Dr Greg Penney is a Superintendent with the Department of Fire and Emergency Services in WA, with more than 16 years’ operational and incident management experience, both as a firefighter and paramedic. His PhD research examined the critical components of bushfire suppression to improve firefighter safety and operational effectiveness during siege bushfire response. Greg’s study adopted a fire engineering approach, incorporating both empirical and physics-based computer simulation to analyse suppression efforts with a significant focus on firefighter tenability.
Upon completion of his PhD, Greg has written A Handbook of Wildfire Engineering: Guidance for Wildfire Suppression and Resilient Urban Design. The Handbook draws on Greg’s research and is designed to promote the emerging field of wildfire engineering and provide practical guidance to firefighters, incident management teams and urban planners to improve fire suppression operations, firefighter safety and resilience community design at the rural urban interface. For his research, Greg has been awarded with the Australian Institute of Health and Safety National Eric Wigglesworth Award and the Ron Coffey Award for Excellence in Bushfire Protection at the 2021 Fire Protection Industry Awards.
