From 28^th September to 2^nd October, Elijah Igweh, PhD student at FRISSBE, attended the 5^th Summer School on Fire Dynamics Modelling at the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) in Germany. The school, held at the Institute for Advanced Simulation (IAS-7) and supported financially by the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS), brought together approximately 30 participants from across the fire safety research community for an intensive week of lectures and hands-on sessions.

Fire dynamics modelling, and the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) in particular, has become an indispensable tool in fire safety engineering. The growing complexity of these models, however, demands users with a solid grounding in the underlying theory. The summer school addressed precisely this need, combining rigorous theoretical discussions with practical exercises. The curriculum covered computational fluid dynamics, turbulence models, particles and aerosols, combustion, thermal radiation, pyrolysis, parallel processing, and validation methods.

A distinctive feature of the school is that several of the lecturers are themselves among the developers of FDS, giving participants direct access to the thinking behind the tools they use. The teaching team comprised Alexander Belt, Emanuele Gissi, Prof Simo Hostikka, Prof Bjarne Husted, Randall McDermott, Dr Jason Floyd, and Prof Lukas Arnold. Participants also had access to the JURECA supercomputer for the practical exercises, as well as a tour of the Jülich quantum computing facilities, offering a glimpse of the broader scientific infrastructure that the Forschungszentrum hosts.

Beyond the lectures, the school provided valuable space for networking. Dinners and informal exchanges allowed participants to build connections with fellow researchers and with the FDS development team directly. FRISSBE extends its thanks to Prof Lukas Arnold, Alexander Belt, and the local organising team for a well-run and genuinely enriching event.