PROGRAMME BOOKLET Orange (proofread)

Speakers
DAVID ADAMSON | NIHE
David joined the Northern Ireland Housing Executive in 1984 as an
Architectural Assistant and became a Chartered Building Surveyor in 1994.
Since then he has undertaken a variety of roles specialising in regulatory
compliance around Building Regulations and Fire Safety. He is currently the
NIHE Fire Safety Manager and together with his highly skilled team works to
ensure that fire safety policy is delivered on and validated across the entire
Asset Management portfolio – currently 86,000 domestic dwellings and over
700 non-domestic premises.
David, in terms of NIHE, has made a significant contribution to fire safety in
not only evaluating the draft Fire Safety Regulations (NI) and their
implications, but authoring the fire door-set and fire door assembly
specifications with supplementary Codes of Practice for NIHE.
More recently and post Grenfell, David has reviewed all 33 Tower Block Fire
Risk Assessments and with his team is to the forefront in overseeing delivery
on all of the prioritised Action plans and remediation works. He has also been
of recent times an active member of an Independent Tower Block Reference
Group with multi-agency collaboration involving Building Control Northern
Ireland, NIF&RS and several Government departments.
DR KAREN BOYCE | Ulster University
Dr Karen Boyce is a Senior Lecturer in School of the Built Environment and has
been a member of FireSERT, working in the area of human behaviour in fire,
for 27 years. Her research interests are primarily on the provision of data and
information in relation to the behaviour and movement of occupants during
evacuation and her PhD research (1996) focused on the capabilities of people
with disabilities to evacuate.
High profile projects have included an EPSRC funded investigation into the
behaviours of evacuees of World Trade Centre on 9/11. She is the author of
over 60 research publications and current Chair of the Programme Committee
for the International Symposium Human Behaviour in Fire series. She was
Guest Editor of special editions of Fire and Materials in 2012 and 2015 and is
currently a member of the Editorial Boards of open access journals Fire
Science Reviews and Case Studies in Fire Safety and a member of the Advisory
Board of Fire and Materials. She recently co-wrote a chapter entitled
Engineering Data for the 4th Edition of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers
Handbook and is Co-chair of the Planning Committee for the 12th
International Association of Fire Safety Science Symposium.
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