Dr Ricky Carvel is Senior Lecturer in Fire Dynamics in the School of Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has previously worked for the University of Aberystwyth, Heriot-Watt University, and International Fire Investigators and Consultants.

He is editor of the ‘Handbook of Tunnel Fire Safety’ (2nd Edition, ICE Publishing, 2011) and was associate editor of Fire Safety Journal (2009-2015). He has been working in the field of fire science and engineering for over 20 years. In 2018 he was awarded the ISTSS Achievement Award for his work in tunnel fire safety.

His research work is focussed on the interaction between fires, ventilation and water sprays in both tunnels and buildings. In 2004 he was awarded a PhD from Heriot-Watt University for his thesis “Fire Size in Tunnels”. He has also been involved into research in dust explosions, ignition, material flammability, fire-fighting and CFD modelling. He has authored more than 20 journal papers and more than 40 conference papers.

Dr Michael Spearpoint is currently the Research Leader at OFR Consultants and is based in the Manchester office. Previously he was Associate Professor of Fire Engineering at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand where he also completed his PhD. Prior to joining the University of Canterbury, he completed his Masters in Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland, and before that worked at BRE in the UK. He is a Chartered Engineer, a member of the SFPE and a member of the IFE.

Mike has published widely on topics including fire and evacuation modelling, the performance of materials and systems in fire, and various other fire engineering-related topics.

Enrico Ronchi is a senior professor at the Fire Safety Engineering (90%) and Transport and Roads (10%) divisions at Lund University.

He currently teaches evacuation design and human behaviour in case of fire and is the author of more than 120 publications in the field of fire evacuation.

His field of research focuses on the development, application and validation of exodus models for buildings and open spaces in the event of fire or other events.

Gabriele Vigne is Fire Safety Engineer and Scientist, currently Director with JVVA in Madrid, Spain. He has worked on a wide range of multidisciplinary projects providing fire engineering solutions, including general fire strategy designs and computational fluid dynamics modelling, in commercial buildings, airports, underground infrastructures ,rail and road tunnels, high rise and super high rise buildings. He has been involved as a Project Manager in numerous International multidisciplinary projects which predominantly involved Advanced Modelling.

Prior to lead JVVA, Gabriele worked for Arup Fire in different offices (Madrid, Amsterdam and London), being the European representative of Fire and Smoke Modelling and the European Representative for Mass Motion. He worked in projects worldwide and lived in Spain, Italy, UK and the Netherlands.

Gabriele held a Master degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master of Advanced Studies in Fire Engineering. Gabriele is currently undertaking a PhD on computational methods for fire and smoke modelling at the University of Jaén (Spain) with the partnership of the Imperial College of London (UK). Gabriele has a particular experience in Fire Dynamics, Smoke dynamics, Fluid Dynamics, Fire and Smoke modeling, Evacuation modeling and Tunnel Ventilation. He is the Spanish and Italian NIST international resource for FDS and Smokeview. He is authorized International Instructor for FDS (Fire Dynamics Simulator).

Gabriele is lecturer in Human Behaviour and Evacuation Modelling at the University of Comillas (ICAI) and in the Universidad Europea (UEM) in Madrid. He is reviewer for the Fire Safety Journal, the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Fire Technology, Fire and Materials and the Bulletin of the Polish Academy of Sciences: Technical Sciences.

He is part of the Board of Directors of the SFPE Spanish Chapter. Since 2012, he is member of the European SFPE (Society of Fire Protection Engineers) coordination group (ECCG). Since 2016 he is member of the SFPE Subcommittee for Standards Oversight (SCSO), Committee in charged with identifying, developing, and overseeing SFPE’s technical products and research work, reviewing new innovations, and helping to establish the research agenda for the fire safety engineering profession and he is member of the SFPE Subcommittee for Handbook Subcommittee (SCHD). He is also member of the SFPE Long-Range Planning Working Group.

Member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the SFPE Europe Magazine.

He has been appointed as Expert Witness for the London’s Grenfell Tower Fire in order to understand the causes of the fire and how it could be prevented.

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 was born in Madrid (Spain) and studied Mechanical Engineering at University of California at Berkeley (MSc 2003, PhD 2005), and before than at ICAI Universidad Pontificia Comillas (Ingeniero Industrial, 1999). Guillermo joined Imperial College in 2012 from a previous academic position at the School of Engineering of the University of Edinburgh (2006-2012).

He leads the research group Imperial Hazelab, which currently counts with 4 postdocs and 15 PhD students. The group is funded by a range of sponsors, most notably Arup, BASF, EPSRC, and the European Research Council (2015 Consolidator Grant).

His research is centred on heat transfer, combustion and fire. 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 15 years he is best known in three areas: 1) how polymers and wood ignite so we can avoid fires from starting; 2) how engineers can design better structures that resist fire; and 3) how wildfires spread and how to fight them.

Prof. Björn Karlsson is a Civil Engineer by profession, he did his PhD in Fire Safety and Risk Engineering at Lund University in 1992, where he worked as an Associate Professor until the year 2001. He then moved to his native country, Iceland, and now serves as Director General of the Iceland Construction Authority, responsible for building regulations, fire safety and electrical safety in Iceland.

He also serves as an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Iceland.

He has written books and many scientific papers in the field of fire safety and risk engineering, amongst them is the textbook “Enclosure Fire Dynamics”.