Best thesis awardees

Jonathan Zimak

Jon recently completed his industry sponsored Ph.D. in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute under the advisement of Professors Albert Simeoni and Milosh Puchovsky. His Ph.D. work promoted the development of standardized testing used to certify inert gas discharge systems and their components though over 200 large-scale experiments. Jon examined the near-field fluid, heat transfer, mass transfer, and extinction dynamics of multiple standard and nonstandard representative real world fire threats.

As a graduate Student, Jon also led a team of 6 students in Iceland tasked with constructing and burning replica tuft houses to better understand Viking-Age combat. He also supported fire testing of intact battery electric vehicles, multiple controlled burns and wildfire field campaigns, and wildfire loss litigation. Jon Zimak is now an Associate in Exponent's Thermal Science Practice specializing in Fire Protection with multidisciplinary expertise in fire protection, mechanical, and chemical engineering.

Mohamed Mohsen Ahmed

Mohamed Mohsen Ahmed is a Senior Analysis Engineer at Tesla, specializing in safety analyses for electric vehicles and energy storage systems. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, under the supervision of Prof. Arnaud Trouvé, where he developed high-resolution CFD models of fire spread, capturing the pyrolysis, flaming, and smoldering behavior of wildland fuels.

His modeling of pool fires contributed to community benchmarking efforts within the IAFSS Measurement and Computation of Fire Phenomena (MaCFP) Working Group. Following his Ph.D., he pursued postdoctoral research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, focusing on detailed chemistry modeling of vegetation fuel consumption. His overall research has resulted in 7 publications in leading journals and a book chapter, advancing CFD modeling in general and fire modeling specifically.

Dr Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos

Dr Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos completed his PhD at Imperial College London, working with Prof. Guillermo Rein in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His research focuses on the use of wildfire spread models for probabilistic wildfire risk assessment, coupled with evacuation models to produce evacuation trigger boundaries for rural communities. As part of his PhD, he developed a methodology for predicting and planning against dire evacuations based on probabilistic trigger boundaries, investigated the importance of model choice and multi-model ensemble modelling for comprehensive community risk assessment, and developed a fast, terrain-aware, ground-level wildfire smoke model.

During his PhD he worked on the WUI-NITY project, a collaboration between Imperial College London (UK), Lund University (Sweden), Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Australia), Movement Strategies (UK), and the Fire Protection Research Foundation (USA). The project was funded by the National Fire Protection Association (USA), the National Research Council (Canada), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA). Its aim is to create the first coupled pedestrian–wildfire–evacuation model, in which wildfire and smoke spread can dynamically and automatically influence the evacuation process, enabling more accurate community evacuation planning and more robust fire resilience strategies.

Dr Kalogeropoulos now works as a Fire Scientist at CloudFire, supporting wildfire modelling, risk analysis, and technical studies for utility, litigation, and regulatory applications. He is involved in the development, verification, and validation of the ELMFIRE wildfire spread model, as well as the application of the WUI-NITY model to real communities.

Dr Pascale Vacca

Dr Pascale Vacca is a postdoctoral researcher and assistant lecturer at the Chemical Engineering Department of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), where she is a member of the Centre for Technological Risk Studies (CERTEC). After completing the International Masters in Fire Safety Engineering, she worked as a fire safety consultant at Jensen Hughes Belgium, before starting her PhD on Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fires at UPC.

Her research interests are focused on the assessment of risk and vulnerability of assets located at the WUI and the Wildland-Industrial Interface. She investigates wildfire impact and its consequences by means of a performance-based design approach and the use of CFD tools. At UPC, she is involved in the teaching of fire science and risk and safety related courses both at Bachelor’s and Master’s levels.

Dr. Rongwei Bu

Dr. Rongwei Bu is a Lecturer at the School of Transportation, Changsha University of Science and Technology. Under the supervision of Prof. Chuangang Fan, he received his PhD from Central South University in 2024.

His research focuses on the mechanisms and control of fires in transportation infrastructure, with particular emphasis on flame spread behavior of solid combustible materials. Along this line, he has published 13 journal articles as first author and has received funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). Beyond academic research, he is actively engaged in fire safety outreach.

Dr. Yohannes Werkina Shewalul

Dr. Yohannes Werkina Shewalul is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo, where he investigates the consequences of energy (gas and oil) transmission pipeline rupture fires, including jet fires, fireballs, trench fires, and explosions, on human safety and building vulnerability. He earned his PhD in Civil Engineering (Fire Safety Engineering) from Stellenbosch University and holds a Master of Science in Structural Engineering and a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering.

Dr. Shewalul’s research focuses on fire-structure interaction, post-fire structural assessment, human and building vulnerability to severe external fires, fire performance of sustainable building materials, and developing a performance-based fire design framework for critical infrastructures. He co-authored the SFPE Foundation-funded research project "Fire Testing of Resilient and Sustainable Building Materials." He was awarded the SFPE Foundation Student Research Grant in 2021 and Student Travel Grant in 2024. He currently serves on the SFPE Foundation GCI Energy & Infrastructure Working Group.