Samuel L. Manzello

Samuel L. Manzello is a technical advisor at Reax Engineering and visiting professor Tohoku University (Japan). He has worked on microgravity droplet combustion, droplet-surface interaction, soot formation in well-stirred reactor/plug flow reactor, fire-structure interaction, and structure vulnerabilities in wildland-urban interface (WUI) fires.

Life and career
Manzello holds B.S. with honors (1996) and PhD (2000) in mechanical engineering from University of Illinois-Chicago. He was awarded NASA Graduate Student Research fellowship during his PhD and has performed experiments in NASA's drop tower and Japan Microgravity Centre (JAMIC)’s drop tower as well as NASA's vomit comet (reduced-gravity aircraft) investigating sooting and radiation on droplet combustion in microgravity. His dissertation was Microgravity droplet combustion: An experimental investigation on the influence of sooting and radiation on droplet burning supervised by Prof. Mun Y. Choi.

After graduation, Manzello joined NIST as a National Research Council (NRC) postdoc fellow in 2001.

Manzello left NIST in 2021, and joined Reax Engineering, Inc, as a technical advisor.

Awards and honors

 * 2015 Harry C. Biggelstone Award from NFPA for a paper "Characterizing Firebrand Exposure from Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) Fires: Results from the 2007 Angora Fire" This is the very first journal paper which investigated the firebrand exposure from WUI fires.
 * 2016 Tibor Z. Harmathy Award from Springer Nature for a paper, "Experimental Study of Firebrand Transport"
 * 2016 Best Journal Paper Award from the Combustion Society of Japan for a paper "The Size and Mass Distribution of Firebrands collected from Ignited Building Components Exposed to Wind"
 * 2017 Samuel Wasley Stratton Award, NIST "for his groundbreaking engineering and scientific research on the vulnerabilities of built structures to ignition from wind-driven firebrand showers produced from wildland-urban interface fires".
 * 2020 Best Best Journal Paper Award from the Combustion Society of Japan for a paper "Role of firebrand combustion in large outdoor fire spread".

Selected publications

 * Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of wildfires and Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) fires, 2020