I completed my PhD in 2014 in Applied Mathematics at the University of Sydney. I then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Victoria University Melbourne on Physics-based Simulation of Bushfires, before joining UNSW Canberra in 2014. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022, was appointed deputy director of UNSW Bushfire in 2023, and was appointed maths discipline coordinator in 2024.
My Grants
I completed my PhD in 2014 in Applied Mathematics at the University of Sydney. I then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Victoria University Melbourne on Physics-based Simulation of Bushfires, before joining UNSW Canberra in 2014. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022, was appointed deputy director of UNSW Bushfire in 2023, and was appointed maths discipline coordinator in 2024.
My Grants
Enhancing resilience to ember attack on the urban fringe D. Sutherland, J Sharples.D. Sanderson, P. Barnes, Black Summer Recovery Grant $804000, 2022-2024.
Ember storms on the urban fringe D. Sutherland, J Sharples. Suburban Land Agency contract $70,000, 2022-2023
Gravity Current Driven Smoke Dispersion In a Stratified Ambient, A. Ooi, K. Moinuddin, D. Sutherland, R. Manasseh, ARC Discovery Project, $250,000 2021-2024
Understanding the Origin and Development of Extreme and Mega Bushfires T. Penman, J. Sharples, K. Moinuddin, J. Hilton, D. Sutherland, C. Clements, ARC Discovery Project, $590,000 2021-2024
Fire spread across fuel types K. A. M. Moinuddin, G. R. Thorpe, A. Ooi, V. Novozhilov, J. Philip, D. Sutherland, Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre, $523,000, 2017-2020
Predicting merging fire behaviour in Planned Burning T. Penman, A. Filkov, B. Cirulis. J. Sharples, D. Sutherland, Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre, $100,000, 2020-2021
My Research Activities
My research is the application of computational fluid dynamics simulation to problems motivated by bushfires. This is a broad and rich area encompassing, buoyancy driven flows, entrainment and mixing, particle transport, contaminant modelling, and combustion modelling.
Currently, my research is focussed on the Large-Eddy Simulation (LES), including combustion, of laboratory-scale extreme fire behaviour, and field-scale grassfires. I also conduct Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of buoyancy driven flow to understand the dynamics and mixing processes of gravity currents.
My Research Supervision
Supervision keywords
Areas of supervision
Duncan has projects available in computational fluid dynamics simulations of bushfires
Currently supervising
Tanvir Saurav, Nusrat Mehnaz, Will Swedosh, Mohamad Sadeghi.
My Teaching
Currently I teach two mathematics subjects: ZPEM1304 Engineering Mathematics 1B, and ZPEM3306 Waves and Fluids. If you are enrolled in one of those courses, please see the Moodle pages for more information.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1870-0932