I was a general engineering student at University of Maryland and was fortunate to meet Dr. Milke to hear a presentation and then follow up with Prof.
Bryan which further convinced me to study fire protection engineering.
Shortly into my studies I started as a fire protection engineering intern for a national fire protection consulting firm.
After graduation, I continued as an engineer for the same company in a newly created office in Houston.
I moved 8 times along my 40 year career, taking on new responsibilities and meeting new people along the way.
I have always considered this a privilege in the fire protection community.
After moving to Guam to open a Pacific Office and oversee Asia, I returned to the East Coast and soon started the fire protection group at a multi-discipline company where I have been for the last 10 years.
During each assignment, I continued my involvement with SFPE.
Both at a local and National level, as connections within the industry and continuing education were always an important part of my career.
When I joined the SFPE BOD 8 years ago, I had a good perspective to offer, having been in so many locations and worked with hundreds of engineers encompassing many facets of engineering.
SFPE’s vision is to be the global leaders in engineering a fire safe world.
Our mission is to define, develop, and advance the use of engineering best practices; expand the scientific & technical knowledge base; and educate the global fire safety community, to reduce fire risk.
The BOD created this strategic plan and works with the SFPE staff to create strategies and tactics to fulfil the vision and mission.
The strategic plan is updated by the BOD every three years, and the objectives are reviewed yearly under each Presidents leadership.
Of high importance is creating technical material, both in documents and webinars, symposia, and conferences.
We aim to provide technical material to develop the professional qualifications of the members and distribute that knowledge throughout the community and building industry.
Of course, this is best accomplished by members and staff through marketing, communications, chapter engagement, membership, and corporate relations.
At SFPE we continually strive to broaden our reach, especially to the international community.
We continue to add new chapters and grow membership each year.
I have had the pleasure in working with the European BOD in 2024 and helping them develop their strategic plan.
There is a healthy thirst for knowledge in Europe, which has continued to grow, as signified by our last conference in Copenhagen, where registration had to be capped at 300 persons, though many more would have liked to attend.
We continue to add new chapters – especially globally and are strategically reaching out to the international chapters to encourage their engagement with the society.
One of our main initiatives evolves around producing educational material, both written and as provided in seminars, webinars and conferences.
We are constantly updating material and creating new content to deliver to the SFPE members.
One of our most popular courses is the PE exam review course.
Those that engage in the course have proved to have a much higher rate of success in passing the FPE registration exam the first time.
Obviously, we are experiencing a very fast and evolving world when it comes to new technology and how it impacts the fire protection industry.
Some examples include the proliferation of battery powered devices, battery storage and mass timber construction.
Additionally chip manufacturing and data centers are growing at a fast pace as well, which provide many fire protection challenges.
We also cannot ignore the changing environment and increasing incidences of wildland fires and the interface with society, including the disparity in areas and regions that are socially and economically disadvantaged.
Becoming a member of the global society allows the most opportunities to interact with fire protection professional around the world.
We have at least two conferences each year, our annual conference in North America and a European conference.
Every other year we also have a performance-based engineering conference, which rotates to different global locations.
We also provide seminars, webinars and symposia.
Those are great avenues for fire protection professionals to collaborate. In addition, local chapters have regular monthly meetings.
Last, but not least the website has a live forum for any members to post questions and ideas for collaboration.
Most of SFPE’s research initiatives are led by the SFPE Foundation, a charitable non-profit organization affiliated with SFPE whose mission is to advance the scientific understanding of fire in the social, natural, and built environments globally.
The SFPE Foundation is committed to funding research and educational initiatives that expand our knowledge base, bring together partners within and outside of our industry, and result in actionable findings and tools that can assist practicing fire protection engineers and other stakeholders, in particular when it comes to emerging issues.
For instance, a recently completed project focuses on the integration of fire protection systems in building information modelling (BIM), and includes an open-access report and user guide for engineers working with BIM and fire protection systems.
Their current projects focus on delivering on research needs identified within the SFPE Foundation’s Grand Challenges Initiative, a global collaboration between 35+ industry and academic leaders.
Projects underway include “Environmental and Health Impacts of Thermal Runaway Events in Outdoor Lithium-Ion Battery Energy Storage System Installations,” “Fire Testing of Resilient and Sustainable Building Materials,” and “The Interface between Digital Buildings and Fire Service Operations.”
The Foundation also leads our wildland-urban interface (WUI) work at SFPE, hosting our WUI Working Group Initiative, as well as the WUI Virtual Handbook, which provides open access information about WUI property fire risk assessment and mitigation strategies.
They’re currently administering a FEMA FP&S grant to expand the handbook, and they’re also working with multiple organizations to provide training on the handbook and related topics to a global audience.
Over the last 25 years, SFPE has published engineering guides and standards that provide engineering solutions to fire safety design issues.
The topics in these documents are usually related to areas of fire protection engineering where current content does not exist, such as human behavior in fire, fire risk assessment, selection of computer models, tall building fire safety, performance-based design, and structural fire engineering.
This content provides fire protection engineers with solutions that comply strictly with prescriptive requirements or apply to an alternative to the prescriptive requirements.
At the same time, SFPE works hard to ensure our engineering guides and standards are referenced in the applicable global codes and standards.
This is an integral part of the process that ensures our technical content is relevant and used by fire protection engineers worldwide.
As such, since the primary goal in producing our engineering guides and standards is to reduce fire risk, the process for developing our technical documents follows strict industry standards.
Aside from emerging technologies, one of the challenges facing the community worldwide is providing adequate training and to assure those practicing in the fire protection arena are technology capable and recognized as qualified.
Some countries and have specific registrations for fire protection engineers, but many have no definitive qualifications or certifications.
This can lead to non-fire protection professionals rendering opinions and judgements which may not be in the best interest of public safety.
We are challenged to be recognized as a discipline and to educate the broader building community to utilize qualified professionals.
These were certainly pertinent questions, and the answer to the future of SFPE and broader field of fire protection engineering are somewhat contained in each response.
In short, there is still a deficiency in the number of fire protection engineers worldwide.
We have come a long way in the last 50 years.
SFPE was incorporated as an organization in 1971, although there was a group of fire protection professionals that starting meeting in 1950.
SFPE has always been an international organization, but most participation in the early years was from North America.
SFPE Europe was incorporated in 2020 and continues to grow with new chapters every year.
We continue to add new chapters globally and especially student chapters, which brings hope that the profession is being recognized as a distinct engineering discipline.
This, along with membership growth and continuing to provide quality training, will allow SFPE to be recognized as the global leaders in engineering a fire safe world – which is our vision.
