Scientific Committee FIVE

Petra Andersson, Chair, RISE Research Institutes of Sweden

Petra Andersson has worked with fire research for more than 20 years. She obtained her PhD in Fire Safety engineering at Lund University in 1997 and has since then worked with Fire Research at RISE (former SP) with various research topics such as fire detection, functional performance during fires, extinguishment and environmental effects. Since 2020 she works part time as associate professor at Lund University in Fire safety engineering. Her research includes both simulations and experiments. Lately her research has been more focused on Electric and Hybrid vehicles.

Birgitte Messerschmidt, NFPA, USA

Birgitte Messerschmidt is Director, Research, National Fire Protection Association. She is responsible for NFPA’s Research Strategy, Research on fire problems and other safety issues, Data collection efforts to maintain NFPA’s fire incident and fire service databases and the NFPA Research library. She has a M. Sc. In Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark and has spent her entire career working on fire safety issues.  Making our built environment more resilient to fire through better understanding of the impact of construction products and methods, as well as testing procedures and policy has been a career long passion. She has been involved in testing and research as well as standardization and advocacy. She has published and presented numerous papers on fire safety issues.

Dr. Anja Hofmann-Böllinghaus, BAM, Germany

Studied Physical Engineering in Berlin and did her PhD in BAM and TU Berlin in Fire Safety. Since 2007 responsible for “Enclosure fires and reaction-to-fire tests of building products”. Active in national and international standardisation committees, Vicepresident of vfdb – German fire protection association and Associate editor of Fire and Materials Journal.

Michael Försth, Luleå University of Technology

Michael Försth obtained his PhD in Physics at Chalmers University of Technology in 2001, in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has been researcher and research manager at RISE Fire Research and is currently professor at Luleå University in Technology. Michael has long experience in fire safety of buses and coaches and has contributed to improved fire safety regulation in the standardization work at GRSG (The Working Party on General Safety provisions) at UN ECE, (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe).

Tian Li, RISE Fire Research Norway

Tian Li is the Research Manager at RISE Fire Research and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Li holds a PhD in Thermal Energy from Norwegian University of Science and Technology. For over a decade, Li has been working on combustion physics, fire safety, and computational fluid dynamics in various universities and research institutes in Norway, Sweden, US, China, and France. One of his recent research focuses is the fire safety of alternative fuel vehicles, particularly those powered by hydrogen fuel cells and rechargeable Li-ion batteries.

Dr Joseph M. Kolly, MITRE Corp, USA

In 2021, Joseph Kolly joined MITRE Corporation as the Director of the Transportation Innovation Center.  Here, he oversees the work of MITRE’s multi-modal transportation research portfolio and the work of several transportation related departments and laboratories, including MITRE’s Integrated Demonstration and Experimentation for Aeronautics (IDEA) laboratory. 

Before joining MITRE, he served as the first Chief Safety Scientist of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). 

Previously, he worked at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) for 18 years. He started his NTSB career in 1998 as an investigator on numerous major investigations in all modes of transportation including the investigation of the TWA Flight 800 accident, where he led applied research and testing programs to investigate the cause of the fuel tank explosion