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| Chief Donald Burns |
The SFPE Scientific and Educational Foundation
has awarded the first
round grant for the Chief Donald J. Burns Research Grant to Dr. Ofodike Ezekoye
and Austin Anderson, of the University of Texas Fire Research Group (UTFRG).
Funding for this grant was provided by Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure.
The $25,000 grant is named in memory of FDNY Assistant Chief Donald Burns, who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001, while setting up his command post to direct the evacuation.
The purpose of this grant is to help advance the integration of information modeling as a means of improving infrastructure safety and first-responder preparedness.
Funding for this grant was provided by Bentley Systems, Incorporated, a leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure.
The $25,000 grant is named in memory of FDNY Assistant Chief Donald Burns, who died in the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001, while setting up his command post to direct the evacuation.
The purpose of this grant is to help advance the integration of information modeling as a means of improving infrastructure safety and first-responder preparedness.
With this grant, UTFRG hopes to produce software and hardware solutions to better predict fire hazards and mitigate their impact in commercial and governmental buildings, thereby reducing both civilian and firefighter deaths and injuries caused by fires. The project seeks to create a statistical fire heat release rate (HRR) distribution for a structure that has been described by a building information model. This can be used to create a fire risk map of a burning structure that will be useful to firefighters as they initiate operations within it. Knowledge of the fire propagation through alarms, coupled with a model that uses best likely estimates for the fire intensity (HRR) in a building’s compartments, would allow arriving first responders to better allocate their firefighting resources.
Each year, over a five-year period, the Chief Donald J. Burns Memorial Research Grant will fund one or more baccalaureate, master’s, or doctorate student global research projects that apply information modeling to improving emergency responder safety when training for, responding to, and operating during building emergencies.






