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Advancing the science of fire protection

October 28, 2024

Dr. Leslie Marshall, Director of the SFPE Foundation, discusses collaborative efforts to advance fire protection research and supporting future engineers

The SFPE Foundation is dedicated to advancing knowledge and practices in fire protection engineering In March 2021, I became the SFPE Foundation’s first full-time staff member.

Before that, the foundation relied on a dedicated Board of Governors and part-time support from the SFPE staff.

Before joining SFPE, I was the Associate Director of the Center for Sustainable Business at the University of Pittsburgh.

There, I developed plans that promoted energy transition and economic development, which involved working with stakeholders from different sectors.

That experience, particularly building relationships between groups that typically don’t collaborate, proved essential in preparing me for my role at the SFPE Foundation.

I believed—and still do—that institutions like the SFPE Foundation can and should play a key role as a convener of many different types of organizations and researchers and students, all working together to address shared problems of mutual interest.

The role of coordinator, convener, and communicator is one that I think we too often underestimate—it’s a big lift to bring so many different parties together, many of whom approach the same problem with different motivations, technical backgrounds, language, prior histories, etc.

If we can provide a platform to connect researchers and practitioners and teachers and the public, then I think we can do a lot—in our own relatively small sphere of influence—to start to move the needle on some very complex issues.

We, as the Foundation, can contribute by trying to match up public demand and industry needs with emerging research, new guidance, and education, as well as identify and help provide the resources needed to develop new research and guidance, particularly when it comes to emerging topics.

Objectives and key programs

Our mission is to advance the scientific understanding of fire in the social, natural, and built environments toward our vision of engineering a more resilient, sustainable, fire-safe world for all.

As an affiliate of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE), we do this by partnering with a wide range of global stakeholders to create, develop, promote, facilitate, disseminate, and support  innovative research, education, and applied engineering methods that advance the science and  practice of fire engineering where it’s needed most.

Over the last three-and-half years, we’ve made great strides in professionalizing the organization—developing new policies and procedures, improving organizational efficiencies, hiring new staff to support our programs—while also increasing the amount of resources we invest in supporting fire engineering students, researchers, and practitioners exponentially.

Since 2017, we’ve awarded more than $1 million USD in research funding, awards, scholarships, and fellowships across all programs.

Progress through collaboration

There are many ways we collaborate with other organizations and institutions to advance fire safety research.

One example is our flagship Grand Challenges Initiative (GCI), a global collaboration between 35+ industry and academic leaders.

Launched in 2022, the GCI was created to establish a 10-year plan for strategic cooperation in research, education, and outreach to enable fire engineers to contribute to solving pressing global challenges in the areas of (1) Energy & Infrastructure, (2) Resilience & Sustainability, (3) Climate Change, and (4) Digitalization, Artificial Intelligence, & Cybersecurity.

Acting as the convener and providing a platform for collaboration, the SFPE Foundation recruited four GCI Student Research Fellows from around the world to support a working group in each of the four target topic areas.

Together with their working group chairs and working group members, they produced four white papers that were published in late 2023.

Each paper outlines key areas where new research, education, and outreach is needed now and in the immediate future.

With the support of our GCI Partners, the SFPE Foundation is now working to advance progress on those key priorities.

Our GCI Partner organizations also continue to stay involved by serving on research project Advisory Panels as subject-matter experts, by working with us to plan and host in-person conferences on emerging issues (stay tuned for an announcement related to AI and Fire Engineering in the coming weeks), and by helping to fund projects on emerging topics, such as Energy Storage Systems and related hazards.

Later this year, we’ll be launching a website that tracks progress on the Grand Challenges Initiative topic area priorities and highlights the work being done across all GCI Partner organizations.

The SFPE Foundation also hosts the WUI Working Group Initiative, a collaboration of more than 100 fire engineering and related experts worldwide to scope out and define the ways fire engineers can contribute to addressing the problem of WUI fires and related hazards.

We’ve also been awarded four US DHS FEMA Fire Prevention & Safety grants to bring fire engineering knowledge and resources to bear on training and information gaps that exist within the US Fire Service when it comes to tackling the challenge of WUI fire hazards.

Through those grants, we’ve worked with consulting teams and fire departments across the US (and even some outside of the US) to develop and host the open access WUI Virtual Handbook, which provides information about WUI property fire risk assessment and mitigation strategies.

One of our active grants is focused on expanding the handbook, and we just received another to expand our efforts to provide training on more advanced topics for fire service personnel, such as WUI fire dynamics, WUI fire modeling, and human behavior related to WUI fires.

In a previous grant, we worked with a fantastic team of consultants to develop a modular two-day training for fire service personnel, and we’re now working with US government agencies to see if we can roll that training out at scale across the US over the next few years.

Supporting the future of engineering

The Foundation has a number of different programs designed to support and develop the next generation of fire protection engineers, whether that’s with funding, access to mentorship, opportunities for research project dissemination, or participation in networking-related events.

Our newest program falls under the umbrella of our Grand Challenges Initiative (GCI): the GCI Applied Research Fellowship program.

Our Student Research Grant program is another cornerstone of our support for the next generation of fire engineers.

Beyond the funding and mentorship opportunities we provide, we know that we can also make a difference for those early in their careers by supporting their attendance at industry networking events and conferences, and by giving them a platform to share their work with the broader fire engineering community.

That’s why we recently launched the Student Travel Grant program to provide funding to students to attend and present at SFPE- and SFPE Foundation-affiliated conferences and events.

Public awareness and education

Education—including public education—is at the heart of the Foundation’s mission.

In fact, our official legal name is actually the “SFPE Educational and Scientific Foundation, Inc.” (Perhaps you can understand why we use “SFPE Foundation” for short!) Since our founding in 1979, the Foundation’s Governors (and now, the Foundation’s staff as well) have never lost sight of the importance of making sure the projects we fund and the awards we make have a real, tangible impact on the science and practice of fire engineering as a professional discipline.

We’re committed to making sure that our support of the projects we fund does not end with writing a check—when we support a project, we try to do everything we can to show up throughout its development, as well as in the dissemination phase when the work is done and it’s time to bring as much awareness to the findings and their implications as possible.

Over the past few years, I’ve put a large emphasis on this part of our work.

Championing innovation

I’d like to see us continue our trajectory and grow our reputation as a valuable partner and resource for those who share our interest in making the world a more sustainable, resilient, and fire-safe place for all.

In particular, I think our strength lies in being able to think creatively and expansively about the fire safety challenge we’re facing now and expect to face in the future, and to really fill that niche when it comes to championing the innovative research and education that is needed to prepare fire engineering and the communities we serve.

One of our strategic goal priorities is “innovation for impact” – I see us continuing to push the frontiers of our field, supporting new research to fill in the gaps that are emerging even faster than the new technologies and applications that introduce them, and developing guidance and training that is informed by that research to help practitioners and their communities adapt to a constantly changing global environment.

Through our affiliation with SFPE, we have the potential to turn the knowledge gained through innovative research into the future standard of practice; we have access to disseminate knowledge through a global network of more than 5000+ SFPE members across 128+ SFPE Chapters; we have the ability to support growing fire engineering programs in universities around the world; we can help translate insights from fire engineering knowledge and practice to close information gaps in other fields.

The more work we do—and the more we talk about the work we’re doing in as many different types of spaces as possible—the more attention we will bring to the discipline of fire engineering and the value of consulting with fire engineers on a wide range of life safety considerations.

Fire engineering is inherently interdisciplinary—it often requires looking at complex problems and developing nuanced creative solutions that draw on many fields of expertise, and doing so when we don’t have all the data or information we might ideally like to have about a particular scenario or set of conditions, and when we don’t necessarily know how the environment is going to look 5, 10, or 20 years down the line.

In a way, that mirrors what we’re trying to do at the Foundation—we’re looking at the challenges as they are, doing our best to understand them, trying to estimate how they are likely to change in the future, and we’re bringing together as many of the most creative, dedicated people and organizations as we can to try and do something about them to make the world a safer place for all.

This article was originally published in the October 2024 issue of Fire & Safety Journal Americas. To read your FREE digital copy, click here.

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