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  • WHERE I WORK

Flame thrower

Fire-safety researcher Luke Bisby investigates which materials can take the heat.
  1. Kendall Powell

    1. Kendall Powell is a science journalist in Boulder, Colorado.

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Luke Bisby stands in his lab at University of Edinburgh.

Luke Bisby is a structural engineer and fire-safety researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Credit: Kieran Dodds for Nature

As chair of fire and structures at the University of Edinburgh, UK, I work in three laboratory spaces. We do everything from small-scale experiments on various building materials to see how easily they ignite or spread fire, to large-scale analyses of the load-bearing systems of skyscrapers using complex computer simulations. Around 2008, my group moved into fire science — the study of how things burn, from ignition to growth of the fire and all of the underlying physics.

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Nature 587, 694 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-03292-3

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