Appendix A Biographies of Committee Members
David Lucht, Chair, is a professor and the director of the Center for Fire Safety Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Professor Lucht began his career in Ohio, and he worked as an engineer and researcher at the Ohio State University. He went on to become the Ohio State Fire Marshal. After Congress passed the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act in 1974, he became the first presidential appointee at the newly created U.S. Fire Administration under President Gerald Ford. He became the deputy administrator of USFA in 1975 and served until 1978. Professor Lucht then went on to establish the first master's degree program in fire protection engineering at WPI in 1978. He is currently on the board of trustees of Underwriters Laboratories, Inc., and has been a member of NFPA's board of directors. Professor Lucht graduated with a B.S. in fire protection and safety engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology and holds professional registration as an engineer in the state of Massachusetts. He is a fellow and past president of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers.
Craig Beyler is the technical director for Hughes Associates, Inc. He is recognized for his unique leadership in developing and implementing scientifically based methods for engineering analyses of fire phenomena. His many contributions to this area have included both theoretical and experimental work in enclosure fire phenomena and extinguishment mechanisms. Of particular relevance is his work on an analytical basis for fire detector response, SFPE’s Practice Guide on Radiation from Pool Fires, and his advancements of heat/smoke vent engineering calculation methods. Recently he received the Arthur B. Guise Medal recognizing eminent achievement in advancing the science of fire protection engineering and was elected as an SFPE fellow. Dr. Beyler holds a B.S. degree in fire protection engineering from the University of Maryland, a B.S. in civil engineering from Cornell, an M.S. in mechanical engineering from Cornell, an M.Sc. in fire safety engineering from the University of Edinburgh, and a Ph.D. in engineering science from Harvard.
David Collins is president of the Preview Group, Inc., in Cincinnati, Ohio, and manager of the American Institute of Architects’ (AIA’s) Code Advocacy Program. Mr. Collins has worked as regional code manager for the American Forest and Paper Association and the Portland Cement Association, as well as deputy chief building official for Hamilton County, Ohio. He is a member of BOCA, ICBO, and SBCCI as well as NFPA and serves on numerous ICC and NFPA committees. He has been on many AIA national committees and served as AIA secretary. Mr. Collins has an AAS in architecture from Purdue and a B.S. in architecture from the University of Cincinnati. He is a registered architect, a certified building official, and a certified plans examiner in the State of Ohio.
Fred Dryer is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University. Dr. Dryer's principal research interests are in the fundamental combustion sciences, with emphasis on the chemistry and chemical kinetics of fuels and hazardous waste materials as related to
ignition, combustion, and emissions generation and abatement; the fundamentals of formation, ignition, secondary atomization, and liquid-phase chemistry of conventional and synthetic fuel droplets as related to heavy industrial fuel combustion and emission control, gas turbine/reciprocating engines and liquid fuel fire safety-related issues on earth and in microgravity environments; and solid-phase and gas-phase interactions as related to particle burning phenomena and materials processing. Dr. Dryer recently served on two National Materials Advisory Board/National Research Council committees—the Committee on Improved Fire and Smoke Resistant Materials for Commercial Aircraft Interiors and the Committee on Aviation Fuels with Improved Fire Safety—on the NASA Scientific Advisory Panel for the Atmospheric Effects of Aviation Project, and on the National Materials Advisory Board/National Research Council. He received a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. in aerospace and mechanical sciences from Princeton University. He also served on the professional research staff in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department of Princeton University for 8 years.
Ken Dungan is president and cofounder of Risk Technologies, LLC, and chair of the SFPE's Scientific and Educational Foundation. Mr. Dungan served as department head of the Fire Protection Engineering Division at Union Carbide's Oak Ridge gaseous diffusion plant. He also was assistant director of engineering services for Verlan, Ltd., an insurance company for the coatings industry. Mr. Dungan then founded Professional Loss Control, Inc., in 1976, specializing in safety, fire protection, and environmental engineering. In 1995, he cofounded Risk Technologies and Performance Design Technologies, LLC. He is a past president of the SFPE and past chair of the American Association of Engineering Societies. Mr. Dungan is serving on many NFPA committees, is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and is a licensed engineer in Pennsylvania and Tennessee.
Ofodike "DK" Ezekoye is associate professor and General Motors Centennial Teaching Fellow in mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Ezekoye has worked on problems such as heat transfer in combustion systems, aerosol generation and filtration, and inverse design of thermal systems. He joined the University of Texas faculty in 1993 after a year as an NRC postdoctoral research fellow at the Building and Fire Research Lab at NIST. Dr. Ezekoye has published more than 70 technical articles and reports. He received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1997. Dr. Ezekoye has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
William Feinberg is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Cincinnati and an experienced researcher of crowd behavior during fire disasters. He has been the chair of the sociology and computers section of the American Sociological Association and has been active in the ASA for over 35 years. His research has led to a computer simulation model called FIRESCAP, which simulates human reaction to a fire alarm. Dr. Feinberg has an A.B. in sociology, an A.M. in sociology, and a Ph.D. in sociology, all from Brown University.
Charles H. Kime is an assistant professor at Arizona State University, East Campus. He coordinates the fire services programs in the College of Technology and Applied Sciences; these include a bachelor of applied science degree in fire service management and a master of science
in technology degree in fire service administration. Prior to joining Arizona State University, Dr. Kime spent more than 32 years with the Phoenix, Arizona, fire department, retiring in 1999 as the executive assistant fire chief. In the fire services, his experiences range from line firefighting positions to supervisory and middle management, then to executive management positions, which he held for more than 20 years. During his fire services career, Dr. Kime was very active in university education. He has taught in the graduate program of the Arizona State University School of Public Affairs and the bachelor of interdisciplinary studies degree program at the same institution, as well as myriad fire sciences and fire services administration classes. His research interests include organizational leadership, organizational behavior, and human resource management, especially within the context of the fire service. Dr. Kime holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial technical education, an M.B.A., and a Ph.D. in public administration. His book Organizational Leadership: Fire Services in the United States was published in 2001 by Elsevier.
John Lyons (NAE) is a retired director of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and a former director of NIST. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1985 “for outstanding contributions to fire science and technology.” Dr. Lyons helped create and launch the Advanced Technology Program and the Manufacturing Extension Partnership at NIST and the Federated Laboratory program at ARL. His particular interests are managing multiprogram laboratories, movement and diffusion of technologies, formation and management of partnerships between government labs and the private sector, stimulating consortia formation and management, technology and competitiveness, measuring research performance, justifying research efforts, and managing technical personnel. Dr. Lyons’ career spans almost 20 years in the chemical industry and 25 years in government labs. The result is a broad perspective useful in today's environment of sharing and partnering between the public and private sectors.
Fred Mowrer is an associate professor at the University of Maryland. He joined the faculty of the Department of Fire Protection Engineering in 1987 after receiving his Ph.D. in fire protection engineering and combustion science from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Mowrer received a B.S. degree in fire protection and safety engineering (1976) from the Illinois Institute of Technology and an M.S. degree in engineering (1981) from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a registered fire protection engineer in California. He has worked as a consultant for an international fire protection engineering firm and as an engineering representative for an insurance organization. Dr. Mowrer is recent past president of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers and an active member of the International Association of Fire Safety Science and the National Fire Protection Association. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. Dr. Mowrer's primary research interests include measurement of the contribution and response of products and materials to fire, mathematical fire modeling, development of a computer-based framework for building fire safety analysis and design, and analytical fire reconstruction. Dr. Mowrer has published papers on all these topics. He received the Harry C. Bigglestone Award for excellence in written communication of fire protection concepts from the NFPA on three occasions.
Eli Pearce is university research professor at Polytechnic University in New York, where he has served as a member of the faculty and administrator since 1971. From 1958 to 1973, he worked in industry, at DuPont, J.T. Baker Chemical Co., and Allied Chemical Corporation. Dr. Pearce
received a B.S. degree from Brooklyn College (1949), an M.S. from New York University, and a Ph.D. from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (1958). His research interests are in polymer science, including synthesis, structure-property relationships, degradation, flammability, and polymer compatibility. He was president of the American Chemical Society through the year 2002.
Judy Riffle is a professor of chemistry at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) and director of its macromolecular science and engineering program. She has worked for Union Carbide as a research chemist and served as vice president for R&D at Thoratec Laboratories Corporation, a cardiovascular biomaterials company. In 1988, Dr. Riffle became assistant professor of chemistry at Virginia Tech, where she holds a tenured position. She has served as chair of the Polymers Division of the American Chemical Society. Her research has been on new polymeric materials and modifications of old polymeric materials that are flame retardant. She is active in integrating research and education through the Macromolecular Science and Engineering Program. Dr. Riffle has a B.S. in chemistry and a Ph.D. in polymer chemistry, both from Virginia Tech.
James T'ien is professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Case Western Reserve University. He also serves as the chief scientist on combustion for the National Center for Microgravity Research on Fluids and Combustion. He has performed fundamental combustion research in a number of topics, including flame spread over solids, material flammability, and flame-radiation interaction. He is the recent recipient of a NASA public service medal for his contribution to microgravity combustion and spacecraft fire safety. Dr. T'ien received a B.S. from National Taiwan University, an M.S. from Purdue, and a Ph.D. from Princeton.
Beth Tubbs is a staff engineer at the International Conference of Building Officials, where she administers the code development process, code maintenance, and interpretation for the Uniform Building Code and Uniform Fire Code as a representative of the International Fire Code Institute. She is closely involved in code development committees, including the Secretariat of the International Fire Code and International Building Code Performance Committees, providing building and fire code technical support and assisting with related educational activities as well as acting as a liaison with other national agencies on fire protection issues. She has degrees in civil engineering and fire protection engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and is a licensed professional engineer in fire protection engineering in California.
Forman Williams (NAE) is professor of engineering physics and combustion and director of the Center for Energy Research at the University of California, San Diego. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineers, Sec. 01 Aerospace Engineering, in 1988 “for contributions to the advancement of combustion and flame theory.” Before his present position, Dr. Williams taught at Harvard and Princeton. His field of specialization is combustion, and he is the author of Combustion Theory (Addison-Wesley, 2nd ed., 1985) and the coauthor of Fundamental Aspects of Combustion (Oxford, 1993). He is a member of the editorial advisory boards of Combustion Science and Technology, Progress in Energy, the AIAA Journal, Combustion Science, and Archivium Combustionis. Dr. Williams is currently researching many fundamental aspects of combustion, as well as combustion in microgravity. He received a B.S. from Princeton and his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology.
Tom Woodford is an associate professor and head of the Department of Fire Protection and Safety Engineering Technology at Oklahoma State University. He spent 12 years in the U.S. Navy, specializing in surface ship damage control and engineering. He also spent 2 years with an independent fire-testing laboratory in Washington State, where his responsibilities included work in large-scale fire testing and computer fire modeling. Mr. Woodford is an associate member of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers and the International Association for Fire Safety Science and a member of the National Fire Protection Association. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1983, a master of science degree in ocean engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 1991, and a master of science in fire protection engineering from the University of Maryland in 1996.
