Improving Fire Safety Through Simulation and Modelling 2024

Benjamin Ralph: Director, Hollis Group

Conor Logan: Technical Director, Colt International Ltd

Since joining Colt in 1987, Conor has gained extensive knowledge and experience in the design installation and application of: 

Smoke Control Systems
Pressurization Systems
Fire Engineering Strategies
Computational Fluid Dynamics
Climate control Systems
Louvre and Solar Shading systems
Previously, Conor worked for Colt in Singapore and was instrumental in the start-up of Colt Ventilation East Asia Pte Ltd, he has also worked as a Fire Engineering Consultant with International Fire Technology (a Colt Group Fire Engineering Consultancy).

Conor has thorough and extensive experience in the design, application and performance of smoke control systems and was Chairman of the Smoke Control Association for 8 years up until 2017. He currently sits on BSI Committees for Fire Safety, Fire Engineering and Smoke Control along with several European Standards Committees, helping to formulate BS 9991, BS 9999, The new pressurization standards EN 12101-6 & 13, PD 7974-2 and various Smoke Control Association Guidance Documents.

As Technical Director, he has responsibility for design standards and compliance at Colt UK&I and represents Colt at The Smoke Control Association, The Association of Specialist Fire Protection (ASFP), and sat on their technical committee drafting the ‘Black Book’ on fire curtains.  He was responsible for Colt being the first smoke control company to be certified by a third party (IFCC) as competent for the installation of smoke control systems, as well as smoke and fire curtains.

Guillermo Rein: Professor of Fire Science, Imperial College London

Guillermo is Professor of Fire Science at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Imperial College London, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Fire Technology. He is Fellow of the Combustion Institute.

His research is centred on heat transfer, combustion and fire, by the combination of lab experiments and computer models. The purpose of his work is to reduce the worldwide burden of accidental fires and protect people, their property, and the environment. His research portfolio is ample, but over the last 20 years he is best known in three areas: 1) how synthetic polymers and wood ignite so we can prevent fires from starting; 2) how modern materials respond to fire so engineers can design better structures; and 3) how wildfires spread so rural communities can be protected.

He created and leads the research group Imperial Hazelab where he has supervised 16 postdocs and graduated 24 PhD students, 11 of whom have become academics. The group is funded by a wide range of international sponsors, most notably Arup, EPSRC, NIST, H2020 and the European Research Council. Hazelab has been prolific at publishing their work in more than 200 journal papers (Google h-index 62) collecting over 11k citations. 

Guillermo's work has been recognised internationally with a number of scientific awards like the 2020 Research Excellence Award from the Combustion Institute, the 2018 SFPE Guise Medal from the Society of Fire Engineers, or the 2016 Early Career Award for Excellence from the International Association of Wildland Fires.

He is also a motivated teacher, enthusiastic about the education of the next generation of engineers, and passionate about outreach in engineering.

He has been featured in international media (e.g. The Economist, Financial Times, BBC Radio, New York Times). He appeared in the TV documentaries 'Titanic: the New Evidence' and 'The Great Fire of London: In Real Time'.

Stephen Welch: Senior Lecturer, Edinburgh Fire Research Centre, University of Edinburgh

Dr Stephen Welch has a PhD in combustion and 30 years of experience in fire research and teaching. He worked for nearly a decade at BRE's Fire Research Station, with involvement in development and validation of CFD fire models, as well as a range of full-scale fire test programmes, including the BRE Large Compartment and LBTF atrium fire tests at Cardington. Since joining the University of Edinburgh in 2004 he has undertaken research into generalised methods for fire-structure coupling, soot and toxic species prediction, sensor-steered fire models, fire safety of modern energy-efficient buildings and fire performance of composite pressure vessels; his main current interests are numerical simulators for travelling fires, with resource provision on modern engineering computational clusters (ECDF Eddie, Cirrus and ARCHER2, all c/o EPCC/EPSRC). He innovates to promote student learning of fire safety engineering.

Dean Simrick: Principal Engineer – Product Safety and Environmental, BAE Systems

Oliver Heynes: Director, Insight Numerics

Francesco Restuccia: Senior Lecturer, King’s College London

Dr Francesco Restuccia is a Lecturer at King’s College London Department of Engineering, where he leads the Heat and Fire Lab. He has a growing profile in lithium-ion battery heat transfer research, focusing on safety aspects such as ignition prevention and improving overall thermal performance.  
He is a member of the SAFEBATT project funded by the Faraday Institution, leading a project at KCL focusing on Multiphysics Modelling of LIB Thermal Runaway and Propagation. His research has been recognized by several awards, most recently the best paper award in energy storage at the 16th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics.  He is a motivated educator, teaching a variety of General Engineering courses, as well as regularly involved in science outreach to promote multidisciplinary approaches to engineering problems.

Wojciech Wegrzynski: Associate Professor; Deputy Head of Fire Research Department, Building Research Institute;, Director of SFPE Europe

Dr Wojciech Wegrzynski is a Professor at the Polish Building Research Institute ITB in Warsaw, where he also holds the position of the Deputy Head of Fire Research Department. Director-at-large at SFPE Europe. Author of more than 40 peer-reviewed papers published in all primary FSE journals. For three years working towards better communication between the fire science and engineering through his podcast Fire Science Show. His main area of interest is the fundamentals of fire dynamics in compartments and tunnels, and also the use of computational fluid dynamics in fire, wind and fire interaction, standardized fire testing and innovations in smoke control. His research is focused on finding solutions to make the smoke exhaust systems cheaper and more efficient. Member of the MAC and the Sub-committee for Research of the IAFSS. 2018 NFPA Harry C. Bigglestone Award Recipient; 2019 Jack Watts Award Recipient; 2020 SFPE 5 Under 35 Award Recipient. Member of Editorial Board of ‘Fire Technology.

Danny Hopkin: Director, OFR Consultants

Danny is a fire engineering consultant and researcher. He joined OFR in 2017, where I’m now a Director, based near Oxford, and is a co-editor of the SFPE International Handbook of Structural Fire Engineering, published by Springer Nature, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield.

Georgina Williams: Principle Fire Engineer – Fire Safety Division, Hydrock

Georgina is a Principal Fire Engineer with a PhD and MSc in Fluid Dynamics. She is a focused project lead, bringing a pragmatic problem-solving approach to remediation, retrofit and redevelopment projects and new developments across a range of sectors.

Georgina has experience in a range of performance-based design methodologies including fire/smoke modelling, evacuation modelling, radiant heat calculations, smoke control calculations, time equivalence analysis, probabilitic modelling and structural fire engineering analyses. She regularly adds value to tricky projects, with several challenging constraints, where the right solutions have to see beyond prescriptive guidance.

Georgina is an active committee member for “Women Talking Fire” which is an independent networking group that’s providing networking and technical development opportunities and conferences to women and allies across the fire safety industry.