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About the Topic

The response of structures to accidental fire events is a crucial component of the safety and resilience of the built environment. While structural engineers explicitly consider gravity, wind, and earthquake- induced forces in their design, they often rely on prescriptive rules for mitigating fire hazard. However, developing an understanding of the anticipated behavior of structures in fire provides benefits as it allows engineers to assess risk, safely innovate, and quantify performance of candidate designs to meet resilience and sustainability goals. Engineers must have access to the appropriate models and analyses tools to enable these assessments. This presentation will discuss available methods for characterizing fire exposures, material response, and structural behavior in the fire situation, and discuss their application as part of a performance-based structural fire design approach. The presentation will also highlight through practical examples how assessing explicitly the performance of structures in fire can deliver benefits in terms of cost, safety, architectural heritage, sustainability, and resilience.

About the Speaker

Thomas Gernay is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where he founded and leads the Multi-Hazard Resilient Structures group. His areas of research are in structural fire engineering, computational mechanics, risk and resilience, and performance-based design. He has published more than 75 peer-reviewed journal articles and is the co- author of SAFIR®, the finite element software to model the behavior of structures subjected to fire. His contributions have notably been recognized by an NSF CAREER award, the AISC Terry Peshia Early Career Faculty Award, the NFPA Foundation Medal, and the IAFSS Magnusson Early Career Award. He serves as an Associate Editor for both the ASCE Journal of Structural Engineering and for Springer’s Fire Technology, and is Co-Chair of the ASCE SEI Fire Protection Committee. He holds a Ph.D. in structural engineering from University of Liege and was a Fulbright postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University.