Henry Curran is the director of the Combustion Chemistry Centre and the Priority Research Area leader in Energy at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG). In addition, he is a member of the editorial boards of Progress in Energy and Combustion Science and Proceedings of the Combustion Institute. In 1994 Professor Curran earned a Ph.D. from NUIG, where he performed experimental and numerical studies of combustion kinetics. In 2011 he earned a D.Sc. from the National University of Ireland. Professor Curran is a founding member of the Irish Section of the Combustion Institute; a fellow of the Institute of Chemistry of Ireland and the Royal Society of Chemistry; and a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Institution of Engineers Ireland, the American Society of Automotive Engineers, and the Society of Automotive Engineers.

Professor Curran has more than twenty years of experience in developing comprehensive detailed kinetic models and thermochemical estimates and in calculating reaction rates to describe large carbon number hydrocarbons relevant to predicting real fuel behavior in energy conversion systems. His collaborations with industry, academic institutions, and national laboratories have contributed significantly to the construction and validation of detailed kinetic models used by the combustion community for simulating large alkanes, cycloalkanes, and their reaction intermediates, as well as for a wide range of oxygenated hydrocarbons.

Kelly Senecal is a co-founder and owner of Convergent Science, Inc. and Convergent Science GmbH. One of the original developers of the CONVERGE computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software package, Dr. Senecal is a consultant to the automotive industry and works closely with engineers on problems related to combustion modeling and other fluid flow phenomena. He is experienced at managing large consulting and software development projects for the private sector. Dr. Senecal is a Fellow of the Society of Automotive Engineers, a member of the Executive Committee of the ICE Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and a member of the board of advisors for the Central States Section of the Combustion Institute.

Dr. Senecal received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 research papers in the area of CFD of reactive flows, and he is the author of the widely used LISA (Linearized Instability Sheet Atomization) spray breakup model. Dr. Senecal has received international recognition, including articles in The New York Times and England’s The Sunday Times, for his pioneering work on the use of CFD in the engine design process. More recently, Dr. Senecal co-founded the Computational Chemistry Consortium (C3), which is dedicated to providing to the entire combustion community the most accurate, yet practical, chemical mechanisms for hydrocarbon fuels.