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Research

What are people saying on LinkedIn? Join the Research LinkedIn subgroup and find out.

Results of the Nominating Committee's actions
The following individuals have been nominated, as indicated, by the Section Nominating Committee. 

• Chair - Jill Wellens, Hughes Associates
• Vice-Chair - Stephen Kerber, Underwriters Laboratories
• Secretary - Cameron McCartney, National Research Council of Canada
• Executive Committee At Large (2013-2015)
  Prof. Brian Meacham, Worcester Polytechic Institute
  Prof. Beth Weckman, University of Waterloo (Canada)
• Nominating Committee (2013-2014)
  Brian McDonald, QAI Laboratories
  Chris Marrion, Marrion Fire & Risk Consulting

The following Executive Committee members continue their terms: Jay Tarley and Victoria Valentine, At-Large members. Dan O’Connor will now serve as Past Chair. 

Additional candidates may be nominated by petition of 10 members of the section.  Any petitions must be received by Rita Fahy at NFPA no later than Friday, March 1, 2013. Election ballots will be mailed Friday, March 1, and will be due back by Monday, April 15. 

NOTE: The annual business meeting of the Research Section will take place during the week of June 10th, at the NFPA Conference & Expo, McCormick Place Convention Center, Chicago (time and place to be determined). Please plan to attend and discuss candidate presentations to be sponsored by the Section at future meetings and other efforts intended to build the Section.

Some Web-based resources for the fire research community
A while back, NFPA took a survey of the section members, asking why they were interested in belonging to a section. Most responded that they belonged because they wanted to keep up to date with new technology or they wanted to network so that they would have sources of information when they needed them. As a result of those findings, the Research Section has begun to provide research-oriented links on our Web page, adding new links as section members identify them.

The links below are to organizations, typically government sources, not-for-profit labs, and educational institutes, that conduct fire research and have posted research results or updates on their Web sites. If you know of a useful link you would like to share, send the address with a brief description to Rita Fahy. 

The Fire Protection Research Foundation makes available the final reports from their projects, which have recently covered such topics as profiles on residential power consumption, analysis of the performance of residential sprinkler systems with sloped/beamed ceilings, measuring the impact of fire extinguisher agents on cultural resource materials, risk factors for firefighter cardiovascular disease, quantitative evaluation of fire and EMS mobilization times, firefighter safety and emergency response for electric drive and hybrid electric vehicles, firefighter safety and emergency response for solar power systems, antifreeze solutions in home fire sprinkler systems, tomorrow’s codes and standards volunteer, glovebox fire protection, incentives for the use of residential fire sprinkler systems in U.S. communities, and an evaluation of health care operating rooms as wet/dry locations. The proceedings from SUPDET 2011 -- Suppression, Detection and Signaling Research and Applications - a Technical Working Conference are also available on the website. 

NFPA’s One-Stop Data Shop offers a wide range of statistical and data services to help our customers find the best fire experience information available, quickly and conveniently. Many of the statistical reports are free to NFPA members.

The Fire Research Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has many resources available.

In cooperation with the U.S. General Services Administration and other government and private organizations, NIST is working to establish a technical foundation for egress provisions that eliminates egress design as a contributor to fire deaths and minimizes the total social cost of the provisions. This includes collection of data from building evacuations, human behavior research, and egress model evaluation.

Since 2001, NIST and USFA have teamed up to produce an on-line newsletter at FIRE.GOV that contains easy to read articles describing ongoing research activities around the world.  The newsletter contains contact information and links to the specific researchers and organizations involved in the research.

Underwriters Laboratories makes their research results available on their website.  They have conducted numerous studies geared towards improving fire safety and in particular firefighter safety.  Topics include:  Firefighter Exposure to Smoke Particulates, Impact of Ventilation on Fire Behavior in Legacy and Contemporary Residential Construction, and Structural Stability of Engineered Lumber in Fire Conditions. Many of the topics include free on-line training components.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a user-friendly series of spreadsheet applications with useful calculation routines, Fire Dynamics Tools (FDT^s) Quantitative Fire Hazard Analysis Methods for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Fire Protection Inspection Program (NUREG 1805, Final publications Report) (http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/ nuregs/ staff/sr1805/final-report/index.html).

Lund University’s Department of Fire Safety Engineering and Systems Safety has a publications Web page that contains research reports and dissertations, available in both Swedish and English, that can be downloaded as PDF files.

The latest research news from the Institute for Research in Construction (IRC) of the National Research Council of Canada can be found at this link, from which you can also link to the IRC publications database. The search engine can be used to find fire research papers that are downloadable in PDF format. (http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/index_e.html)

The University of Maryland makes available theses and dissertations, on-line.  The full text versions of theses and dissertations from December 2003 to the present are available at DRUM: Digital Repository at the University of Maryland.

Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s Web page offers an electronic collection of and dissertations by members of its Fire Protection Engineering Department from 1986 to the present.

University of Canterbury's fire engineering program has links to its research programs and publications on its web page.  (http://www.civil.canterbury.ac.nz/fire/firehome.shtml)

CFI trainer.net is a website sponsored by the International Association of Arson Investigators that contains free educational courses to aid in the education of fire investigators. Launched in 2005, the programs currently running include Introduction to Fire Dynamics and Modeling, Fire Dynamics Calculations, analyses of the Station Nightclub fire and Charleston Sofa Super Store fire, and many more. The courses are designed to meet the topical areas of NFPA 1033, Standard for Professional Qualifications for Fire Investigator and are consistent with NFPA 921, Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations.

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Section objectives

Authorized in 1987 and organized in 1988, the Research Section of NFPA brings together persons involved in or interested in research related to fire safety, fire science, fire codes and standards, fire protection, and related areas. Its principal activity is the facilitation of communication between researcher and research user including what users need, what researchers have available, and what general strategies will lead to increased use of valid research.

This section was established to serve the interests of its membership in research on fire-related issues by the following:

1. Facilitating communication between those who conduct fire research and those who use the results of such research.
2. Facilitating communication by fire safety and fire protection practitioners of their needs that may be addressed by research.
3. Facilitating communication by researchers of the applicability of their research to the mission of NFPA and other fire research user needs.
4. Facilitating technology transfer to the codes and standards consensus process and other fire safety and fire protection decision-making processes.
5. Identifying methods by which fire research can be more systematically applied to fire safety and fire protection decisions, including the codes and standards process.
6. Facilitating communication among researchers on better ways to serve user needs and to plan and support research to serve those needs.

In this Section:

Executive committee join research

constitution & bylaws