Rate My Professor Ed Galea

Professor Ed Galea, originally from Melbourne, Australia, is the founding director of the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) within the Faculty of Engineering and Science at the University of Greenwich. He earned his BSc (Hons) and Diploma in Education from Monash University, followed by a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. Galea holds professional qualifications including PhD, CMath, FIMA, CEng, and FIFireE. Joining Thames Polytechnic (predecessor to the University of Greenwich) in 1986, he progressed rapidly to Senior Lecturer in 1988, Reader in 1991, and full Professor in 1992. Under his leadership, FSEG, established in 1985, has become one of the world’s largest research groups dedicated to mathematical modelling of fire-related phenomena, securing over £6 million in research and consultancy funding since 1991 and publishing over 200 research papers.

Galea’s research specializations encompass fire safety engineering, with key interests in evacuation modelling, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and fire field modelling, human behaviour in fire, agent-based modelling, and crowd dynamics. He has led the development of influential software tools such as SMARTFIRE for CFD fire modelling and the EXODUS family of evacuation models (including buildingEXODUS, airEXODUS, and maritimeEXODUS), which are distributed worldwide and utilized by major organizations including Airbus, Boeing, and the European Space Agency. His scholarly impact is evidenced by over 350 peer-reviewed publications and more than 10,000 citations on Google Scholar. Notable works include “Perceptions of autonomous vehicles: Relationships with road users, risk, gender and age” (Safety Science, 2018) and “A review of the methodologies used in the computer simulation of evacuation from the built environment” (Building and Environment, 1999). Galea has received prestigious awards such as the 2002 Queen’s Anniversary Prize for the university’s life-saving fire research, the 2001 British Computer Society Gold Medal for the EXODUS model, Gold Awards from the Royal Aeronautical Society in 2006 and 2017, and the 2013 Medal of Distinction from the Royal Institution of Naval Architects for ship evacuation research. He has also delivered public lectures, including the University of Greenwich Annual Lecture in 2007 titled “Burning Questions, Model Answers - The Simulation of Fire and Human Behaviour.”