It is our great honour to invite you to the Eighth International Seminar on Fire and Explosion Hazards (8th ISFEH) which will be held in Hefei, China from 25 to 28 April 2016. This seminar is hosted by the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). The ISFEH has been organized since 1995, and the previous seminars were successfully held respectively in Moscow (1995, 1997), Lake Windermere (2000), Londonderry (2003), Edinburgh (2007), Leeds (2010), and Providence (2013).

The 8th ISFEH will include invited lectures from the world’s top fire and explosion hazards researchers and presentations of peer-reviewed papers. All accepted and presented papers will be included in the seminar proceedings, which will be published by the Press of USTC. Poster sessions will provide an excellent opportunity to interact individually with researchers about their most recent work. Students are encouraged to participate and awards will be made. In addition to the technical sessions, colorful social activities are planned to provide opportunities for participants to meet with other colleagues and friends from around the world. The four-day seminar is a good platform for all of us who are interested in fire and explosion hazards science and technology to share our new ideas and recent research findings. It is our goal to make this seminar both enjoyable and informative for everyone.

USTC was established in 1958 to meet the needs of the nation, and its birth was regarded as a major event in the Chinese history of education and science. Since then, USTC has been firmly devoted to basic research and original innovation in order to cultivate talent and capacity for dealing with key issues in China’s development of science and technology. Despite twists and turns over the years, it has achieved great successes and created a unique approach to higher education that is the most suitable for the situations in China. Its impressive accomplishments have been praised by many people in the academic world.

The State Key Laboratory of Fire Science (SKLFS) has a long tradition of conducting outstanding fire research and providing comprehensive education in fire safety. SKLFS carries out frontier basic and interdisciplinary researches that combine state-of-the-art knowledge and approaches of chemistry, physics, mechanics, thermo-physics (heat transfer, combustion, etc.), information science, computer science, electronics, automation and material science to investigate fire dynamics and basic principles of fire safety technologies.

The venue of the Seminar will be at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, which is located in the downtown area of Hefei, the capital city of the state of Anhui, China. Hefei is an ancient city over 2000 years old with historic and cultural landscapes located at the shore of Chaohu Lake, one of the five largest freshwater lakes in China. It was awarded “Best Case City in Urban Competitiveness” in 2010 and “Top 10 Happiest Cities in China” in 2011. It is a lovely and attractive place to visit. There are also many famous landmarks in Anhui Province, including Yellow Mountain, the most beautiful mountain in China, and Jiuhua Mountain, one of the four sacred mountains of Chinese Buddhism. Moreover, the local opera (Huangmei opera) and culinary enjoyments shouldn’t be missed.