Kathy Notarianni is an Associate Professor and Department Head emeritus at the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), home of the first U.S. graduate program in FPE. Kathy teaches Fire Behavior and Combustion, Risk Analysis, and Complex Decision Making. Kathy advises research projects in these areas as well as in developing tools for the Fire Service.

Kathy was born in the United States in Cranston, RI, sister city to Etri, Italy where her paternal grandparents immigrated from. Kathy studied Chemical Engineering and Fire Protection Engineering at WPI earning her bachelors and master’s degrees respectively. Kathy completed her Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University where her research focused on Dealing with Uncertainty in Fire Safety Engineering Calculations, cumulating in a new SFPE Handbook Chapter providing guidance for practitioners.

Prior to coming to WPI, Kathy was a group leader and researcher at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) where she ran large research projects for the National Institute of Health, the Department of Defense, NASA, and others. Kathy is an SPFE fellow and works to spread Fire Safety Education and Research.

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.

Dr. Ruben Van Coile is Assistant Professor ‘Structural Fire Safety’ at Ghent University, Belgium.

He has degrees in civil engineering, fire safety engineering and law and has been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh and a practicing fire safety and structural fire safety engineer in London, UK.

Ruben has been contributing to the current revision of British Standards PD 7974-7 and supports the development of guidance documents on probabilistic structural fire safety engineering in ISO/TC92.

His research field focusses on the application of risk and reliability methods to structural fire engineering, including cost optimization and the definition of target safety levels for structural fire design.

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.

Dr. Nils Johansson is associate senior lecturer at the division of Fire Safety Engineering, Lund University.

He defended his PhD thesis ”Fire Dynamics in Multi-Room Compartments” in 2015.

Dr. Johansson has been teaching fire dynamics at Lund University since 2010, but he has also experience as a fire safety consultant in Sweden.