Extreme Engineer of the Month

Education: B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. in Fire Engineering, Wooster Polytechnic Institute Favorite Classes: B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. in Fire Protection Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Best Skills: Problem solving and working well as part of a team Hobbies: Travel, skiing, and cooking. In addition to travel in the United States, Jamie’s been around the world to exotic places like South Africa, Cambodia, India, and Thailand. Role Models: Jamie’s best role models were his supervisors and mentors who encouraged him early in his career and as he developed his specialty. He particularly admires their generosity in sharing the knowledge and experience they gathered over many years of work experience with the next generation of fire engineers. Advice: Keep an open mind and look at all the types of engineering available. Because an engineering degree is a useful foundation for many different professions, considering all the options is important. Don’t narrow your focus too much. Take in as much as you can over the broad spectrum of engineering.

Firefighting and Engineering

In high school Jamie decided he was interested in engineering. At about the same time he started to serve as a call firefighter and an emergency medical technician (EMT). While most kids were going to the mall, Jamie trained to be a firefighter several nights a week and went to EMT school every weekend for a year. As an 18 year old, there was nothing more exciting for Jamie than jumping on a fire truck and running off to a call in the middle of the night. The career fire fighters on the team, however, encouraged him to go to college and get a degree.

A Great Way to Help Save Lives

Jamie chose Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) because its program allows students to graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in a branch of engineering in four years and get a Master’s in fire protection engineering with just one additional year. And it didn’t hurt that WPI had plenty of rock climbing and skiing nearby. Additionally he was attracted to WPI because he felt that having an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering kept his options open and gave him a broader base to build his career. He has since learned that you don’t really need fallback positions in fire protection engineering because there are so many different options in the field and there are more jobs than engineers to fill them. It was a tough call for Jamie though because he was also interested in the medical aspects of his EMT job, and he actively considered applying to medical school. In the end, his interest in the study of a phenomenon as complicated as fire along with his desire to help people won out and directed him into fire protection engineering.

At WPI Jamie studied mechanical engineering for his undergraduate degree. While it may seem unrelated to firefighting, Jamie says that understanding computational fluid dynamics has allowed him to specialize in the increasingly popular field of computer fire modeling. Additionally, some fire protection engineers work on designing smoke management or sprinkler systems, which draws on fluid movement and other key principles of mechanical engineering. Structural engineering, chemical engineering, and electrical engineering are other popular backgrounds for fire protection engineers.

Fire Dynamics—A Mix of Chemistry, Physics, and Engineering

Jamie’s years at WPI were busy and sometimes stressful, but he loved learning all he could about fire dynamics—the theory of how a fire grows and moves through a space. It’s a mix of physics, chemistry, electrical and mechanical engineering all rolled into one. One of the things that Jamie likes best about fire engineering is that there is so much to learn that you can never learn everything. “If you’re interested in researching new aspects of fire engineering, the sky’s the limit,” he says.

Fire Protection—Beyond Codes

After graduating from WPI, Jamie was approached by several consulting firms. He chose to work for Arup, an international engineering firm with a fire engineering group known for performance-based fire protection designs. There he worked on projects involving all aspects of fire design, including using fire design to develop comparable fire protection for buildings that were so architecturally advanced that the traditional building codes didn’t apply. After almost six years at Arup, during which he got to help design some really cool buildings, Jamie decided he wanted to do more research and field work and accepted a position as a fire research engineer with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

CSI in Real Life—Investigating Fires

As an ATF fire research engineer, Jamie has a widely varied set of responsibilities. He provides training to ATF certified fire investigators, conducts field investigations of fires, and does laboratory testing to support criminal cases. He also does research to better understand the way fires start and grow and how to protect against them. Here he has access to state of the art fire research tools and a laboratory large enough to build two-story houses inside the lab and burn them down to try to simulate what happened in real life.

National Response Team for Large-Scale Disasters

One of his favorite aspects of his job is his participation on the National Response Team, a group of specialized ATF investigators who join together to investigate large-scale disasters. As a fire consultant to the group of law enforcement and ATF agents, Jamie is constantly impressed with how the group can meld their specialties into the overall investigation of the event.

As Jamie describes it, the buildings they go in to investigate are usually black holes. Fire investigators pick through the rubble to figure out where the fire started, how it moved, and the fuel and sources of air that fed it. Based on that he can assist the team by determining where the fire would have been hotter or cooler, what types of smoke to expect, how the fire may have moved throughout the space, and a variety of other fire phenomena. Supported by those types of calculations the team works to figure out how and where the fire started.

Back in the Lab—Matching Theory with Practice

After the investigation is complete, Jamie returns to the lab to test his theories about the fire with models—sometimes full-scale models—to see if his theories match with what people witnessed. All of his research is recorded and stored in the ATF database, which the bureau one day hopes to release to the academic world for further research and development of new fire protection technologies. Jamie likes his day-to-day work and knowing that something he does could someday form the basis for a new design or strategy that saves lives.

During a typical investigation Jamie might use a combination of on-scene investigations, witness statements, computer fire modeling and laboratory testing to help support a criminal case.

In a recent case Jamie used full scale testing of a large building fire to validate the results of a 3D computer fire model; the model was compared against what the witnesses saw during the fire and helped to verify the theories of the ATF fire investigators.

Tying it All Together

Jamie recommends firefighting experience for all fire engineers. He says that having seen and fought real fires helps tie it all together. With his firefighting background, Jamie is more readily able to merge the theoretical with the practical in his investigative work.