Improving Fire Safety Through Simulation and Modelling: Tools, Techniques and Real-World Applications

Gareth Steele: Principal Fire Engineer, London Fire Brigade

Gareth is a Principal Fire Engineer who jointly leads a team of seventeen fire engineers and fire engineering technicians at London Fire Brigade. Gareth is passionate about fire engineering and about improving the safety of occupants and firefighters in the built environment. He sits on several British Standards committees for suppression, fire engineering and smoke control and has contributed to several industry guidance documents for smoke control, fire modelling and others. Gareth holds a BEng and MSc in fire safety engineering.

Benjamin Ralph: Partner, Head of Fire Safety, Foster + Partners

Benjamin is a Chartered Engineer and Partner at Foster + Partners, where he is the Head of Fire Safety. His primary driver is early and integrated conscientious fire safety design - unlocked through iterative creation and probabilistic fire engineering. Benjamin gets his biggest kick from developing and using cutting-edge science and engineering to proactively enable the aspirations of a multidisciplinary team and meet society's expectations for a safer future.

Jacob Plummer: Nuclear Safety Inspector, Office for Nuclear Regulation

Norman Rhodes: Consultant Engineer, _

Dr. Rhodes is the former technical director of Parsons Brinckerhoff (now WSP) Mechanical/Electrical Technical Excellence Center. He was previously responsible for Hatch Mott MacDonald’s Fire Life Safety and Security practice for North America and Canada. He is the former secretary of the PIARC Working Group on Fire and Smoke Control in Tunnels, and has coauthored a number of its publications on fire and smoke control in road tunnels. He also served on the steering committee of the European Community research activity on Fires In Tunnels (F.I.T) and was responsible for the development of best practice guidelines for emergency response management. He is a former chair of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ Thermofluids Group.

Xu Dai: Former Post-doctoral Research Associate, The University of Edinburgh

Dr Xu Dai was a senior structural fire engineer at Buro Happold (London office) from 2021-2022. Prior to this position, he worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), National Fire Research Laboratory (NFRL) as a foreign guest researcher from 2019-2021. Dr Dai also worked at the University of Edinburgh as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate between 2017-2019 on a European collaborative research project on characterising the fire spread behaviour within large open-plan spaces via fire modelling and large-scale experiments. Dr Dai obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2018, and MSc degree in Structural Engineering (with Distinction) at the University of Sheffield in 2012.

Megan McEvely: Engineer, MMI Thornton Tomasetti

Ms. Megan McEveley joined Thornton Tomasetti in 2020 after graduating from the University of Cambridge with a degree of Master of Engineering with a First-Class Hons. Since joining Thornton Tomasetti Megan has worked on a variety of projects spanning Technical Safety and Structural Engineering undertaking projects such as vessel failure assessment under fire load, quantitative risk assessment, Monte Carlo simulations for a structural retaining wall and fire and gas detector mapping studies. Megan is an Associate Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Steve Howell: Technical Director, Abercus

Steve is the Technical Director at Abercus, a consultancy specialising in advanced engineering simulation – computational fluid dynamics (CFD), finite element analysis (FEA), bespoke software and teaching/training – and its application across a range of industrial sectors including energy, defense and the built environment. He is a chartered engineer with 25 years of experience in the field of computational fluid dynamics, both with commercially available codes for industrial applications and the design and development of bespoke CFD codes.

Michael Spearpoint: Research Leader, OFR

Michael is currently the Research Leader at OFR Consultants based in its Manchester office. Over the past 35 years his research has covered a wide range of fire science and engineering topics including the fire properties of materials, fire and evacuation modelling, and assessing the performance of active fire protection systems. He has contributed to the development of British and international standards. He holds a PhD in fire engineering and is a Chartered Engineer through the IFE.

Guillermo Rein: Professor of Fire Science, Imperial College London