From 8^th to 10^th April, Dr Ulises Rojas-Alva represented FRISSBE at the 8^th Ibero-Latin American Fire Safety Congress (CILASCI 8), held in Santander, Spain. The congress was organised by the GIDAI Research Group at the University of Cantabria and brought together researchers and experts from Portugal, Spain, Brazil, and across Ibero-America to share advances in fire safety science and engineering.

Dr Rojas-Alva presented a paper entitled "Analysing European fire incidents in Electric Vehicles", co-authored with Dr Martina Manes (Lecturer in Civil Engineering, University of Liverpool), with contributions from Dr Sam Povall (Lecturer in Mathematics, University of Liverpool). The study addresses a growing area of concern for fire safety in the built environment and in transport infrastructure, as the increasing adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) brings with it new and complex fire hazards.

The central contribution of the work was the estimation of EV fire frequency rates at the country level, as well as a global rate aggregated across Europe. A key challenge encountered in the analysis was the significant overdispersion of values across countries, reflecting the heterogeneity in how EV fire data is currently collected and reported throughout the continent. This finding resonated strongly with the audience, and the discussion that followed acknowledged an important implication of the work: beyond the statistical results themselves, the study makes a case for improving the way EV fire datasets are gathered across Europe, a concrete future objective that the authors have identified for the research.

The work received financial support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme (Grant Agreement no. 952395) and the European Commission's Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchanges programme (Grant Agreement no. 101236710).

CILASCI congresses have been held biennially since 2011, rotating between Iberian and Iberoamerican host cities. This eighth edition in Santander marks the congress's return to Spain for the first time since CILASCI 5 in Porto in 2019.