Meet Nick Kalogeropoulos, Dr Ashraf Ben El-Shanawany Memorial Prize winner

Every year, the Department of Mechanical Engineering awards prizes to recognise the achievements of our PhD students.

The Dr Ashraf Ben El-Shanawany Memorial Prize is awarded for outstanding achievement by a PhD or EngD student to include research, public outreach, innovation and entrepreneurial achievement.Dr El Shanawany was an Engineering Doctorate student in the Nuclear group, who died in 2017, shortly after finishing his thesis entitled Uncertainty Quantification in Probabilistic Safety Analysis.

One of the current holders of the prize is Nick Kalogeropoulos, let’s get to know him better:

A few words on the award you’ve received! 

I am incredibly honoured to be awarded the Dr Ashraf Ben El-Shanawany Memorial Prize. My lab and I strongly believe that dissemination and communication of our research is a very important part of being a researcher, and over the years we have tried to go above and beyond to show the world what we are doing to improve wildfire safety. This award shows that this effort does help engage with the greater public and enables us to make a true difference.

Why did you decide to study for a PhD? 

When I was an undergraduate student, I did not think much about continuing my studies through a PhD. I enjoyed Design for Manufacturing the most, and planned on working on prototyping and product design because I love the creative and iterative engineering process.

In the summer of 2018 I was doing a UROP project at Imperial when a wildfire swept through the area of Mati, near Athens in Greece. My grandparents lived in the area and were placed in danger because of the fire. While they and their house were not harmed by the fire, it resulted in the highest death toll wildfire in modern European history, with 104 fatalities. I visited the area a few months after, and the dire effects of the wildfire, like the black outlines of the burned cars in the asphalt and the charred trees surrounding them really left a mark on me.

I decided then that before I was to continue any sort of future career, I wanted to first commit myself to the study of wildfires and community safety, to at least try to contribute against the wildfire problem and make sure a catastrophe like Mati does not occur in the future.

What is your research about, in a nutshell?

I use computational models to predict how wildfires might spread near populated areas, and create plans to aid with evacuation schemes. One such example is something we call trigger boundaries, imaginary lines around populated areas that mark the last chance of safe evacuation during a wildfire. If the evacuation of the community starts before the wildfire crosses this line, there is enough time left to complete the evacuation, so that no one is at risk when the wildfire arrives to the community. We develop these with the collaboration and support of many researchers within the Hazelab research group and within an international consortium.

From there we try to make more robust plans, taking into account historic weather conditions, and using multiple wildfire spread prediction models and probabilistic analyses, to create more reliable plans. So far we have made such plans for communities in the UK, Greece and the USA and are currently working on a community in Canada. Ultimately, we want to establish methodologies of using wildfire and evacuation modelling to improve community wildfire resilience.

How would you describe your experience during your research studies in the department? What would you say about the supervision you received? What were the most difficult challenges? What did you enjoy most about the experience?

Professor Guillermo Rein is an amazing supervisor, both in terms of the wisdom he has imparted and the opportunities that he has offered me. In the past three years, I have gone further than I ever thought, doing research to help keep us safe against wildfires. His knowledge and experience have been a catalyst for our research output. He has enabled me to publish my work and present it in world-leading conferences, from California to Portugal to Japan. We have started a collaboration with Google, to use and investigate their machine-learning based wildfire spread models. We have worked with emergency services in Cyprus and have contributed to UK reports on the effects of climate change on human health. All of this would not have been possible without him.

The most challenging part of this work is wildfires themselves. No one person, and certainly not one discipline, can fully understand wildfires, or attempt to solve the wildfire problem. Being a wildfire scientist, and especially a modeller, means being a forester, engineer, chemist, computer scientist, psychologist, and most of all, a great communicator. Learning from all these disciplines takes time and energy. We acknowledge our experience and limitations as engineers and work with other researchers to complement our strengths. Wildfires is a multidisciplinary problem and requires collaboration and communication.

What are you planning to do now and in the future?  

Now I am working on the last chapters of my thesis and hope to submit by the end of March. In the meanwhile, I am writing up papers to share our results with the academic community. We are now discovering and embracing the diversity of wildfire models, seeing how their differences complement each other when used together. After I submit, I hope to take some time off, and then start using the experience I got during my PhD to work with communities directly, running wildfire models and proposing wildfire mitigation plans. I want to continue the work we have been doing in helping communities with wildfire preparation plans, finishing our current work in Canada and adding new communities in Cyprus.

My ultimate hope is that I can use the models and plans I developed in my PhD to help actual communities prepare against the worst effects of wildfires. I am looking for opportunities to continue working on wildfire modelling and helping people plan against wildfires, either in an academic or industrial environment.

What are your interests beyond Engineering?

I am about to finish my PhD so there is not much time left in a day for other activities, but I do play football every weekend or so. I love playing goalkeeper, especially when enough people join in to play with full-size goals. When the weather does not allow for that, I enjoy playing games with friends, along with some good herbal tea. As part of my PhD I got to travel a lot to conferences abroad, and loved to explore new places and culture; the trip to Japan was one of the highlights of post-pandemic trips. And of course, I still love manufacturing and prototyping, and still work on CAD design, machining and 3D printing whenever I get the chance, and see a problem that I can work on.