaseous and liquid forms, lithium-ion battery thermal runaway and propagation, LNG safety, and fires in built and natural environments. She has over 7,900 citations with an h-index of 50. Key publications include 'An experimental study on thermal runaway characteristics of lithium-ion batteries with high specific energy and prediction of heat release rate' (Journal of Power Sources, 2020), 'Heat fluxes under the ceiling induced by wall fires with various burner aspect ratios in a channel' (Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, 2021), and 'Advances and challenges in thermal runaway modeling of lithium-ion batteries' (Innovation, 2024). Her engineering tool for venting protective systems has been adopted in European Standard EN14994, used in hydrogen refuelling station designs, and informed the UK's Hy4Heat project and protective measures at Air Liquide, bp, Shell, and FM Global. She led two hydrogen safety guidance notes published by the European Commission. Wen is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng, 2024) and Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (FIMechE).