FiSAC 2026
Fire Safety
Asia Conference
Rationalisation. Responsiveness. Resilience.
Integrating Fire Safety with Hazard Management
FiSAC 2026 starts in
In Partnership
Strategic Partner
Prof Guillermo Rein
Director of Research,
Professor of Fire Science,
Leader, Imperial HazeLab,
Editor-in-Chief,
Fire Technology
Imperial College London
Keynote Speaker Day 1
Director-General
Fire and Rescue Department of Malaysia
YAS Dato’ Sri Ts. Nor Hisham bin Mohammad is the Director General of the Fire and Rescue Department of Malaysia (FRDM), a position he has held since January 2024. With nearly three decades of distinguished public service, he has held key leadership positions across operations, fire safety, training and strategic management at both state and national levels, making significant contributions to strengthening Malaysia’s fire and rescue capabilities.
His professional expertise spans emergency management, disaster response, fire safety, organizational leadership and public sector transformation. Throughout his career, he has led numerous major emergency operations, including the Putra Heights Gas pipeline fire, the Batang Kali landslide, national flood responses, and international humanitarian deployments, earning recognition for his strategic leadership in complex disaster management.
Beyond operational leadership, Dato’ Sri Ts. Nor Hisham is actively engaged in international collaboration as Vice President of the International Fire Chiefs Association of Asia (IFCAA) for the 2024–2026 term. He is also a keynote speaker, researcher and co-author of several peer-reviewed publications on firefighter health, safety, and emergency management, reflecting his commitment to advancing innovation and excellence in the fire and rescue profession.
Associate Clinical Director,
Online Program Director, A. James Clark School of Engineering,
Fire Protection Engineering
University of Maryland
Professor William “Bill” Koffel is a Clinical Associate Professor and the Online Undergraduate Program Director for the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD). He earned his Bachelor of Science in Fire Protection Engineering from UMD in 1979. Beyond academia, he founded Koffel Associates, Inc., serving as president for over 35 years before transitioning to Senior Director of Special Projects. He is a recognized expert in the field, serving on numerous National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) technical committees and chairing the Correlating Committee on Automatic Sprinkler Systems.
Professor William Koffel was honored with the 2025 SFPE Rolf H. Jensen Award for Outstanding Committee Service by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. Over his distinguished career, he has also received the NFPA Standards Medal in 2018 and the Glenn L. Martin Medal from UMD’s A. James Clark School of Engineering in 2016. As the Online Undergraduate Program Director at the University of Maryland, he leads the implementation of the department’s brand-new fully online Bachelor of Science degree format. He teaches within the undergraduate online course programs, delivering fundamental Introduction to Fire Protection Engineering (ENFP) courses and specialized seminars focusing on industry codes, fire dynamics, and standards developments.
Director of Research,
Professor of Fire Science,
Leader, Imperial HazeLab,
Editor-in-Chief,
Fire Technology, Fellow of the Combustion Institute.
Imperial College London
Dr Guillermo Rein is Professor of Fire Science at Imperial College London, where he leads research on wildfires, battery fires, urban fire safety and fire dynamics. His work combines fundamental engineering with real world applications to improve fire safety, resilience and emergency response. He is Editor in Chief of Fire Technology and a Fellow of the Combustion Institute.
Founder and Organiser
Tall Building Fire Safety Network
RT is the founder and organiser of the Tall Building Fire Safety Network (TBFSN). Started in 2009 the TBFSN seeks to improve fire safety in the Tall Building Environment.
RT is a former RN submariner and firefighter. He is a chartered Fire Engineer, and Fellow of the Institution of Fire Engineers.
On leaving the Fire Service, RT took up the position of Head of Safety for Virgin Atlantic Airways, leading a multi-disciplinary team of safety, health and environmental specialists. RT was part of the response team that managed the crash-landing incident at Heathrow in 1999.
In 2000, RT was headhunted by BAA (UK airport operator) to lead the response to the major fire at Terminal 1, Heathrow Airport. In the following five years, RT contributed to several major airport construction projects; including the skyway at Gatwick Airport and T5 at Heathrow Airport.
RT was awarded the HSE’s award for European Safety and Health at Work achievement 1998 and European Strategic Risk Management Award 2004, International Fire professional of the Year 2015. CIR International Risk Management Award 2017. In 2020. RT was judged to be in the top 10 influencers in the UK for fire safety: https://www.ifsecglobal.com/ifsec-global-security-fire-influencers/ifsec-global-influencers-in-security-and-fire-2020/
RT now works as a consulting resilience engineer and expert witness on High Rise Fire Safety. RT is a member of the CONIAC Group on Construction Fire Safety. He is the inventor of the Crisisboardroom™ concept for management of crisis events. Crisisboardroom™ has been deployed around the World to make businesses more resilient.
Director, Fire Engineering Skills Network and Technical Services
Arup
Dr Young Wong is a Principal at Arup and Services Group Leader in South East Asia, with over 25 years of experience in fire engineering across the UK, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. He has worked in multidisciplinary design environments on major projects including super tall buildings, airport terminals, underground, and sports facilities. Dr Wong is a Chartered Engineer with ECUK, a Registered Professional Engineer in Hong Kong, and a Fellow member of both the Institution of Fire Engineers and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers.
Deputy Director
University of Science and Technology of China
Professor Longhua Hu is a Chair Professor at the University of Science and Technology of China and Vice-Director of the State Key Laboratory of Fire Science, with expertise in high-rise building fire dynamics, fire safety in underground spaces, and combustion science. He is a Fellow of The Combustion Institute and has received several honors, including the FORUM Mid-Career Researcher Award, the National Natural Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China, the XPLORER PRIZE, the Newton Advanced Fellowship of Royal Society, and the First Prize of the Anhui Provincial Natural Science Award on underground tunnel fire safety. He had served as Vice-Chair of IAFSS, Co-Chair of the Fire Research Colloquium at the 38th International Symposium on Combustion, Co-Chair of the Awards Committee for the 14th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science, Chair of the Program Committee for the 13th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology, and now serving as Vice-Chair of AOAFST, Organization Committee Chair of the 14th Asia-Oceania Symposium on Fire Science and Technology, Associate Editor of Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology, Safety Science and Technology, and Editorial Board Member of Fire Safety Journal and Fire Technology.
Founder, CEO
Matwerkz Technologies
Dr. Leong Yew Wei is the Founder and CEO of Matwerkz Technologies, a Singapore-based advanced materials startup specializing in thermal management solutions. He holds a Ph.D. in Advanced Fibro Science from the Kyoto Institute of Technology, specializing in composite materials. Before launching Matwerkz in 2020, Dr. Leong spent a decade as a senior scientist and held several senior management roles at A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), where he spearheaded industrial R&D solutions. At Matwerkz, he led his team to develop a breakthrough, adaptive thermal management technology designed to enhance electric vehicle safety. This innovation earned the company the grand prize at the global SLINGSHOT 2024 deep-tech competition, establishing Dr. Leong as a prominent innovator in energy storage safety.
Principal
Holmes
Martin Feeney is a Principal and Senior Fire Engineer with international consulting engineering firm Holmes. He holds a Masters degree in Fire Engineering from the University of Canterbury. During his 43 years of consulting engineering he has practised as a structural engineer and also as a fire engineer and has developed specialist expertise in performance-based fire safety design.
Martin’s specialist interest is in the assessment of the performance of structures when exposed to fire, especially for steel and mass timber structures. He is passionate about performance-based design generally and has a particular interest in developing fire safety concepts for complex projects. He has prepared performance-based fire safety solutions for a wide range of building types, including hospitals, shopping centres, public assembly buildings, apartment buildings and office buildings. He is a Chartered Professional Engineer in New Zealand, a Fellow and Life Member of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, a Distinguished Fellow of Engineering New Zealand and a Past President of the SFPE New Zealand Chapter. He has served on the SFPE Subcommittees for Very Tall Buildings and the Standards Committee on Performance-Based Design and was invited by the New Zealand government to form part of the working group which developed the 2012 Building Code fire provisions and associated compliance documents.
Lead Professional Officer
Singapore Institute of Technology
Dr. SK Mahasin Alam is a Lead Professional Officer at Singapore Institute of Technology, Singapore. His current research focuses on hydrogen safety – modelling of hydrogen dispersion (hydrogen concentration decay, accumulation of hydrogen in enclosed environment, hydrogen plume dispersion length) and flame (visible flame length and width, radiative heat flux) characteristics. He did his PhD in computational chemistry from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests are Na and Li storage mechanism and diffusion of Na and Li in organic batteries, electronic properties and diffusion of dopants in doped semiconductors, structural and electronic properties of Ge & Si nanowires and carbon nanotubes, interactions and reaction mechanism of surface species on catalyst surface using DFT method, photoluminescence properties of graphene quantum dots, polymers using time-dependent DFT method, QSAR studies of biomolecules for their bioactivities, molecular docking and pharmacophore mapping.
Founder
Energy Safety
Kurt Vollmacher is the founder of Energy Safety, an independent partner dedicated to supporting the safe integration of energy transition. With four decades of firefighting experience, extensive expertise in incident investigation, and a strong background in standards development, he bridges theory and practice to strengthen safety across the energy sector. He is the architect of the ISO 17840 standard series and continues to contribute to its development and international expansion. As an international trainer and speaker, he works with manufacturers, organizations, and first responders worldwide to improve access to life-saving safety information.
Associate Professor
Universiti Putra Malaysia
Mohd Zahirasri is very active in the field of fire safety engineering. He currently works as an Associate Professor at Universiti Putra Malaysia. In the field of fire safety engineering, he has published 50 research papers in leading fire science journals, including Fire Safety Journal, Fire Technology, Fire and Materials, and Fire Science Reviews. He has also been involved in safety engineering research, which has resulted in several high-impact publications in journals such as Safety Science and Process Safety and Environmental Protection.
He is an active member of the International Association for Fire Safety Science, which brings together leading fire scientists from around the world. Since 2015, he has taught fire engineering and chemical engineering courses to undergraduate and postgraduate students at Universiti Putra Malaysia.
In terms of postgraduate supervision, he has graduated seven PhD students in the field of fire engineering. His students have conducted research on PV system fire safety, tropical peat soil fire dynamics, EV fires, radiative heat transfer, evacuation dynamics, and CFD-based fire simulation.
Director of Research
National Fire Protection Association, 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.
In the early part of her career she focused on fire testing and how the performance of different products can impact fire development. She was involved in the development and implementation of the harmonized EU fire testing and classification system for construction products. Other areas of work include fire performance of facades, fire toxicity, fire fighter health and safety, fire resilience of the built environment, fires in the Wildland Urban Interface and fire data collection and analysis. She has been active in international standardization and has advocated for fire safety policies around the world.
Making our built environment safer and 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 published and presented numerous papers on fire safety issues.
