The team behind SAFIR
Jean-Marc Franssen is a former Full Professor at University of Liege, where he taught and conducted research in fire safety engineering for more than 40 years. He has made extensive contributions to the fire safety engineering profession, including through committee work for Eurocode 3 and as the Chairman of the draft team of the Horizontal Group Fire for all the Eurocodes. He is the founder of the Structures in Fire (SiF) movement. He was also the Director of the Liege Fire Laboratory and the Vice-Chair of the Belgian Institute of Fire Safety (ISIB). He started the development of the finite element software SAFIR in the 1990s.
Thomas Gernay is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he founded and leads the Multi-Hazard Resilient Structures group. He is an active contributor to professional committees in structural fire engineering including as the Co-Chair of the ASCE SEI Fire Protection committee, the Convener of the fib task group on Performance-Based Fire Design, the Vice-Chair of the Thin-Walled Structures task group for the Structural Stability Research Council, and a voting member of the ACI 216 Fire Resistance committee. His research has been recognized by numerous awards including the NSF CAREER award, the AISC Early Career Award, the NFPA Foundation Medal, and both the Magnusson Award and the Best Thesis Award from the IAFSS. Thomas has been co-developing SAFIR alongside Jean-Marc since 2011.