Dr Eleni Asimakopoulou

Her research covers fire dynamics, flame spread, façade fires, evacuation, microbial induced corrosion, evacuation, and climate change effect on catastrophes. Her research involves developing tools, protocols, and means of communication, to help cope with the intensified fire disasters to yield risk resilient communities and raise public awareness.

Eleni is an Associate Editor of the Fire Technology journal by Springer Nature, an EU expert, a member of the European MIC Network and an Aurora Program Alumni. Eleni works with standardisation, organising and scientific committees. She supervises BSc, MSc and PhD students and works on research projects.

Eleni is an Athena SWAN Champion within the School of Engineering and Computing actively contributing to UCLan’s mission and commitment to EDI. She is also Member of the REF and Knowledge Exchange, Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Group (KEEDI Group), the Race Equality Network (REN Group), and the Science Ethics Reviewer Panel. She is also an external PhD examiner at The University of Queensland, School of Civil Engineering (Australia), Imperial College London (UK), University of Science and Technology of China (China) and Université de Lorraine (France). She serves as a reviewer for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) in Canada, conferences and more than 20 journals.

Eleni has served as PI for several projects and held the role of Co-I in seven EU-funded projects focusing on fire engineering with computational and experimental studies of fire spread in facade systems, evacuation of high-rise buildings, as well as disaster response and recovery. In her most recent endeavours, such as the FIRE-FACTS, ELISSA, and EENSULATE projects, her research has concentrated on fire testing of innovative insulation and glazing systems for buildings. This involved conducting experiments and numerical simulations of fire behaviour in medium- and large-scale compartment-facade configurations. Lately, she has secured funding from the UK-Home Office for the SAFE project on operational research and testing of evacuation strategies for High Rise Residential Buildings and served as an expert in ERASMUS+ project Skilled to be Fire Expert. She is also a PI in the IS-Fires project funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation with the support from the industry (Hydrock), Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service and international universities (Stellenbosch University), that address a very complex, largely neglected problem affecting low/low-middle socio-demographic index countries.

She is a Member of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE), an Associate Fellow at the Institution of Fire Engineers, and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a Member of the SFPE Research, Tools, and Methods (RTM) Committee.